What comes to mind when you hear the word courage? The dictionary defines courage as the ability to do something that frightens you or summoning strength in the face of grief. In this episode, we discuss the 6 types of courage you currently possess and how strengthening these is the key to living a more courageous life.

About the Host:

Jani Roberts is the Owner of Alignment Essentials, a health and wellness company spanning the fitness, self-improvement, and mindfulness spaces. She is the creator of the Warrior® Workout, Moving Meditations™, Inspirational Conversations™ and all of the Alignment Essentials programming content. In addition, Jani is an International best-selling author of the book, Navigating the Clickety-Clack, How to Live a Peace-Filled Life in a Seemingly Toxic World.

Jani has over 40 years of experience in the health and wellness field. She owned and operated a large gym franchise in Florida, as well as a boutique studio for several years where she specialized in health and wellness related services, products, preventative health education, personal training, small group fitness classes, private nutrition and health coaching.

She has literally trained hundreds of thousands of instructors around the world, and she was the featured choreographer and performer on numerous training DVDs. She has presented for dozens of large Health and Wellness brands such as Nike, and Adidas. She holds several certifications through ACE, AFAA and NASM.

Jani travels extensively as a speaker and presenter sharing her Alignment Essentials wellness tools and helping people find more joy in their lives and is currently training at the Shamanic Institute of Healing. 

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What? Life isn't supposed to suck? Get out of here. Life is supposed to be good for me? I don't think so. Truth? Did you know that you have the power to create your own reality? True? Did you know that you can live the life that you've always desired? Holy? That's right. And that's why we're here. Are you ready? Unless you're on Joy overload, you've come to the right place, it's time to get out of your own way and start creating more of what you want, and less of what you don't end up with the excuses. I'm your host, Jani Roberts. Let's do this.

Welcome back, my friends, it is an awesome day here in Pennsylvania. And I am so happy to be joining you for this podcast, to acknowledge and discuss the unbelievable courage that you have. And the reason that I know this is because I know that you have overcome things that if you had known in advance that they were coming and that you were going to have to find your way through them. You would have said, Oh, hell no. There's no way I can get through that. And yet, somehow, you found your way through. How did that work? How did you do it? Do you think you went on autopilot people say voice sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. I don't think we've given ourselves enough credit. We are able to muster courage in situations that are truly just so difficult. And use that courage to find our way through. So today, I wanted to talk to you about accessing this courage as you need it. And the six different types of courage that are available that are at your fingertips. And as you do this work, you will develop these different courageous aspects of yourself. The spiritual courage, the intellectual courage, the social courage, physical courage, emotional courage, and moral courage. This is powerful stuff, we have the ability to be more courageous than we ever thought possible. Sometimes we blend two or more of these types of courage together, it may be we're overcoming something physically, and we're finding ourselves to be quite courageous as we move through it. But it's also a spiritual courage that connects with that, that merges and brings us through. My point is that we can learn to tap into these different types of courage and we can learn to mash them together when we need them, and call on them instantly. When we find ourselves in a place that requires that power, that courage supplies us with. Now, who we claim to be, we have learned is a curious, powerful experience. Who we thought we were compared to who we know we are now because of the work that we're doing, to discover, to dig deep to find our way it takes a lot of courage to do this work. Most people go on I'm not going no, that's uncomfortable. It's just too uncomfortable. I can't do it. From our perspective here at EY it's way more comfortable, uncomfortable, not to do the work. Tolerating being less than who we really are. That is uncomfortable, way more uncomfortable than that. That sticky out of our comfort zone place that we must travel through in order to expand. As we look at this first type of courage, we're going to begin with emotional courage. This type of courage opens us up to feeling the full spectrum of good feeling emotions. At the risk, however, of encountering the not so good feeling emotions, and our ability to do this is strongly correlated with joy. Think about this.

When we allow ourselves to be brave enough to be courageous enough to experience the emotions that We find ourselves sitting in, instead of pushing them down, pushing them away, blocking them out, we then expand and we're able to experience more of the good feeling emotions. But if we've been living in despair for a long time, it will take this emotional courage to move us into a better feeling place. And you have this ability, you have emotional courage. Look at the connection to spiritual courage. This is what really fortifies us. When we are down on the turret, roll it around struggling. Because we may not necessarily know or understand the why of how we got to where we are. But this courage enables us to know there is something here for us even in this uncomfortable space, there is something here for us. So we need to tap into this spiritual courage. Remember who we truly are, center ourselves in our truth and allow this courage to surface. Again, powerful, powerful stuff. Now, physical courage is what I feel most people think of first, when they hear the word courage, in other word, being brave. If I've been physically harmed, or someone I know has transitioned, I'm going to stand in my power and make my way through this physically, I don't know how but I'm going to do it, I'm going to go through the motions, if you will, trying my best to be present, be resilient, and be you know, in my now and stay in awareness. We call on this a lot. Because we at first, when we're doing this work, we recognize that we are more in our head physically than we are socially, intellectually, morally, emotionally, spiritual, spiritually, naturally, right, because we are in the physical. We are experiencing life from a physical perspective, but we are also spiritual, we are energy. So we have the ability to have many perspectives. For some people, the most challenging courage to muster is social courage. If there's a risk that we feel we're taking, that we will be rejected, and what we're doing will not be accepted, it won't be the popular thing to do. I say bring it on, we need more of that. But this can be terrifying. I've certainly been terrified by it in my experience, but again, goes back, I was more terrified of not doing it. when push came to shove. I needed to do what I needed to do, and take that risk. And in all honesty, it wasn't that big of one once I got through it. But when I was looking at it, it was completely overwhelming. As we move through this period of COVID, we were unable to socialize in the way that we're used to. As we've moved over the past few decades into this technological world, we have become less social, we we find it more challenging to have conversation with people for not practicing it. If all we're doing is texting, because we're used to isolation, or we need to be isolated as we did during that time. When we bounce back in to connecting with people, it can take some social courage, our perspective is not different, we are not the same. There's no way we could be the same after that experience. We truly are different to the point where I could get so much anxiety about going out of doors the first time. And for many people this doesn't have anything to do. COVID is just socializing in general is not something that they feel comfortable doing. And I can actually feel physically sick. From that anxiety of connecting with others. I can feel physically ill because I'm longing

