Book Week: How We Learn To Be Brave

In this episode I’m talking about the book How We Learn to Be Brave by Mariann Budde. My focus is  the first four chapters, each one highlighting a powerful choice:

• Deciding to go
• Deciding to stay
• Deciding to start
• Accepting what you do not choose

These ideas overlap with the beloved Serenity Prayer, reminding us to change what we can, accept what we cannot, and seek wisdom to know the difference. A brave step can create endurance and hope for the future. 

Take a moment to look back: Where have you already been brave? Where might you need to make a new decision? I encourage you to avoid beating yourself up over choices you wish you didn’t make, or paths you wish you had taken. You very likely made the best decision at the time for a variety of reasons. You didn’t know then what you know now and how could you have? Sometimes we can only learn those lessons in retrospect. Learn from them and move on. Our choices—whether to go, stay, start, or accept—shape our courage and our future.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• Join Kelly’s Free community on Skool
• Bishop Mariann Budde

 Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

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Welcome to Vibrant Life Podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Tibbits, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self-awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self-awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Welcome to Book Week. This week we're talking about How We Learn to Be Brave. Reverend Budde is the Bishop of Washington and wrote a book that really impacted me. Today we're just going to talk about the first four chapters, and there's four big ideas. If you want to write them down, they are deciding to go, deciding to stay, deciding to start, and accepting what you do not choose. For me, there was a lot of overlap in this book and the Serenity Prayer. The Serenity Prayer says, "Lord, help me with the things that I can't change." There are things that other people are doing, that people are thinking, the weather. I can't do anything about any of that, so help me to accept that I can't change these things. But at the same time, help me to change the things that I can, and then give me wisdom to know the difference. A chapter on deciding to go, and then the next chapter saying deciding to stay sounds very contradictory, but both are needed. Let's look at deciding to go. I wonder if you have a story about a time that you decided to go. You decided to be brave and leave a place where you were content and decide to go. And you look back now, and you realize all that hard work, all that change was worth leaving the place that you loved. She tells a story about living in a town, and it was time for her to leave, and there were people in the town who were going to be really supportive if she stayed. But If she left, she got to grow into the version of her that became this bishop. The chapter talks about what so many of us recognize, that when we look back, we really have clarity that this place that we loved, maybe it was your season of being in college or a job that just seemed so perfect, and at some point it became time to go. You don't always realize then that this is a good thing. But almost always when you look back, there's clarity that it is such a gift to be able to go. So here's the first thing to notice. Is there any area in your life right now where it might be time to go? It might be time to change a job or to do something a little bit differently. At the same time, chapter two says, sometimes you need to stay. And she uses a quote from Martin Luther that says, "Here I stand, I can do no other. So help me God." And I remember once being in a work situation that was really, really hard and I didn't know what to do, and the verse that came to me was a verse where God reminds us that sometimes we just need to be still and He will fight for us. So sometimes in life we need to go. We need to stop doing the thing we're doing. Other times it's time for us to choose to stay, to do the work that's a little bit harder. And she references The Rule of Benedict, which says, "It may be the neighborhood we live in rather than the neighborhood we want that will really make human beings out of us." It might be the neighborhood we're living in currently rather than the place we want to go that will make human beings out of us. So where in your life is it kind of hard right now? Maybe it's a friendship that takes a lot of extra work. Maybe it's the role you're serving in as a volunteer or for a paid job, and you're noticing it's not quite time to go. It's time to be still and to learn the lessons that we need to learn. I love that her book has both. My friend Ellen often says there's nuance in between two different things. Sometimes it's time to go sometimes it's time to stay. I love that she refers to Eleanor Roosevelt, who says, "No one can make us feel anything without our consent." Whether you decide to go or decide to stay, what you feel, what you think, what you do is 100% in your authority. And she finishes chapter two with this idea, there's no manual. There's no way to know for sure when it's time to go and when it's time to stay. I think these two chapters just help us to honor the fact that sometimes we need to do one or the other. And often you don't know until you look back, the clarity of why you chose to go or why you chose to stay. Chapter three has a very different idea. Sometimes we're deciding to start. I don't know about you, but doing things in a messy way before I feel ready has been one of the biggest tools that I've learned to apply in my own life. I've always wanted to wait until everything was in order before I did something. But I've discovered that I actually often learn things in that messy middle of learning how to do something that I've never done before. She quotes a quote that says, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I wonder today if you were able to close your eyes and put your hand on your heart and take a few breaths. Is there anything you want to do that you just haven't begun yet? You haven't taken that first messy step. She starts this chapter with a story about Jesus. