Just received Brendon Burchard’s new free book, High-Performance Habits – you actually pay the postage and handling in the mail and the premise of it is six habits, three personal and three social. The personal ones are Seek Clarity, Generate Energy, and Raise Necessity. The Social Ones are Increase Productivity, Develop Influence and Demonstrate Courage.

As Mark Twain relates ” Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” When we first do something that contains fear, such as skydiving, the level of fear first time is quite high, or at least it was for me. But the more we do something the more comfortable we get with it. That’s why leading a courageous life can also increase our fearlessness.

What have people said about having a dose of courage over the years, here are the quotes I have chosen:

1. Who is your standalone hero or heroine, Gandhi, Malala, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa? Or is it just someone from your local community?

2. Everyday courage could mean keeping a positive attitude or taking action despite great uncertainty, bad health or hardship such as sharing unpopular ideas or showing up every day for work even when things are tough at the office: What’s Going On.

3. Mainstream media and our government are telling us to be afraid of Africans with one politician stating that people were afraid to go out because they were afraid of being followed home by an African and having their home invaded. No courage there!!

4. Feel that tremor in your heartbeat, that’s the recipe for courage, go out and do it anyway: The Climb.

5. Unconditional Love, the ultimate emotion – includes trusting someone besides yourself.

6. One of my top ten, Brene Brown. Netflix or ring that person you have been putting that conversation off with, you choose which will have the most positive effect in your life: Be Brave, Show Up.

7. My favourite E. E. Cummings poem is the following: I carry your heart with Me, here it is:

I carry your heart with me ( I carry it in my heart ) I am never without it ( anywhere I go you go, my dear; and whatever is  done by only me is your doing, my darling

I fear no fate ( for you are my fate, my sweet ) I want no world ( for beautiful, you are my world, my true ) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will sing is you

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows ( Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide ) and this is the wonder that keeps the stars apart

I carry your heart with me ( I carry it in my heart )

To love that much is an act of immense courage.

8. The dark and the light, Fear and Courage, they travel with each other: So What.

9. Every great adventure began by putting one foot in front of another, the courage is in taking the first step.

10 Who remembers the cheesy song from the Mickey Mouse club, one of Walt’s first creations: The original mouskeeters.

11. Every year my friend Emeli from Collective Potential produces a workbook to implement 2018. This year its called On Purpose. If you would like a copy, join Collective Potential on Facebook and there is a link.

12. One of my other blogs is about this amazing woman Maya Angelou.

Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights, activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young adult, including fry cook, sex worker, nightclub dancer and performer, cast member of the opera Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the decolonization of Africa. She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. In 1982, she was named the first Reynolds Professors of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Beginning in the 1990s, she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993) at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961: Maya on Courage.

13. Bravery is a synonym for Courage I think. As well as heroism, potvaliant, and valiancy.

14. Some truth is spoken by the cigar smoker: Hot N Cold.

15. Unusual image, looks like the fish is definitely not in the right spot.

You are capable of remarkable things that you could never foretell and will never discover without courageous action, please take it.

Music this week comes from Marvin Gaye, Pink, Brene Brown, Maya Angelou, the Mickey Mouse Club and one of my favourite pop divas, Katie Perry.

Namste until next time, my dear friends.