What does it look like to be brave?

“I now see that owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we will ever do.” Brene Brown 

Be Brave – original painting, fine art print, and note cards are available in my shop 

I want you to think back to a time when you felt truly brave.

What were you doing? Were you showing your creative work to strangers, or starting a new job? Perhaps you needed to be brave for someone else, a sick family member or a friend going through a tough time in her life.

When I set out to create the painting Be Brave, I wanted to honor the fact that bravery is not limited to the stories we hear, the big and impressive acts of heroism. We are asked to be brave every day, when a child is sick or we have to perform at work. When we must take a risk to get where we want to go. Difficult conversations, meeting new people. Accepting love.

Be Brave detail

It only made sense that to create a painting about bravery, I needed to be brave with my technique. As you can likely see by now, I love to play with different types of landscapes in my paintings. I love oceans and hills and tall flowers. I love a bright sun against a multicolored sky.

Being brave meant trying a new perspective, letting go of my usual anchor (a strip of land, the surface of the ocean) for a groundless expanse of evening sky. Bravery meant using colors in new ways, dabbing in green and purple and bronze and gray and yellow-orange, by drawing a tree rising through the scene that did not begin and end within the confines of the painting. Instead, the branches move into view as if they are in the middle of a journey, the majority of the tree hidden from our view.

This painting is special to me, because I’ve so needed to be brave over the past year. If you’re anything like me, you have journals filled with entries saying I know I need to try new things, but I don’t know what to try.  Years can pass this way. They did for me.

Ultimately, this is what I love about bravery. Most of your journey may indeed be hidden from view, the decisions you make moment to moment unknown by your loved ones. However, when you do decide to move forward and try new things, even if years have passed, bravery kicks in to see you through. This has been the case for me, as I learn more each day about how to trust my instincts and keep moving forward with my goals.

This is your reminder, friends: what you do each day, those tiny decisions and choices and actions that make up the course of your day,  are little acts of bravery. You are brave when you care for others, doing the best you can. You are brave when you take another hesitant step towards a goal, or when you allow yourself to be vulnerable and open to change.

Whenever I need a reminder to shift my perspective, I look back on this painting and ask myself: can I trust myself to be brave? These days the answer is thankfully, excitingly, yes. 

Can you? I’d love to hear about a time when you practiced being brave. Let me know in the comments below.

xo,