Courage

                                 

Walt Disney said “all our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.”

I’ve written about discipline, commitment, and hope. I want to close out this series by talking about courage.

Have you seen the movie Wicked yet?  My daughter-in-law tells me that there is a bit of foreshadowing about the Cowardly Lion in this one that will be explained in Chapter 2.

The Cowardly Lion was always my favorite Wizard of Oz character. I can still mimic “I’m the king of the for-est…” For some reason, I guess I could relate to him. I also remember that, in the end, the Wizard gave him a medal for bravery but told him that he had it in him already.  That the medal just verified that.

So, what is Courage?

Courage is being afraid, but moving forward anyway.  Those friends and acquaintances that I’ve had that have been in war tell me that they were always afraid.

The horrors of war were real. Knowing that you could die at any moment, well, if it doesn’t scare you, then you must be too dumb to be afraid. From the trench warfare of World War I to the jungles of Vietnam, young men demonstrated courage beyond anything most of us can imagine. It’s terrible to think about having to worry about IED’s in a middle eastern desert.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but it is what keeps you moving against odds that might seem overwhelming. Underdogs in a sporting event?  Courage.  Give up or give it all you’ve got.

Courage might mean that at your lowest point, when the game seems lost, you keep going…keep fighting. Courage means take one more step.

I think a lot of times, that’s the best definition of courage—that you just go one more step. Keep going. Keep fighting.

Down 5-0 in a tennis match?  Win the next point. And then the one after that. Strike out? Get back up to bat and try again. Miss a shot? Take another.

I used to work with the kickers on the football team at Maryville High School. I never really tried to coach them about how to kick, but I always tried to help them with the mental side of the game.  If one of them ever missed a kick, I would find them immediately on the sidelines and tell them that the last one didn’t count.  Only the next one counted.

We have to do that. We have to put our failures behind us and move on.  How else do we get out of bed in the morning? How else do we take the field or the court again?

I find no glory in failures, but I do find lessons to be learned. Failure hurts. Or it should. But we should learn from our mistakes.  We should learn how NOT to do something. The only true failure is when you don’t take the lesson away from the failure.

Failure builds resilience and character. How we behave when we fail reveals who we truly are. What we do next reveals who we are to become. We should not fear failure.

When I was the boss, I wanted my managers to risk making mistakes. I wanted them to feel empowered to make decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. The same thing is true for our children. If we won’t allow them to make mistakes, how will they learn?

A quote that was on my wall as a teenager and is still imprinted on my heart today is as follows:  “On the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that on other days, on other fields will bear the fruits of victory.”

And from Kipling’s poem If—“…If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it, and—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

Have courage. Persevere. Take just one more step. Then another.