Leading Your Self Through Life With Love & Courage
An introduction to a way of being that reconnects us with our aliveness
Most of us are so busy with the daily experience of modern life that we forget we have choice. We’ve programmed our human self with routines and procedures and we find our selves going through the motions of another day without really feeling like we were in it. Is this really it? Is that all life is really about? No. I don’t think it has to be.
With Love & Courage is a call to embrace the power of being human.
The thing that we believe separates human beings from other life forms is our consciousness and yet most of us are not using it to full effect. This isn’t our fault - the social systems we’ve inherited and continue to be part of upholding profit from our human survival mechanism of seeking safety. To the human brain safety = familiarity. Therefore even if it’s not what we actually want, our human self will pull us back towards what is familiar.
For example - it’s why you keep choosing the same kind of romantic partner experience and even if you do choose someone who is different, you will find your self behaving in ways that provoke your new partner into behaving in ways that give you the familiar experience. For example even if you choose an emotionally mature and stable partner this time, you may find your self starting to behave in ways that create arguments and instability or a feeling that you’re in this alone, even though that isn’t what you want at all and actually you probably could have a great relationship with the partner in front of you. The experience of arguments, instability and feeling like “I’m in this alone” is familiar to your system which means its desirable to your human self even though you don’t want to keep having that experience.
You likely have your own experience of this pattern in your own life. Maybe you want to speak up at work but each time you try to your throat closes or you flush bright red and stop yourself. Maybe you want to launch a new business or project but keep finding yourself browsing Rightmove instead (this is one of my patterns!). Maybe you want to be able to have difficult conversations with your partner but every time they ask to talk you feel like you can’t breathe and have to leave the room.
Whatever your example is, it probably feels like a ‘you’ problem, but it’s not.
You’re not doing anything ‘wrong’, you’re not ‘broken’ - this is a function/ a mechanism of being human.
Give your self a break.
Your self (your human) has just been trying to keep you safe. It doesn’t realise that you are wanting something new for your life. It doesn’t realise that you would rather take the ‘risk’ of vulnerability over the ‘safety’ of the familiar. For example, your self doesn’t get that you want to take the ‘risk’ of loving someone so deeply that if they left or died you would feel completely broken. It can’t compute that. So instead it keeps you a bit removed and a bit separate by finding things that are ‘wrong’ with every partner because then you never actually have to risk the vulnerability of deep love (sharing another of my personal patterns).
Again - remember this is not a ‘you problem’ - this is a human mechanism. It’s not trying to hurt you, it’s trying to keep you safe. But you don’t want a safe life. You want to feel ALIVE and to your self - that’s scary.
Our human systems are wired for survival. Our brains and nervous system took all the data available to us as new beings (babies) and created an interpretation of the world that exists ‘out there’ (i.e. beyond the skull). In our early years of development we form numerous assumptions about our self and the world around us. These form the basis of our thinking and perception throughout the rest of our life. New information might be added to these assumptions and built on top of them, but without deliberate deconstruction the baselines can stay the same.
This is NOT about constant self analysis.
In this work we are not interested in constantly looking at your past. We’re not searching for a ‘true self’. We’re also not constantly ‘healing’.
Leading your self through life with love and courage is about real time, present moment awareness and conscious leadership of the self so that we increase our capacity to meet life in the moment where change can occur - NOW.
If you want to get better at staying in hard conversations, you need to stay with your self in the discomfort of hard conversations. If you want to speak up at work, you need to stay with your self in the discomfort of raising your hand and letting words come out of your mouth. If you want to make new friends, you need to stay with your self in the discomfort of leaving your flat and talking to real people.
Do you feel the discomfort that just came up in your body as you thought about your version of those examples? That’s what most of us are avoiding. It’s those feelings that most of us start to experience and then feel like we can’t cope with so we go back to the familiar patterns of behaviour (leaving the room, not speaking up, not leaving the flat) even though it’s not going to get us what we want.
If we want to change our experience of life, we have to be able to lead our self through the emotions that come up. Our survival self will ring all the alarm bells as we start to do something that breaks the pattern. We need to be able to stay in that moment of discomfort long enough to show our self (our human system) that we did not die from doing the new thing. That is how we re-wire a new experience AND we build an internal relationship of trust with our self which means the alarm bells start to go quieter each time we do the new thing AND we get the added bonus of becoming someone we actually like and respect.
