A skunk sprayed a pet and that pet slept on her coat. In the chaos of getting ready for school, she didn’t realize, threw on her coat and ran for the bus. All the way to high school she wondered what stank. When she got off the school bus, she realized it was her.

And the smell transferred itself to the carefully-chosen outfit she was wearing that day. She tried to ignore it but the scent was so pungent that she couldn’t breathe. Her friends apologized that they couldn’t sit next to her.

Can you imagine what she thought? How she felt?

She went to the nurse’s office and called her mom at her nearby office job. Mom wouldn’t come get her because she was busy. She hung up the phone in tears. The nurse looked at her sympathetically. She didn’t feel she had a choice. Their home was too far away to walk and it was raining.

At which point, I said, “I would have left campus, gone to your mom’s office, and sat there.”

And she replied, “I don’t have that in me. I’m not like you – I’m not Brave like you.”

That surprised me, for two reasons.

First, I’ve never thought of myself as Brave

If you made me pick an adjective off a list to describe myself, Brave wouldn’t be the word. Not even in my top 10. I thought about what might have caused her to apply that word to me.

And I thought about the character, Joy, introduces Lewis Black’s character in the movie, Inside Out: “That’s Anger,” she says, as we watch a montage of Anger blowing up. “Anger cares deeply about Fairness.”

And that’s how I feel: I have a deep-seated reservoir of Anger that I draw upon when confronted with unfairness.

• Refuse to help a child in need? Anger makes me confront you with it.
• Demand that I rat out other students who signed a petition calling for your removal because of your inappropriate behavior? Threaten to call my parents and play a recording of our discussion for them that I didn’t know you were making? Anger makes me tell you that what you’re doing is illegal.
• Ask me, when I phone asking for your VP, if the name “Libby” is short for “Libido”? I’ll tell you it’s short for “Liberated woman who will have your ass in a sling if you don’t put your VP on the line right away” and then ask the VP what the hell he was thinking hiring someone like you.
• Tell me I’m a terrible manager, when you’re the one who micromanages your people and lies about your numbers? I’ll tell you that you’re being irrational and need to rethink your own management style.
• Accuse my friend in grad school of not studying when she is burning out studying but still doesn’t understand because your book is so poorly written and your course so poorly designed and you suck as a professor? I’ll tell you how it is from across the room.
• Insist on applying my 30 year bonus on something safe like going to Paris or Disneyworld or Hawaii instead of my 3rd grade dream of Antarctica? I’ll offer to go without you since you don’t seem to like the idea. (He went, we had such a wonderful time, he doesn’t remember fighting the idea.)
• Declare in a meeting with the CEO that the entire project team should be fired because they lied to you about the progress of the project? Point out that they had told you about the blockers; and, when you didn’t take action, that they told me about the blockers and I pointed them out to you and you refused to do anything about them.
• Tell me that I can’t retain my title despite my demotion like every man who the company has ever demoted? I’ll tell you I’m not going to set the precedent, take the 6-figure buy-out that my idiot new boss wasn’t supposed to offer me, and ride into the sunset.

Brave? I’ve never thought about myself as Brave. But there have been moments where I’ve been so pissed off that I spoke the truth.

Second, I think of this woman as incredibly Brave

I’ve known this woman since we were children and she is incredibly Brave.

• She spent two years abroad in high-school and college, in countries where English wasn’t even a second language – and a third after graduating college.
• She moved to LA to seek out a career as a screenwriter, something she had always dreamed about but had no training or experience in. When it didn’t work out, she saw it as a failure. But pursuing your dream – whether it works out or not – requires an amazing amount of courage.
• She works in a public high school – a place where kids experience stress at incredible levels owing to social pressures, hormonal influx, media manipulation and disillusionment of suddenly recognizing the imperfection of adults – and in a place and time where they have unprecedented access to guns.
• She gave birth to and raised two kids while her husband pursued his dream job, putting them squarely in the working poor category, often leveraging public assistance to get their kids milk. Why didn’t she get a job to contribute? Because childcare cost more than she’d earn working. She had to wait until the kids were old enough to be latch-key on their own.
• When someone reported (luckily inaccurately) that one of her children had been abused by an older child, she sat down with her child and questioned them gently but directly to get to the bottom of things.
• When her mother became unable to care for herself, she took on caregiving in addition to a F/T job, a union position, and caring for two teens. For two years, she cooked dinner at home, threw it and her family into a car, drove to mom’s, ate dinner with her, cleaned up – while her family went home – and waited until mom had fallen asleep before heading home herself.

These are situations that many of us can’t imagine facing. Situations that require deep reserves of courage just to get through them.

And she calls me Brave. Brave is in the eye of the beholder.

Courage is a decision

I was listening to an interview with Margie Warrell, a courage strategist, author of The Courage Gap, and host of the Live Brave podcast. She talked about how many of us think about courage as an emotion – a feeling that we have that causes us to take action. But, she points out, that’s actually backwards. Thinking of it as a feeling that comes first causes us to wait for the feeling to come before taking action.

Courage actually comes as a decision to move forward despite everything blocking you – especially if you don’t Feel brave – and that causes the feeling to come afterwards.

She also suggests that you can’t just summon courage when you need it – you have to build your courage muscle like you build a physical muscle, so that it’s there when you need it.

And then she pointed out that courage is bigger when you are in community. Having empathetic conversations with others about the things that worry, concern, and frighten them makes it easier for us to be Brave on their behalf.

So if your Inner Tiger is feeling damp and daunted, find a group of people to hang out with – or create one – and practice listening about their fears and dreams. Your inner courage to help them will return.

Mine has.