The reason more people don’t go for their Dream is they lack either clarity or courage. To change our course, we often have to give up one thing – safety, predictability, the known – for the big Unknown, buoyed only by our innocent hope for something better. Often leaving one path to take another, requires a leap of faith.  And to make that leap, we need courage.

But where does courage come from?

We “muster” it, we say, but what does that really mean? To muster. Webster says muster means “to summon up” something that is within oneself.

But how do we know how much there is to muster? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a dashboard or a control panel that would give us readings on how much courage we had to spend.

Maybe procrastination is our intuitive self knowing that we don’t have enough courage required to complete the task. Yet.

So, is courage like a bank account, with a set amount that accumulates? Or is it more like a muscle – use it or lose it? Or are we all rationed a portion of courage at the beginning of life, an unknown amount that will somehow have to last us to the end of our days? We don’t know how much time we have been given, and maybe we don’t know how much courage we’ve been given until we muster it.

It’s like shopping without knowing how much we have in the bank. Instead of buying what we need, what would move us ahead in life, we scrimp and lay down only what we need to “get by.”

The word courage comes from the Old French, meaning “heart.”

In Dream Hatching, we brood over our Dreams, giving them time to find first their heart, then their form, and finally, their wings. But the heart comes first. Your Dream will never soar, if you can’t muster the courage to take the inevitable risks needed to get it off the ground.

“You are never given a wish (or a Dream) without also being given the power to make it come true.”  – Richard Bach

The dictionary defines Courage as the “ability to do something that frightens one.” If that’s the case, maybe anxiety gives us an indication of just how much courage is in us.

 
The good news is we don’t need a ton of courage, we only need “enough” to set things in motion.
 

“You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise great will come of it.”  – Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo

A few friends told me not to share the clip below on Dream Hatching, because it might scare people away. To me, I think it evokes the FEELING we have when we make any leap into the unknown. You can watch the little one in this video as it musters the courage to make a leap.
 

 
Maybe it’s making a little “pros and cons” list in its head. I don’t know. What I do know is Courage doesn’t happen in the head. It happens in the heart. That’s where the word comes from. If you need to make a leap, get out of your head and into your heart. Let your passion propel you.