Courage Doesn't Feel Good

Until you land the plane

I collect parenting tips the way other people collect recipes. Most of them don’t survive contact with an actual child. One did, and I want to tell you about the day it earned its keep.

My daughter was seven. She crawled into my lap at the kitchen table and said,

“Mama, I really want to get all fours this year.”

So we looked up what a four meant. The rubric said:

I was kind to myself and others - Always. A three was most of the time. A two, some of the time.

I hugged her and said, “Why don’t you go ask your teacher when you weren’t kind to yourself and others?”

She got up, walked out the front door, and started pacing the yard. I sat on the porch steps and watched. Her face was red. She was breathing fast. She was shaking.

“Kiddo, what’s going on?”

“Mama, I can’t ask the teacher that. The teacher’s too busy. The teacher isn’t there for me.”

I had watched Kelly McGonigal’s TED talk, How to Make Stress Your Friend, earlier that week, so for once I had the right sentence loaded. I kissed the top of her head, inhaled the magical scent of my child and said:

“What you’re feeling right now - this is courage. This is your body telling you that something matters and you’re going to need to act. We need to talk to your teacher. I’m going to go with you, and we’re going to do this together.”

---

Here’s the science I was leaning on. McGonigal cites a study that tracked 30,000 adults for eight years. Heavy stress raised the risk of dying by 43 percent - but only in the people who believed stress was harmful. The belief about the feeling did the damage, not the feeling. And the stress response itself releases oxytocin.

The pounding heart is not just an alarm. It is a built-in instruction: go find your people. Ask for help.

The shaking was never the problem. The story that my kid almost told herself about the shaking - that’s where it nearly went wrong.

She asked her teacher. Her teacher was mortified that any child would think she didn’t have time for her. My kid got every four she earned.

She also got over it in about four minutes, because she was seven and resilient and she knows what my momma-bear face means. Adults take longer. We’ve had more years to practice the other story - the one where the shaking means stop, and busy means unavailable, and asking is weakness.

And we’ve learned a sneakier dodge. If you’re afraid you’re not quite the person you believe yourself to be, the safest move is to never finish anything that could settle the question. One more procrastination activity. One more revision. One more roadblock you built yourself, between the work and the daylight. The unfinished thing can’t fail. It also can’t ship. I know this intimately - I call it a “fear of success” - something my own brother told me years ago.

I know it is scary and anger inducing and dysregulating but - just do it. Just land the plane. Just deliver the thing. Courage doesn’t feel good. It is your heart pounding shaking hard that you need to get social, get help, just do it, just push through. Courage is heart opening - it feels like pacing a yard with your face on fire. The feeling is not the warning. The feeling is the fuel, and it comes with its own chemistry for reaching out. Literally your body is built to get “social.”

My job on the porch steps was to watch and not rescue. To stand in the gap while she found her sentence. That was my courageous act that day - the not-rescuing - and the pride in explaining to my kid how she is going to learn to do the most courageous thing in the world - to advocate for yourself.

---

Something you can do in the next five minutes. Wednesday Women and Composure Digital are building the first real data set on what happens when women leaders stop holding back and build a public presence - what it unlocks, and what the shaking costs them on the way. They need 400+ women founders and VP+ leaders. They’re at 283.

If you’re a woman in leadership: take the survey. Five minutes. Your voice in the data. And if you’ve been meaning to build a public presence but keep finding roadblocks — some of them real, because we all know what lands in a visible woman’s inbox — this is a low-stakes first rep. Deliver a thing.

If you’re a man reading this: you know a woman who did the thing while shaking — who asked, who published, who took the stage with her face on fire. Forward this to her. That’s your five minutes.