to socially connect that Courage isn't difficult for me to tap into. But I'm just so I'm longing for it. I'm starving for that human connection. And I can feel that physically. You can see how these types of coverages of types of courage connect to each other. It's important that we observe where we are within these different types of courage where where do I feel that I'm more vulnerable, less stable, feeling a little bit stickier, a little shakier. Which one of these types? Or you know, there may be one, there may be none, there may be three or four, there's no judgment here, but it's important to look at it and explore it. Where's that coming from? Well, you know, I've always been an introvert. Really? Okay, that's, that's cool. No judgment around it. But does it bring you joy? Are you truly happier in an isolated environment? Or are you experiencing loneliness, and social anxiety? And what you really need is to tap into that social courage that you do have, that you do have access to. All of this connects with our intellectual courage. This speaks to our willingness to engage when the road gets bumpy. It enables us to question our thinking to step back, and Hmm. Perhaps I could have handled that differently. What could I have done differently that that might have brought me to a different outcome or closer to the one that I truly desired? Notice I'm not looking at this as a pile of mistakes that I've made. I'm just observing. I'm using my intellect to explore how did I get here, we have to this means that it, this is discerning, and we need to tell the truth. We need to be honest with ourselves, use our mind to our advantage, don't buy into, have that conversation with ourselves. This can be extraordinarily thought provoking. And will stimulate us into a place of using that intellectual courage in our daily life. Mind blowing, literally mind blowing. And certainly, if I'm on an emotional roller coaster, and I feel like I can't emotionally muster courage, I can tap into my intellect. Right now you're getting in your own way. Let's calm down. Let's take a few deep breaths. And let's look at what we know to be true. Without any question. What do we know to be true? Instead of reacting and going off on a tangent? Well, this person told me this. And in our mind, it's like, so we think this is what happened, but we don't really know. So we're trying to wrestle something to the ground, when we don't even know what it is that we're wrestling. We're in the emotional aspect of things. We're not in the intellectual. Finding that balance again, so we're not reacting. We're gathering information, we're stepping back immediately, particularly when things are super intense. We're stepping back. And really, it's almost as though we pull ourselves out of it. And look at it. Completely different perspective, take the emotion out of it can be really hard sometimes to do that. But we can do that. Take all that emotion out of it. And look at what is happening is is what I'm believing to be true. really true. Without a question. I'm absolutely 1,000% sure that it is truth. I don't know about you, but I found in my experience that's rare. When I start reacting, I usually don't have all the facts. And sometimes it's that unknown. That's making me emotional. I need more information. I'm panicking. So take that pause before panicking. Okay, wait, let's gather the information. What do we know to be true? Again, without question. This is what I mean when I say thought provoking. It really challenges us to step into who we really are and not get in our own way not get sucked into that noise

takes us right into moral courage. This is this involves doing the right thing. Even if it means that others are going to disapprove. I mean, it's time for us to be done with waiting on other people's approval. In order for us to allow ourselves to experience joy. We know this to diving into this moral courage and understanding that this is no one else's business. We're going to tap into what we feel is ethical, we're going to maintain our integrity, our version of our integrity, we don't have to explain that. That's our truth. This thing connects us with our values, our, our ideals, our morals. This is how I want to live my life. It's not about claiming who we who we are to others, but just living it. So we reveal our truth, our moral courage, through our words and our actions. This is how we connect. And you've experienced that. I know, I'm not sure if you've experienced it, yourself. But you've experienced it. As you've observed others. You've met people who are I don't care what other people think. And they don't say it in a sarcastic kind of arrogant way. It's just I'm at a place in my life where I'm understanding that has what they think has nothing to do with me, it's imperative that I stand in my truth. I know where my integrity lies. I don't have to adjust that, in order to cater to what other people think I should do be how I should live, what I should think, very connected to social courage, because we can be very stuck in what other people think. When we're dealing with a social situation. We can struggle with that to the point where we just like, I'm not leaving the house, I just can't deal with the ridicule, ridicule the judgment, I just, I can't take it anymore. Everyone is just ridiculing each other. You know, if you don't act, the way I act, if you don't live the way I live, then you know you're out. Okay? That's your choice. But that is not what I am choosing to attract into my experience. I am attracting like minded people who understand the power of truth. That we are more alike than different, that it's essential to the well being of the planet, for me to stand in my unique truth that only I bring. I mean, think about that. No one brings the Energy to this planet that you do. No one has your exact DNA. No one thinks the thoughts you think, similar, perhaps, but not the ones you think no one has the same creative ideas that you have. You have your way, you have your niche. If you do the work and take the time to discover what that is. What makes you tick. The truth of the matter is warrior. You are extraordinarily courageous. As I mentioned at the top of this episode, you have moved to things in your life that at the time just really didn't seem humanly possible. Certainly not emotionally possible, perhaps not physically possible. Intellectually possible. You had to find your way. And you did. Don't forget the courageous acts that you have expressed on your journey. Don't push those aside. Don't be little them, amplify them. Remind yourself of them. And what you gained on the journey through those experiences that demand it, for you to tap in to your courage. Be brave, my friends, be brave. It is truly who you are. And we will talk next time until then stand in it. Live in it. Be courageous. Nothing but love for you guys. Have a great, great day. Peace.