Safety and Courage
Safety and courage are two very important concepts. In our last Community exclusive blogpost, we explored courage as a choice. Now, we want to look at how a sense of safety may be a necessary component to being able to choose courage, particularly in very personal scenarios, like disclosing your deepest pain in order to receive support.
According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, safety is one of our most basic needs, second only to physiological needs like food and shelter. Our need for safety incorporates things like financial security and psychological safety, which describes not feeling like you will be punished for speaking up with questions or concerns, similar to how a physical sense of safety is feeling like you are unlikely to be harmed. Particularly in the psychological sense, safety requires trust, which can take time to build.
Courage often requires vulnerability, and vulnerability requires exposure in the sense that we need to share of ourselves. The more personal and/or raw the share, the more vulnerable, exposing and courageous it is. In order to allow ourselves to be that open, to expose the personal and raw, we need two things- to take care of ourselves, and to feel a sense of safety. Safety, like trust, can take time to build. So not only does courage require safety, it also means self care, especially after a moment of courage, is important.
Further Resources:
Previous Illuminating Insights blog posts on Choosing Courage (Subscriber Community Exclusive) and Vulnerability & Vulnerability Hangovers