40 Things That Are Brave To Do

This list goes well with a couple of other fear and bravery lists I've written before. Check out 25 Things of Which I Am Afraid and 25 Things That Make Me Feel Brave.

the Palinode over lunch

1. Stand alone in front of people and sing, act, be funny, or deliver a talk


2. Have a dissenting opinion and voice it


3. Share your smallest, everyday fears


4. Ask for help


5. Go to the dentist


6. Quit a comfortable job


7. Have faith in something


8. Tell someone you love them


9. Stand up for someone else


10. Defend the rights of someone you dislike


11. Face a review of your work


12. Risk your own life to save another


13. Be ordinary


14. Stop talking and listen


15. Eat unfamiliar food


16. Tell people what you are good at


17. Forgive someone...


18. ...and, even more difficult, forgive yourself


19. Admit when you are wrong


20. Walk away from something that hurts you


21. Parent a child


22. Feel afraid but take the next step anyway


23. Move to a new city


24. Confront the person who has hurt you the most


25. Ask for what you want


26. Give up something you love


27. Volunteer to help people in hard situations such as palliative care or homeless shelters


28. Get married


29. Go out by yourself in public


30. Audition


31. Learn to live through, and sometimes beyond, grief


32. Come out of the closet


33. Spend time on a nudist colony


34. Accept criticism without shooting the messenger


35. Set out your boundaries and be firm about them


36. Let go of anger and resentment


37. Admit that you don't know how to do something


38. Cry


39. Be satisfied with what you have


40. Live mindfully

I need to acknowledge that this list has about a hundred co-authors, because after I'd worked on it for a while, I asked the fine people of Twitter what they had to add, and they had a lot to say.

And you? What do you think are brave things to do?

25 Things That Make Me Feel Brave

This is a companion list to "25 Things of Which I Am Afraid".

1. I feel brave when I put on my shoe without thoroughly shaking it out to see if there's a critter in their who will eat my toes.
2. I feel brave when I tell someone straight up that I will not be treated in a certain way.
3. I feel brave when I stand up and don't let people tell what I am or am not.
4. I feel brave when I confess to someone that I need their help.
5. I feel brave when I face the deep winter with my seasonal depression and make it through with less battle wounds than the year before.
6. I feel brave when I hold someone's hand so that we can feel the weight of their pain together.
7. I feel brave when I tell someone how much they mean to me.
8. I feel brave when I own up to doing something I'm not proud of rather than cover it up.
9. I feel brave when I use the toaster and don't have to go through my ritual of unplugging it and using plastic tongs.
10. I feel brave when I remain open to another's religious belief even though I am still dealing with the pain the religious beliefs of others created in my life as a child.
11. I feel brave when I accomplish something now that an earlier version of me never thought I could.
12. I feel brave when I think about 2007, which let the Palinode and I know that neither broken backs nor cancer, even when found together in the same marriage, cannot sink us.
13. I feel brave when I love without reserve.
14. I feel brave when I look back and realize that I haven't smoked for just over two years now.
15. I feel brave when I stand my ground about not wanting children.
16. I feel brave when I manage to pull back from the irrational fear that my cats will set out to consciously hurt me.
17. I feel brave when I go to blogging conferences, because I am naturally shy.
18. I feel brave when I stand up to say something in front of a group of people and don't whither in a dead faint.
19. I feel brave when, on a particularly difficult evening, I don't drink.
20. I feel brave when I actually enjoy hanging out with a baby, because, although I like babies, I am certainly not used to them.
21. I feel brave when I write something powerful about my personal history.
22. I feel brave when old friends find me on Facebook, and I let them in to see who I am now.
23. I feel brave when I walk to work through -40° weather.
24. I feel brave when I talk to people whom I greatly admire.
25. I feel brave when I help someone else to be brave in the face of what they fear.

Me at Aiming Low: Taking Bravery Back

"Taking Bravery Back":

Bravery is not just for children as they learn how to become greater people and for heroes only in the most extreme situations. Bravery is for us. It’s our courage that makes us greater people.