Courage and confidence: which is more important?

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“Courage over confidence” - Rina Orellana, Dancer

Confidence is a hard goal to aim for because you never really have it until after you need it. If you wait until you feel confident to try something, you may never get there.

Instead, you might try focusing on being courageous.

photo by Clinton Johnson

This is my flamenco dance group with performing without our teacher for the first time. I’m sweaty, and my skirt is falling down. And I’m so happy. It wasn’t a perfect set by any means, but we worked hard to prepare, showed up with our whole hearts and did our best. In our own small way, we channelled bits of “duende”: the transcendence we look for in art. We had a little bit of confidence between us, but a metric butt-load of courage.

Courage is the precursor to confidence. Without courage, there’s no way to gather the experience that confidence requires.

Doing anything with an unpredictable outcome takes courage. Listening to inspiration takes courage. Sharing our work, our expression, our thoughts… takes courage. Confidence is what happens after we’ve done that. Over and over again. Once you’ve built confidence brick by brick, you can leap into the void and fly because you know that even if it goes wrong, it’s still ok.

Waiting for confidence before doing something courageous is like expecting to see a plant before we’ve put the seed in the ground.

But courage doesn’t have to be big, loud, and stomping around the town square. It can be small and quiet and incremental. Little hops instead of big leaps. And the best part is we can borrow it from our friends. That’s what carried my friends and I through that dance performance!

Where can I borrow some courage?

By my estimate, this is 90% of why people hire coaches: so that they can borrow their courage and take steps towards building up their own confidence. It’s why I work with coaches. And what is therapy but someone lending us the courage to feel our emotions?

To be human is to learn to be brave, and to share our courage with each other. We’re all learning together. We all have different areas of confidence to contribute. To your acts of creative bravery, however small they may seem, I say Olé!

xo Annalee

PS: You can always borrow some of my courage through