Fridays are for courage lessons from my itty bitty puppy pack.
Our past, our traumas, losses, tragedies, and hardships do leave marks on who we are. And yet we get to choose how much, how deep, how long those marks define us. We get to choose whether they write our story for us or whether we reclaim and rewrite it.
These guys spent the first four months of their lives going to the bathroom wherever they wanted, never willingly going to a human, instead being chased down and snatched from their hiding places. To say those four months left a mark is an understatement.
We’ve spent nearly six weeks building trust, training, building more trust, taking steps forward, and having frustrating steps back. And we keep going because we love them and they deserve to be happy and healthy.
We can’t change where we’ve come from or what we’ve been through. We can change how we move forward. We can choose to heal.
Perhaps you flinch when someone says, “Help me understand.”
Maybe your heart starts to race when your leader asks to meet.
Maybe you feel so overwhelmed by the tension building from all the unspoken things on your team that it feels easier to make up stories in your head, even though those stories leave you feeling awful and erode trust with others.
This is what the courage work is about.
Refusing to live and lead from our hurts and harms.
Choosing to do the work to heal.
Take the lesson from Nick and Schmidt: let people help and love you and do the work.