 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.com There are themes that we will revisit from time to time on the anxious morning One of those themes involves courage and bravery Today we will take our first look at courage The lesson of courage is an important one in recovery. It's one we learn early on What is the lesson of courage? What does recovery teach us about being courageous? What do we learn about ourselves and our ability to be brave when the situation requires it? First we learn that courage is not defined by the absence of fear We learn that courage is defined by the actions we take even when afraid That is where courage shows itself Eddie rickenbacher was the greatest american flying ace in world war one He spent his time not only flying primitive inherently dangerous aircraft in the early part of the 20th century But he did it while being shot at repeatedly He was by all accounts a very brave man, but he was also afraid Eddie once said Courage is doing what you are afraid to do there can be no courage unless you are scared This is such an important yet misunderstood concept for most The word courage seems to evoke images of steely-eyed warriors with ice water in their veins remaining calm and fearless in the face of certain doom Steely-eyed maybe but fearless nope I'm not sure when we started confusing the words courageous and fearless, but clearly we have This confusion and the resulting misconception about courage can cause some real problems for an anxious person seeking recovery Convinced that feeling afraid means having no courage An anxious person may consistently call themselves weak and will declare that they are simply unable to engage in the process of recovery Because they're not built that way Every day people will tell me that they are just not as strong or brave as I was in my recovery But they are wrong They're just afraid and they think that being afraid means that they are not strong Do you think this about yourself? Tomorrow we will examine how this misconception surrounding fear and courage gets corrected when we do the work of recovery For now take heart in the idea that being afraid does not mean you are incapable of being brave Being afraid is merely the first half of being courageous 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 a 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