The Courage to Start
Sermon: October 18, 2026 . Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Dieguito
Most of what I learned about spiritual growth I learned from my college singing teacher. Not only did she teach me how to pronounce French opera lyrics and sing with a beautiful tone, but she taught me how to process physical and emotional responses to stress, fear, anxiety, and pain, how to prepare for the future and simultaneously exist in different mental places in time, how to be gracious and patient, how to maintain a calm exterior during stressful moments, and relative to today’s topic, how to have the courage to start.
I was a procrastinator. I put things off because of the expectations I held of the immense amount of effort it would take to complete something. And so, my freshman year in college, when I began taking voice lessons from retired opera diva Rachel Kessler, I would find myself in her living room every week, standing beside her grand piano, having barely practiced during the six days since my last lesson. And she could tell. When she asked me why I wasn’t practicing, I shared with her that I never have an hour I can fully invest in the task. I didn’t tell her that it’s really tiring and overwhelming and frustrating because, as we all know, practicing is hard work.
She said, “An hour?! You shouldn’t be spending more than 10 minutes a day.”
Now, any other music teacher would have balked at these words. What can you possibly get done in 10 minutes? The fact that practicing took me an hour and that my voice was ragged and tired afterwards was why I struggled to break the inertia of starting to practice in the first place. It’s why I didn’t sing all week long and then spent over an hour the day before my lesson overworking my voice and trying to accomplish what I had neglected to do during the week, to little success.
That day, in the fall of 1994, Rachel made me promise that for the following week I wouldn’t allow myself to sing for more than 10 minutes each day, even if I wanted to continue after the 10 minutes ended. I had to force myself to stop and walk away.
I left her house with this new assignment and wanted to try it out immediately. What would it feel like to only sing for 10 minutes and stop? Every day during that next week, I set my timer and sang for 10 minutes. It was easy. When I was having what I called a “good voice day,” the 10 minutes flew by. When I wasn’t, the 10 minutes ended before I had gotten frustrated enough to give up my music major and become a math teacher. When I returned to Rachel’s house the next week and began the warm up exercises, she said, “Ah, you’ve practiced.”
That lesson has stuck with me all these years and I’ve now internalized the understanding that my own personal struggle with starting lay in my expectation that reaching the ultimate goal would be difficult and unpleasant. However, when the expectation became process oriented and not product oriented, when I focused on the actual practice and not whether I could perform the song perfectly before I walked away from the piano, only then could I start.
I was caught in what psychologists now refer to as the perfectionism procrastination loop that ends in paralysis, or “the 3 P’s,” and it happens when our brains believe that the expectations of the goal are too great, and so the task becomes too difficult to start, the mountain too high to climb.
In these instances, we have to find the courage to challenge our internal belief structures. “I believe it will take too long to learn that skill… I believe I’m not talented enough to pull that off… I believe people will ridicule me if I try that.” Those beliefs, whether rooted in truth or not, create fear and anxiety, and it takes courage to overcome them.
Being guaranteed a good ending is the insurance policy we all desire before we start, but the journey rarely has a clear goal at the end, and even if the goal is clear, the path to that goal isn’t. It takes a certain level of trust and faith that if you start walking, the journey will sort itself out. Rumi said, “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” But how to muster the courage to take that first step?
Cynthia Young at the Sacred Wellness Institute says that although we want to wait until we feel “ready,” “readiness comes through action. She says that “stepping out in faith activates a chain reaction - momentum builds, confidence grows, and doors begin to open that we never anticipated.” It can seem like a bold move, to take a leap of faith, but if you look back on any leaps of faith you’ve taken in the past, how many of them ended in dismal failure? Probably pretty few. And even if they did, what did you learn from that experience? Something valuable? Something you needed to learn?
When I taught high schoolers, I had many who wanted to grow up to be on Broadway. It’s a performer’s dream and so many students would ask me if I thought they were talented enough to make it. My answer was always yes and no. Thousands and thousands of extremely talented performers don’t end up on Broadway. Some mediocre performers do, because of luck or connections or sheer stick-to-it-tiveness. However, if that’s the path you want to walk, then start walking it. You may find that ten years from now you’re not performing on Broadway, but you’re the best stage manager the Detroit Opera House has ever seen. You never know where your path might lead. Many of us have experienced walking with a dream in the distance and over time that dream changes, it morphs, and you end up walking toward a different dream that fulfills you, makes you happy, and is even better than what you thought you wanted. Where we end up is rarely where we think we are headed. That’s how life goes. So, why are we putting so much stock in whether our end goal is achievable or not before we start?
