Courage is Not the Absence of Fear
My hands were shaking when I walked into that meeting where I knew I’d have to disagree with everyone, where speaking up meant risking the comfortable dynamic I’d spent years cultivating. Fear sat in my chest like a physical weight, making each word feel like it had to be excavated from some deep, resistant place. But I spoke anyway—not because I wasn’t afraid, but because something more important than fear demanded my voice.
That’s when I understood: courage isn’t the absence of fear—it’s the decision that something else matters more.
We’ve been sold a mythology of fearless heroes, people who face danger with steady hands and calm hearts, who somehow bypass the terror that would paralyze ordinary mortals. But this mythology does us a disservice, suggesting that real courage requires the elimination of fear rather than its transformation.
The truth is more human and more hopeful: every courageous person I’ve known has been afraid. The difference isn’t that they don’t feel fear—it’s that they’ve found something they fear more than their immediate terror. They’re more afraid of living with regret than with failure, more afraid of staying silent than of speaking up, more afraid of being false to themselves than of being rejected by others.
Courage is not fearlessness—it’s felt fear and chosen action anyway. It’s walking into the conversation that scares you because staying silent scares you more. It’s making the career change that terrifies you because staying stuck terrifies you more. It’s loving fully despite the risk of loss because not loving fully risks losing yourself.
I think of my friend Sarah, who left her secure job to start a nonprofit, hands trembling as she submitted her resignation letter. She wasn’t brave because she felt no fear—she was brave because her fear of wasting her life overrode her fear of taking risks. The terror was real, but her commitment to something larger than her comfort was stronger than her need for safety.
This is the coward’s courage—the courage available to those of us who feel everything, who are sensitive to risk, who understand exactly what we might lose. We don’t charge into battle with reckless abandon; we calculate the cost and decide it’s worth paying anyway.
Maybe this kind of courage is actually more valuable than fearless courage, because it’s chosen rather than natural, earned rather than inherited. When someone who feels fear deeply acts courageously, they’re making a conscious decision to prioritize meaning over comfort, growth over safety, authenticity over acceptance.
The shaking hands don’t disqualify the brave action—they authenticate it. They prove that courage was required, that this wasn’t easy, that the person acting had to overcome something real to show up as they did.
Tonight I want to redefine courage for myself: not as the absence of fear, but as the presence of something stronger than fear. Not as never being scared, but as being scared and showing up anyway. Not as eliminating the trembling, but as letting the trembling accompany me on the path toward what matters most.
Because maybe the goal isn’t to become fearless—maybe it’s to become so committed to what we value that fear becomes just another passenger in the car, no longer the driver but no longer able to prevent us from going where we need to go.