Free Courage: Overcoming Fear and Igniting Self-Confidence by Debbie Ford Page A

matter, and whose voice isn’t heard. Thus comes about the death of the courageous warrior child.
    THE BIRTH OF OUR STORY
    Maybe you can remember the death of the courageous warrior child in you. The reality you see now may just be part of a fairy tale that you made up about yourself and then believed.
    The story we tell ourselves about ourselves and our lives either empowers or disempowers us; it either opens us to new possibilities or shuts us down. Many of us create fairy tales about our lives that become the stories that limit our access to a better life. At its highest, our story exists to teach us, to help us grow, to allow our souls to evolve. But we make the mistake of allowing our story to define us and dictate the course of our lives. The stories we choose to tell ourselves about ourselves and our lives dictate who we are and what we’re capable of. So to reclaim courage, we must look closely at the events that are tucked away in our unconscious. We must revisit the past and bring awareness and closure to it so that we can be released from the stranglehold of insecurity, fear, and regret.
    When you were a child, you probably ran to try new things, played on monkey bars, picked up unfamiliar objects, climbed trees, watched bugs for hours, or launched spontaneously into song and dance. And then something happened. Most of us have enthusiastically stepped out, hopped onto our proverbial horse, and then, because of something that was said to us, allowed ourselves to get pushed back into the smallness of our fearful human self. We may have responded by becoming a victim, a codependent, or a people pleaser. Or we may have rebelled but at the cost of our uniquely feminine power as we adopted more masculine traits. The power that comes from our intuitive knowing and emotional intelligence was wholly denigrated and dismissed.
    However it happens, all of us create a story about our own lives defined by the events we didn’t know how to digest. Unfortunately, many of the incidents buried in our story were painful experiences. Our interpretations of these events and experiences create patterns woven through our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and especially our fears. Although the patterns were created in the past, they don’t stay there. Transporting these patterns into the present unconsciously, we create self-imposed limitations and unknowingly make decisions that influence the rest of our lives. The effects of our choices are pervasive and often leave us feeling weak, shameful, and cowardly.
    If we’ve been weak, scared, and stuck, then we continue to see ourselves as weak, scared, and stuck. When we attempt to step out of the confines of the self we believe ourselves to be, especially anything beyond the women’s roles that we know (those of our mothers, sisters, aunts, friends, and colleagues), we get stopped in our tracks—confined by the limitations that have arisen from our very own story. Scared, wounded, and often traumatized in our earlier lives, we go into hiding, wrapping ourselves in a false self-image for protection. Created in the spook house of our unresolved past, this false self is perfectly at home being defined in simplistic and narrow terms. The old self-image, with its outdated operating manual, continues to get churned out by our subconscious mind and continuously projected onto the outer world. It is only when we wake up inside the shell of the image we have created and find the willingness to step outside of it that a warrior’s courage floods into our lives and we are able to make conscious choices that will further our highest vision for a powerful life.
    Amy, a forty-three-year-old executive, came to one of my workshops battling boredom and burnout in her corporate job. Amy had thrived in her career as an administrator in a high-tech firm. Although she had successfully ascended through the ranks of the company, she was concerned that she had lost the passion she once had for her work. Her