I’m currently going through Grateful Living‘s 100-Day Gratitude Challenge, a program that empowers people to live meaningful lives. Day 59, “Embody the Courage Inspired by Others,” includes a quote from the book How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith, written by the Episcopal Bishop and author Mariann Edgar Budde: “The courage to be brave when it matters most requires a lifetime of small decisions that set us on a path of self-awareness, attentiveness, and willingness to risk failure for what we believe is right.”

Thoughts?

Do you agree with Bishop Budde? If so, what does her statement mean to you? If you don’t agree with her, why not? How would you reword it?

Do I agree? Largely, yes. Here’s what her statement means to me:

Bravery isn’t a switch you flip in a dramatic moment. It’s a muscle built quietly over time—through the small, often invisible choices we make every day. Choosing honesty when it’s easier to stay silent. Acknowledging a mistake instead of deflecting. Trying something new despite the fear of looking foolish. Each of those tiny decisions is a kind of practice, and practice shapes character.

Budde names three steps along the path to bravery. Let’s look at each:

• Self-awareness: You can’t be brave about what you won’t look at. Knowing your values, your fears, and your patterns is the foundation everything else rests on.
• Attentiveness: Courage requires noticing—the moment when something wrong is happening, when someone needs an advocate, when your own voice is being swallowed. You have to be present enough to see it.
• Willingness to risk failure: This is the heart of it. Bravery isn’t the absence of fear; it’s acting despite the real possibility of getting it wrong.

What is Bravery To You?

What does bravery look like for a woman over 50? It rarely looks like climbing Mount Everest, although it can. It more often looks like leaving a job that no longer fits, having an honest conversation with an adult child, or finally pursuing the dream you put off for decades. Where do you see your everyday acts of courage or possibility for such?

Women over 50 have a unique advantage. You’ve already survived hard things: the end of a relationship, loss, failure, reinvention. That lived experience is not baggage; it’s evidence. You know you can get through difficult things because you already have.

And what is the cost of playing it safe? You know how that feels. We’ve all been there: the quiet regret, the shrinking sense of self, the dreams deferred too long. This isn’t about guilt; it’s about honest reckoning. It’s the self-awareness Budde talks about.

What Can You Do?

Take some time to think about the small daily decisions in your own life related to this, like speaking up in a meeting, setting a boundary with a family member, admitting vulnerability to a friend, or voicing an opposite opinion from the one being discussed in a group of friends.

Fear doesn’t go away—and that’s OK. The goal isn’t fearlessness; it’s learning to move forward with the fear present. As Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

This entry in the 100-Day Gratitude Challenge suggests thinking of a group or an individual we see as courageous. This example could be current or from history. What makes the person or the group courageous, in your opinion? How could you embody some perhaps small aspect of this person or group? What could you do today to demonstrate that courage? One of the individuals that shows up for me when I think about this is Gloria Steinem. She began her major activity in the late sixties, long before there was any ground swell of agreement for what she was saying. And, in addition to facing ridicule and possible danger, according to her own writing, she was very shy and passionately hated public speaking. But she did it anyway because her mission was so important to her.

So much is happening in our world right now that many of us feel is deeply wrong One woman taking a small brave action may not change the trajectory we’re on, but it certainly won’t hurt, and it may even have a positive impact on others that she didn’t foresee.

So, in what way will you be courageous today? Please let us know in the comments. 

Learn More…

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