When you lead your self through life with love and courage you will naturally start to enjoy being you more, because you’ll actually be being more you and less your self.
Your self is not bad.
Our self has learned how to keep us safe - we want it to do that - but there are certain areas of our lives that we don’t want it to take control of.
There are a lot of things my survival self can do that I don’t want to be responsible for - e.g. monitoring my heart rate or telling my blood vessels to contract or which muscle to move etc. I also want my autopilot to whip my hand up or move me out of the way when it predicts the trajectory of the tennis ball heading towards my face.
But I don’t want my self being in the drivers seat of my relationships, my work, my decisions.
There are experiences I want for my life that are different from what I’ve known in the past, that’s why I want to be leading my self rather than being led.
An Intro to This Way of Being
I don’t see this work as a philosophy but more a way of being.
Leading your self through life with love and courage isn’t something to think about; it’s somewhere to live from. It’s not just something for the mind but an entire experience.
When you go to speak up in the meeting you don’t just have thoughts like “What if everyone laughs at me”, your body literally shuts your mouth and tightens your throat. The survival self is not just something that exists in our minds, it exists in our entire being. That’s why this work involves the body as much as the mind.
Leading Your Self Through Life
‘Leading Your Self Through Life’ has a deliberate gap between your and self.
Your self = the self belonging to you.
This creates a distinction that allows us to take responsibility for our self whilst also remembering that we don’t have to be ‘it’. This helps us remember that we can consciously choose how to be in each moment.
With Love & Courage
Your self is not bad, but when you’ve tried so many different things to change your experience and nothing has worked, it’s easy to beat your self up.
With love & courage is about how we approach our self through this process. Another reason for the separation of your and self is so that you start to see your self as a younger you - it’s the you who learned to be a certain way in order to feel safe. They didn’t know any different. They now need your guidance and leadership so that they feel safe to relinquish the controls of your life over to you.
This work originally started as With Courage - I was not long out of the Army and setting up my coaching business. With Courage was a phrase I used to keep me going when things felt really really hard. But as I continued through a process of complete deconstruction of my life and ‘me’ as I’d known it (a Dark Night of the Soul if you like) I realised how much self-criticism I had normalised. I realised that the ‘me’ I had become - the one I didn’t really like, the one I found it hard to live as - was just the inevitable outcome of the assumptions I had made about myself and life as I went through the events of my childhood. I was adamant my childhood hadn’t affected me but only when I was forced to speak to a therapist did I realise how wrong I was.
I started to feel empathy towards my self. I understood her. It was like I saw my self for the first time and I realised how much she needed my love and attention.
I then swung the pendulum full force in the other direction - completely into self-love and self-care that was initially very needed but eventually became a ‘nicer’ version of the same prison. I prioritised my comfort and safety so much that I became stagnant. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. I retreated from the world and at first that felt great, but then it wasn’t. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to have money to spend on things. I wanted to connect with other humans and laugh and cry and hug. And from where I was at that point in time, all of that was going to require me to get outside of my comfort zone.
My version of love had become a passive “it’s ok you don’t have to” kind of love that wasn’t really the love I wanted in my life. I wanted a love that saw the aliveness in me, the possibilities for my life and that would stand with me through the discomfort of taking the steps to make it real.
With Courage alone can easily lead to a pushing, forcing, striving that fuels criticism and loathing of the self which actually makes them feel even more unsafe and therefore cling to the familiar. They need our love in order to feel safe to release control.
With Love alone can easily lead us to stagnation and prioritising our own comfort so much that we don’t actually grow or change - which defeats the point of this work.
If we want to create a life that feels good on the inside AND is fulfilling to our human, we need to be able to Lead Our Self Through Life With Love & Courage.
This work is ongoing.
There is no destination with this work. There is no ‘better’ version of you to get to.
This is about conscious leadership of the self throughout life.
It’s about growing our capacity to notice in the moment when our self has taken over and is leading us down a familiar path. It’s then about making the conscious choice to meet our self with compassion, understanding and care so that our self feels safe enough to let us guide the next actions, even if that feels unfamiliar (and therefore scary).
That’s With Love & Courage as a way of being. We are only being it if we continue to be it. We can’t read it once, or write it down in a journal and claim to be being it. It has to be lived over and over again.
Where to go next.
If this resonates and you want support with living this work, you might like to book a 1:1 call with Kirsty, or perhaps you want to join one of our upcoming events - see the homepage for details.
With love & courage, Kirsty