 Welcome to the anxious morning every weekday morning will take a few minutes to go over important lessons that you can use in your anxiety recovery journey The anxious morning brings you support education inspiration encouragement and empowerment Read or listen quietly on your own time free of the endless noisy scroll of social media Use the information to help you along the path to recovery from panic disorder Agoraphobia and other anxiety problems for more visit us at the anxious morning calm Yesterday, we looked at the common mistake of confusing fearlessness and courage We saw that being afraid is not the opposite of being courageous We learned that being courageous means being afraid but acting anyway The idea that a frightened person is automatically not courageous is an error This error gets corrected quickly when we start to do the work of recovery How does recovery correct this error and teach us about the true nature of courage and being courageous? It teaches us this part of the lesson by forcing our hands at first We wait to feel brave before doing the difficult scary things that we must do in order to move forward We wait and we wait then we wait some more Yet the feeling we are after never arrives We stay put hoping for the day when the fear will subside so we can take those first steps But the waiting proves fruitless the fear remains despite the effort we put into wishing it away Reading about recovery talking about recovery and asking questions about recovery We worked so hard to intellectually and emotionally soothed the fear so we can move forward yet. We remain stuck No amount of hoping wishing thinking reading discussing or mindset engineering helps The world continues to pass us by while we remain frozen in place Frustration may set in we may begin to doubt our ability to ever take those first steps or to recover at all If I can't be brave if I'm still so afraid then how will I ever do this? The endless analysis and questioning all leads to one conclusion Wait, so I have to do this while I'm afraid Here the lesson is revealed Recovery forces our hands. It does not permit progress via thoughts or words. It demands progress via action Recovery remains disinterested in our desire to not be afraid Then it gets right up in our faces and tells us that being afraid is not only unavoidable but required It informs us in no uncertain terms that acting while afraid is the way out Damn recovery. Why must you be so cold? One of the great paradoxes of recovery is that we must do things we think we are incapable of doing So we may learn that we are in fact far more capable than we thought This applies to being courageous when we take that terrifying leap of faith and act even when afraid The first lesson of courage is revealed to us It's only in the doing and the facing of the fear that we find our bravery I say often that this is a bad deal, but this is the deal that we have when it comes to finding your courage This unfortunately rings true If you are afraid and you are feeling that you possess no courage Know that in many ways courage is something we learn more than something we have We act when afraid we find success and our courage grows. This is how it works You are not weak. You have merely not practiced flexing your courage muscles Tomorrow we'll look at why acceptance is not a universal life strategy Hey, if you're enjoying the podcast and you'd like to get a copy of it delivered every morning into your email inbox Including a full text transcription head on over to the anxious morning dot email and sign up for the newsletter And if you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or someplace where you can leave us a rating or review Take a moment and rate the podcast and maybe write a small review. It really helps us out or just tell a friend about us Thanks a lot