The Soft Side of Courage

Josh Gentine

May 18, 2025

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Courage, in the traditional physical sense, just isn’t necessary these days. Day-to-day survival is essentially assured; it rarely requires courage. I can almost guarantee your job doesn’t require deep wells of courage for you to survive the day. And let’s be honest, despite what we might see on social media and the recent uptick in space travel, it’s the rare few attempting daring or profound feats of human endurance or technologically complex endeavors.

But there is a softer side to courage.

While not physical in nature nor necessary for survival, this courage still evokes fear and makes your heart rate jump and your palms sweat. This soft courage is based on how we show up with and for others.

This week, I had to have a very difficult conversation with a client about the need for them to show up with courage in their family; to have hard conversations and face honest truths. I didn’t intend to invoke the notion of courage, but that’s what surfaced, and when I did, it resonated. Their mindset around who they needed to be in the family was “tough” and “hard”, but when reframed around being courageous, it shifted them into a positive, leadership-focused frame of mind. Was their conversation going to be tough, certainly, but that didn’t mean they were tough or hard to take it on; they were lovingly courageous.

You don’t need courage to survive in today’s world, but you do need it to thrive. Courage is essential to personal growth and crucial to becoming a deeply authentic person in the midst of immense social pressure. Courage is essential to the development of relationships as you take the risk of engaging in real conversations and showing up with vulnerability. And in your family, courage is essential, both in embracing the truth of who you have become together, as a family, and in communicating the vision you hold for its future.