The Courage to Take Action

Perhaps the greatest challenge that you will ever face in life is the conquest of fear and the development of the habit of courage. Franklin D. Roosevelt once said , "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he was saying that the emotion of fear, rather than the reality of what we fear, is the cause of the associated anxiety, stress, and unhappiness. When we develop the habit of courage and unshakable self-confidence, a whole new world of possibilities opens up to us. Just think: What would you dare to dream, be, or do if you were not afraid of anything in the whole world?

Fortunately, the habit of courage can be learned, just as any other skill is learned. To do so, we need to go to work systematically to diminish and eradicate our fears, while simultaneously building the kind of courage that will enable us to deal fearlessly with the inevitable ups and downs of life.
Syndicated columnist Ann Landers wrote, "If I were asked to give what I considered the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, hold your head high. Look it squarely in the eye and say, 'I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.' " This is the kind of attitude that leads to victory.
The starting point in overcoming fear and developing courage is to look at the factors that predispose us toward fear.
The root source of fear is childhood conditioning that caused us to experience two types of fear: the fear of failure, which causes us to think, I can't, I can't, I can't; and the fear of rejection, which causes us to think, I have to, I have to, I have to.
Based on those fears, we become preoccupied with the idea of losing our money, our time, our emotional investment in a relationship. We become hypersensitive to the opinions and possible criticisms of