You’re included.

Courage is not the lack of fear.  It is acting in spite of fear.  Courage has also been defined as a lack of self.

Fear is the third voice of resistance to be overcome, says Otto Scharmer.*

Psychiatrist JT MacCurdy writes, ”We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to being afraid of being afraid.”**

Seth Godin adds to this short list of thoughts on fear by taking us inside how we or others make compliance work:

‘The shortcut to compliance, then,
isn’t to reason with someone, to outline
the options, and to sell a solution.  No,
the shortcut is to induce dear, to activate
the amygdala.’

Well meaning people, including those who love us, can unknowingly use this tool of fear, being concerned for what might happen if we take the wrong path.  Of course, there are times when we must listen to fear for good reason, but these are fewer than we think in the 21st Century.

When we connect with what we must do and pursue it, we find the terrible things we think may happen are not so terrible after all.^  We’ll be most heroic around the things which matter most to us and the people who matter most.

You have something to bring to the world, something never to be repeated because it’s about your skills, your experiences, your passions.

Please, don’t hide it.

And another thought: people with a mission like yours need to find others: a company of heroes.^^

(*The other voices are judgement and cynicism.)
(**Quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in David and Goliath.  Seth Godin describes fear in this way too: ‘Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance.’)
(^Gladwell explores three different kinds of terrible thing – a direct hit (which takes us out completely), a near miss (which wounds us but doesn’t wipe us out), and a remote miss (which doesn’t affect us at all).  Most terrible things come in the remote miss category, and, when we discover how ineffective these are, cause us to act more courageously.)
(^^Band of Brothers makes a great tale of a company of heroes (communitas) being formed in liminal experiences – when Lieutenant Dick Winters is asked by his grandson if he was a hero in the Second World War, he tells him, no, but he belonged to a company of heroes.)