One of my clients sent me a mail this week that contained this story:

Once upon a time a psychology professor walked around on a stage while teaching stress management principles to an auditorium filled with students. As she raised a glass of water, everyone expected they’d be asked the typical “glass half empty or glass half full” question. Instead, with a smile on her face, the professor asked, “How heavy is this glass of water I’m holding?”

Students shouted out answers ranging from eight ounces to a couple of pounds.

She replied, “From my perspective, the absolute weight of this glass doesn’t matter. It all depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute or two, it’s fairly light. If I hold it for an hour straight, its weight might make my arm ache a little. If I hold it for a day straight, my arm will likely cramp up and feel completely numb and paralyzed, forcing me to drop the glass to the floor. In each case, the weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it feels to me.”

As the class shook their heads in agreement, she continued, “Your stresses and worries in life are very much like this glass of water. Think about them for a while and nothing happens. Think about them a bit longer and you begin to ache a little. Think about them all day long, and you will feel completely numb and paralyzed – incapable of doing anything else until you drop them.”

I had heard it before but, like most things, this time it resonated more because I was listening better. I was ready to hear it. As I read it a few more times, I found myself thinking about the cups of water I am carrying. Which ones am I holding up too long? And, more importantly, what’s the impact it’s having on me? Carrying around worries and stress all day long is no small task. Some of it might be unavoidable, but much of it is. And like all other things, the first key is to raise my awareness.

If I don’t know what worries I am carrying around, I cannot ever choose to put them down.

So the first thing I decided to do was to sit and “throw up” all my worries on to the page. Let’s see what was really on my mind, in my heart, in my body. I gave myself ten minutes in the car (while I waited for Nathaniel’s class to dismiss) to write down all I could think of. No limits, no reading, only writing.

It was easy for the first three minutes, and then it got harder and I had to think more and more. I am sure that if I had given myself 20 minutes, it would have been even harder.

Once I had my list, I went over it and grouped it into two sections: things i have control over and things outside my control.

Then I started with the list of things I had control over. I wrote down one thing I could do to either let go of the worry or to “fix” the situation. For example, one of the items on my list is “I worry that I will never learn to ride a bike.” This is something that’s theoretically within my control to fix. I can either decide it’s not that important to learn how to ride a bike anymore and choose to let this one go or I can take one small (or big) action towards this one. (I could also decide that I will postpone this one. I won’t give up on it completely, but I am not ready to take action yet. This allows me to put the water down for a while.) A small action here might be to buy a bike. Or a helmet. A bigger one might be to schedule time with a friend to help me learn. A bigger one might be to commit to a biking event 3 months from now (which will mean I have to learn by then. Alas this might create new worries 🙂 ) By letting it go or choosing to take action, I will remove these from being worries. Because they either will not be worthy of being worried about anymore or I will actually be doing something about them.

The other list is trickier. I have some things on my list that I clearly have no control over. Like “I worry that something might happen to my husband or my kids.” Well, this is mostly out of my control. I could live my life being as safe as possible but something could still happen to these people I love. Planes crash, cars get into accidents, horrible things happen each day. As I looked at the list, I decided to shift my thinking around these a bit. I asked myself, “If I knew this might happen tomorrow, what might I want to make sure I do today?” Let’s say it was inevitable that it would happen. How would I behave differently? I figured if something were to happen to the people I loved, I’d want to make sure they knew how much I loved them and that they mattered to me deeply. Then I thought, ok, how can I do that now? I can’t change the future but I can change how I behave now, what I say, what I do, etc. I have more about this coming in another post, but changing my perspective to what I can do here allowed me to feel like I had some choice and some power to alter these. It allowed me to think of what I might regret if that outcome were to happen and how I can make sure those regrets don’t come to fruition (even if the outcome did.)

While this doesn’t fully eliminate the item for a worrier like me, it does shift my relationship to the worry. Instead of having the worry weigh me down, I use it as a motivator to remember what matters most to me and make sure that I live my life aligned with those priorities. (This is true for me because when I look at my worry list, I notice that the things that worry me the most come from the things/people I hold dearest.)

Having this perspective (and list of action items from the first set) created a lot more space for me. It didn’t eliminate my worries but I no longer feel numb or paralyzed. I feel like I understand what matters to me, what I care about, and how to alter my choices to align them accordingly.

I’ve mentioned my son’s school’s Monday morning assemblies before. This year, I’ve decided that I will try to attend as many chapels as possible. This morning’s topic was courage. The presenter talked about what it means, gave some examples of courageous children, and then talked about what courage looks and sounds like. She also had one slide on what lack of courage looks like. Bravery and courage have been on my mind a lot lately so as I was driving home, I thought about what it means to be courageous.

I think bravery is a lot more personal than we make it out to be.

When I looked up courage in the dictionary it said: the ability to do something that frightens one. (Bravery, by the way, says ‘courageous behavior’). If you pay close attention to the definition, it’s explicitly personal. It’s the ability to do something that frightens you. Not the ability to do scary things. It specifically says “that frightens one.” For you to be courageous, you must be doing something that you find to be frightening.

But we don’t always speak of it in these terms. When we see someone jumping out of an airplane, we say “oh he’s so brave!” For all we know, this person jumps out of planes all the time (like an instructor or something) and to him, it’s not scary at all. In this case, he’s not practicing courage. Whereas if you take someone who’s deathly afraid of heights and they jump out of a plane, that person is clearly being brave.

The reason this distinction matters a lot is that when we’re comparing to others, we often find ourselves judging others’ bravery by our standards. So if I am scared to speak in public, someone who does that will look brave to me and I will feel less courageous by comparison. I’ll think, how come I can’t be as brave as she is? For all I know, she might not be courageous at all. Maybe public speaking isn’t frightening to her. We never even consider this probability because of our own fear of public speaking. We think everyone must share our fears.

But, of course, they don’t.

While having fears is a universal condition, each person’s fears are unique to them (of course, many people share similar fears but you can never really assume other people have the same fear you have.) So when it comes to judging ourselves and/or others it’s crucial to remember the distinction the courage is something you do when you overcome your own fears. Not universal fears. Not others’ fears. But your own.

And no matter how small or big they might be, any time you do something that frightens you, you’re practicing courage. It doesn’t have to be something that others would deem important. It’s personal to you. I am scared to drive on the freeway, so each time I do it, I am practicing courage even if it’s just another ordinary task for other people. I practice courage each time I talk to a stranger because, for me, that’s outside my comfort zone.

Sometimes, it’s as simple as wearing a specific kind of clothing. Or a new lipstick. Other times, it’s telling the truth. Speaking up. Going sky diving. Taking a trip alone. Or taking a trip with a group.

We are all different people and different things scare each of us. This is not a comparison game and there’s nothing too small or too big to practice courage around. Without knowing others’ full list of fears, there’s no way to tell how brave they really are. Instead of focusing on what others are doing, or whether I am as brave as they are, what I decided I want to do is make a list of things that scare me and try to practice a little bit of courage every day.

Just like everything else, I believe bravery takes practice. The more I use those muscles, the stronger they will be, the braver I can be.