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there's so many stories that overlap, things like feeding the 5,000. But she said one of the most important decisions to start is only in the Book of Luke, and it's when Jesus is staying close to the villages in Northern Israel. He's near his hometown of Nazareth, and he's gathered a small group of disciples near him, and he decides to go away to a mountain. And during this time, he's doing some prayer. And while he's praying, the Bible says that this light came, this voice from God, and he said to Jesus, God says, "This is my son. Listen to him." And the people around Jesus don't understand what's going on. We've never heard of this before, God speaking over somebody and God speaking specifically, "This is my son, in whom I'm well-pleased. Go and listen to him." This starting for Jesus became a moment with something really powerful. The heavens opened and God spoke. That doesn't happen for most of us. There's not this clear statement from heaven, "Go and start this new thing." So the rest of her chapter is filled with people who made hard decisions to do something new that had never been done before. And she speaks about these people because they've done these real-life things alongside of her. She is, an amazing bishop who's had to do some really hard things, stand up to authority and power and speak the truth of God over them when there was no other example in front of her And one of the things that she talks about is the fact that, Thurgood Marshall, who was one of the leaders of his generation, had to do something that no one else had done. There had never been a Black man who did as much work, became the justice of the Supreme Court before Thurgood Marshall. He had to start something that no one else had done, but he had this tenacity. He lived long enough to see the tides change. He did small action step after small action step that helped to dismantle Jim Crow in America. She has these stories of how it was never clear before he took the small, decisive action step. It was one small step in the right direction after the other. And what these stories do is they encourage us that sometimes we need to be brave. That's what this book teaches us. Sometimes we need to learn to be brave and do one small step. And from that step, maybe someone comes along and stands with us. Maybe we learn something from there that helps us take the next small step. Sometimes we go, sometimes we stay, sometimes we start. And then the fourth chapter of this seven-chapter book is accepting what you don't choose. So sometimes when you go, the result is something you would have never chosen. Sometimes when you decide to stay, you never would have chosen those results. And sometimes when you start and it's messy and it doesn't look like it's possible, you have these results that you never would have chosen. So what do you do when sometimes life has these action steps create a result that you would never have chosen? She goes back to the Serenity Prayer. God, help me have the serenity to accept the things that I can't change and the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. So when you're accepting what you cannot choose, she reminds us that Very few crises end as quickly as we first hope. I don't know what the crisis could be. It could be a budget that's not aligning. It could be a small nonprofit that you're supporting and it just seems like there's not enough volunteers and there's not enough people or money to help it work out. Over and over again in life, whether it's you're trying to help your kids do their homework and they're tired and they don't have the energy to you want to have family and friends over and it doesn't feel like you have the resources you need for the event that you want. Sometimes in life, we go and make these small action steps. We start things. We stay or we go. And now the result is something that we would not choose. She brings her story to a close in chapter four with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He's the German pastor that lived during the time of Hitler. His friends in England, like Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, kept encouraging him to leave Germany and come to England to be safe. But he stayed and he fought. And it was not the end he ever would have chosen. He actually ended up dying for his belief that Christ looked different than what the Christians of Germany were doing. What do we do with that when sometimes we've prayed and we've worked and we've done our part and the result is different than what we wanted? She quotes Paul where he says, "Suffering produces endurance. Endurance produces character. Character produces hope, and hope doesn't disappoint us." I'm wondering today whether you stayed or you left and you were brave and you took a small action step, and now the result is not what you want. You started that podcast, you created the community, you started writing your book, and the result is not what you want. Let's see if any of these words speak to you today. The suffering is that what is- is different from what you would want. That's where suffering is. We want things to be different than they are rather than accept that they are what they are. That suffering, that hard work that you just did, it created endurance. I wonder if you can think back at something you've done and it took longer than you wanted or it was harder than you wanted, and that endurance created a new character. You're now somebody who does hard things, somebody who doesn't give up, and that character produces hope that in the future you're going to be somebody who figures it out. A story I would tell if you were sitting across the table from me is I went to visit my first granddaughter, and I had to do a whole bunch of things that I never had to do before 'cause my husband always takes care of it. I had to learn to take an Uber and take a train home, and the train happened to be at an airport, and I had never been to that airport before. My Uber driver drops me off saying, "I don't think there's a train station here." So I start with some confusion and fear. I get into the airport, try to get to the train station. One person tells me to do one thing. Somebody tells me to do something else. I feel like I'm just going through a loop. Finally, I make it onto the train and I'm heading home, and now I feel these words that Paul was describing, endurance, character. I'm somebody who can figure things out and hope that if I have to do something hard in the future, I'm going to figure it out again. And hope doesn't disappoint us because God's love has been poured in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. That is the word that I think Reverend Budde wants us to know as we're learning to be brave. We're not alone in this. God promises to be with us, to be our strength. Another verse from Paul in the Book of Corinthians says that God's grace is sufficient, and His power is made perfect in weakness. So why do I want you to read this book? I think it's important for all of us to learn how to be brave. If you feel like you're somebody who's not very brave, I encourage you to just sit down for a few minutes and look back on your life. I bet if you gave yourself the time and the energy, you'd notice so many brave things you've already done. You just forgot about them. And is it possible that going into the future, there are going to be so many times where you get to decide to go and be brave, or you get to decide to stay and be brave? You get to decide, no matter how old you are, to start something, and then to get to the place where even if this isn't the result you would choose, to believe that whatever you're learning in this season will give you hope and perseverance and character, and you may look back five years from now and decide that this actually was the very best outcome for this time. I hope you get to read the book. Thank you for joining the Live a Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encouraged you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life. And if you'd like to learn more, you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly Tibbits Life Coach, or visit my website, kellytibbitts.com. I look forward to connecting again soon