7 questions to help you make a brave decision

Even when you're really scared.

What would you do it you weren’t afraid?

It’s a simple but powerful question.

Don’t be fooled by its simplicity.

Go on, try answering it.

What’s the first thing that pops into your head?

Then notice all the fears that rush in afterwards.

So the next question to ask is:

Can you learn to be brave?

Caroline Pankhurst believes you can. Caroline is a business coaching consultant, psychology doctoral researcher and founder of Be Braver coaching programme who I interviewed at the beginning of the year for Metro.co.uk. (You can read the whole interview here.) Caroline believes that we can all learn how to be braver and that choosing courage will lead to fulfilled life. Here’s how:

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• Why is it important to be brave?

Caroline: If we don’t choose courage, we don’t grow, advance, innovate, we don’t create, we don’t connect. Courage is about taking risks, it’s about moving forward into uncertainty and unknown. And that is the space and the place where life happens.

Playing safe is only ever going to get us so far. Staying in your comfort zones won’t shelter you from grief, pain, illness, death, trauma or heartbreak. We’re never going to avoid the things that really are painful in life. Yet somehow, as we grow older, we start to have an awareness of other people; society starts to put expectations on us, we start to be concerned about fitting in and belonging. And then before we know it, we’re starting to carry all this armour and we can become more and more diminished and we become more and more risk averse.

Yes, as we get older, we obviously get more responsibilities but we stop being brave, we don’t expose ourselves to the fullness of what life has to offer, and all the opportunities that there are out there, because we’re not taking risks. We’re playing safe all the time, we miss out on the best bits of life because we’re trying to avoid the inevitable things which we’ve got no control over.

• How do we learn to be braver?

Caroline: Learning to be brave doesn’t mean wandering around finding excuses to do brave things, for the hell of it – it has to have a purpose.

If we don’t choose courage, we don’t grow, advance, innovate, we don’t create, we don’t connect.

And you’ve got to be deeply connected to why you would do that thing. Our brains are really good at noticing the things that we want to avoid or predicting the things that we think might go wrong. We’re less good at being able to predict the opportunities or the rewards that come with having made a brave decision.

• What is the connection between happiness and courage?

Caroline: If you are brave, you have a much better shot at happiness. When you choose courage, you open yourselves up to way more opportunities.

Since I’ve been practising courage, and being braver, I’ve been the happiest I’ve been. Yes, I have had more outcomes that I would not have desired, but I also have had so many more unexpected, unimaginable things that I would never have even had the audacity to envisage could happen. And that’s just because I practice courage.

7 questions to make a brave decision

1. What are your fears?

2. What are the external threats, losses and gains at stake in NOT making a decision?

3. What are the personal internal threats, losses or gains you perceive in NOT making a decision?

4. What are the personal internal threats, losses or gains you perceive in making this decisions?

5. What can you do to mitigate an undesirable outcome?

6. What needs to be in place to manage the possible impacts?

7. What has past experience of resilience shown you?

Caroline Pankhurst is the founder of Be Braver coaching programme

Photo by Shaylyn on Unsplash