3  Courage

These can help you have enough courage for an interpersonal action:

• See your past failures to do things as like you being in a prison or having fun stolen from you, and acknowledge that you chose that.
• See the possible reactions to what you will do as like friends’ reactions to seeing you get out of prison.
• Instead of giving up, patiently cling onto hope, even if it means spending hours getting the courage to do something.
• Expose the fear part of your mind to everything you know about what brings you toward or away from happiness, especially your regrets. This allows isolation, regret, and frustration to be treated the same as any other danger and be the ones that are fled from. Look at the world to see that this is the correct perspective of danger:
  • Weightlifting involves choosing long-term health benefits over short-term comfort and prevention of short-term injuries, and it’s normal to require kids to lift weights.
  • Advocacy for an end to the birth of people, to end the creation of possibilities for suffering in other people, is rarely tolerated.
  • Putting one’s own life in danger to defend some countries in a few wars is widely admired. The pain in this case is worse than awkward emotions in social situations.
• Be skeptical of thoughts against doing a brave action. It’s the voice of an abuser. Ignore it to be safer. Don’t forget at the last minute why you’re ignoring it. Examples of suspects:
  • Something lies to you about perfection. If you say a word over and over again, then the word will sound weird, but it’s not. This could happen in your mind when you plan on saying something.

These can help you maintain courage after embarrassment:

• Think of the past and the future to recognize self-improvement and overcome the illusion that the situation is disconnected from goodness.
• Resist forgetfulness of any intrinsic value of what you did.
• Judge your actions and decisions using reason. Be skeptical of negative emotions because they don’t always accurately reveal something about you.
• See the situation as a childhood memory.