If You’re Not Courageous, You’ll Never Be Free

The gut feeling is your heart’s advice. Do you still want to ignore it?

Everyone defines freedom differently if you drill down to the specifics. My generation says this way ( that I know of ), “Freedom is the ability to work on your schedule and not being questioned when making the right decision.”

Now, this one can be a shallow perspective depending on how philosophical opinion you were hoping to find here. But my definition is also somewhat closer to this:

“Freedom is the ability to live the way you want, seize every day, and become an inspiration to everyone who sees you.”

Ability to live life the way you want? That requires sacrifice, grit, perseverance and the quality that spawns all of them: the courage to take bold decisions.

Courage can get in the way of relationships.

You have an opinion. You want to show it in front of everyone. But you think you are not the smartest one in the circle. It is hard to embrace this thought when everyone rejects your idea before it even sees the light. You see here? Your concept got rejected just because of your personality!

How do you fight this innate response from your social group? What is the solution to this? Find one person in the group who you know will vouch for you. Then, speak your heart out, anyways.

When I find someone like that, I speak my angle anyways because even single support is a burst for positivity to trust my decision.

Some people will stop you from being courageous.

It happens often. I want to speak boldly on a topic that I think needs a little perspective to understand clearly.

Freedom of speech is so under-rated when you want to give your opinion, and can’t even finish it because of so many judgemental eyes staring at you. How dare they? Can you stop them? You can try with no luck.

Recently, in a group, one of my friends told me, “I never read (the present tense of “read”) your articles.” Yes, ego got the best of me. I wanted to rage for a bit. But I calmed down and told him the advantages of reading instead of speaking about what value my blogs give.

You can’t convince someone to trust your work just because you think it is worthy. You do your work anyway.

Trust builds differently for everyone. When you stick with your uniqueness despite everyone scoffing at you, time will change their point of view. They will bend in front of your bold attitude if you stick to your well-informed decision. I have turned heads because of my stubborn attitude to follow my gut every time.

Embracing change requires courage.

If you don’t embrace change, it will drag you to the ground. It is a fact that the ever-changing world has taught us: to be useful, resourceful and adaptive.

Some people see your potential and the scary part is that they think your grit will challenge their thought process in the future. That is why they want to stop you in the first place.

There is nothing wrong with you. People who resist change are just afraid you will prove their ideology obsolete.

It feels so good to prove people wrong when they say, “You can’t do it.” Yeah, some even say this to your face. Show them with your actions.

Being patient and accepting the way situations drift help you analyse the aspects you can control. Then you will thrive with change and continuously adapt your needs according to your abilities. The first way to grow with change is to embrace it whole-heartedly.

Courage becomes uncontrollable after some time. And that’s a good thing.

When you delay in expressing a gut feeling about the right decision, you can’t hold it for long. It is because you can’t stay in denial when you have control over things that will affect you. You want to be free, for that you’ve got to put effort.

The tendency to stay courageous in every walk of life requires you to trust it whenever it comes. It means you will challenge your own beliefs, the belief of your community.

You will even lose some people in your life too. That is okay as long as you are not hurting them intentionally.

If your thoughts click with someone, they will be attracted to you. My work is to invest more time in blogging. I am connecting with like-minded people through my writing better than my talking could ever do.

Final words

While writing, I never have to worry about whether I am telling the truth. It is because I always flow with the gut feeling. It pushes me in the right direction every time. If someone interacts with me in-person too, I am not afraid to show the right direction.

Sometimes my practical advice hurts people. But that is okay. As long as a person has a learning attitude, they will embrace the change the way it is and build courage from within to flow with the situation by controlling things they can.

This blog belongs to a series of posts I am publishing in this 100-days streak. Today is day 73. Navigate to the end of article 22, for the references from day 23 onwards. If you would like to read the ones before day 22, here is the first one that documents them in the end.

~Sanjeev