Reflections on Change and Courage                                  by Helen Selenati

What is it to find oneself in the storm of profound personal change? What is it to feel one’s center and one’s world shifting irresistibly and irrevocably?  Genuine change involves every aspect of a person’s being. In moments of intense transformation, we find ourselves released into our larger possibilities. These are amazing experiences – some of the greatest moments of our lives. However, real change also has a darker, more foreboding side. Deep level change can carry us beyond our furthest horizons and into the strangeness of the unknown. This is why genuine change calls for genuine courage.

Contrary to popular belief, courage is far more than the absence of fear. To have courage is to feel fear in the face of imminent danger, but to remain able to move ahead despite one’s fear. In short, there is no courage without fear. Courage is exactly that quality of heart that lets us face the risk that real change entails. The fact that change is often unsettling is hardly a good reason to avoid it. The fearful side of change simply becomes part of what makes it so worthwhile in the first place. In those disquieting moments of change, life is daring us to grow in spite of our fearful reasons not to: life is challenging us to recreate our own lives with more courage and more heart.

Personal growth is a creative event in which a new way of being emerges. It involves the creation of a better, more artful life.  Creative change requires the discovery of new possibilities as well as enlarging the sphere of possibilities. In moments of deep change, what was formerly impossible become possible and even actual.

Helen Selenati is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Coach. She has a private practice in Redwood City and can be reached at helen@selenati.com or by calling 650-596-0807. Also visit www.selenati.com