One of my past students, whose dream was to be on Broadway, made it. After being in the touring cast of Book of Mormon for two years, he was moved into the Broadway cast and was in the show until Covid shut it down. During the down time, he made sourdough bread like the rest of us, and when Broadway came calling again, he paused and then turned them down. When I asked why he said, “It was different than I expected… and I don’t really like living in New York.” He said he’d rather live in LA and sing as as one of the barbershop quartet Dapper Dans at Disneyland, which is what he did. He needed one kind of courage to believe in himself strongly enough to get to Broadway, and it was a different kind of courage he had to muster to turn down a Broadway contract and begin walking a new path while people thought he had lost his mind. Who walks away from Broadway? (Someone with a strong understanding of themself and their values.)
I invite you to think back to the practice or the project or the new beginning I asked you to imagine earlier in the service. What’s keeping you from taking that first step forward?
Fear of failure?
Fear of ridicule or not being understood?
Lack of confidence?
Lack of time or energy?
Each of these can play a role in limiting our movement forward. When fear is involved, we may even use some of these as excuses for why we don’t do it. “I’d like to learn to dance, but I don’t have time.” In reality, your inner monologue might actually be, “I’d like to learn to dance, but I’m worried I’ll be no good at it.” When you find yourself in a situation where fear has kept you from moving forward, you have to find the thing that will help break the inertia. As Author Ray N. Kuili says, “Because no matter what they say, you always have a choice. You just don’t always have the guts to make it.”
So, how do we get the guts? Some options include:
Ask yourself why you want to start. What is your purpose? How strongly do you feel about this purpose? Strong enough to take a first step?
Can you take just one single step? You don’t have to walk all the way to your goal right now. Are you able to take just one step to break inertia and begin to create momentum?
Do you have any support structures, any friends or teachers, who might cheer you on? Have you set yourself up for success by surrounding yourself with people who believe in you?
Do you understand that you WILL fail? Probably not completely or in the end, but you’ll trip along the path, and each time you’ll learn something new. Expect and accept this.
Are you ready to start practicing courage? For some reason, we seem to think that we don’t have to practice it, that it will be there when we need it most, but like most uncomfortable emotions, you have to spend time in the discomfort until its edges can soften around you, like shoes that you need to break in. If you always stay in your comfort zone, your discomfort zone never has a chance to loosen around you. Practicing courage in small amounts, will help you gain confidence in Courage itself. Before long you’ll be more comfortable with taking that forward step. Dr. Margie Warrell, author of the book The Courage Gap, says “Courage is like a muscle, the more we use it, the more courageous we become.”
Courage is not blindly running forward without proper discernment of the situation. It is discerning what needs to be done, what you’d like to do, what you think is the right thing to do, then while feeling resistance to move forward because of fear or concern, choosing to move forward anyway. And this is a relative concept. The most courageous person in the room is the person who steps forward first, before the others. They may not feel courageous at all, but they have determined that in that moment they value action over fear, even if fear may still be very present. They’re just doing it scared.
Some of our most notable leaders had thoughts on courage. Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” Robert A Heinlein said, “Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous.” And Winston Churchill, the man many described as exuding hardiness and personal grit, said, “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
Courage comes in all forms and exists in all people. Sometimes the most courageous people aren’t heroes, famous leaders, or those decorated for bravery. Sometimes they are normal, everyday citizens. Susan Cain, author of the book Quiet Power recommends finding a courageous role model, someone you can admire and aspire to be like. If you can’t think of someone, she recommends Miep Gies. That’s a name you might not know. Miep is quoted as saying the following: “I don’t want to be considered a hero. Imagine [if] young people grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary.” Those are humble words for the woman who sheltered Anne Frank in her attic for two years.
But Miep Gies isn’t wrong. Courage can spring forth from even the most frightened doubter when there is a purpose worthy of taking a step forward. I’m quite certain that in 1940, if someone had asked Miep whether she had the courage to hide Jews in her home, she would have questioned her courage, but two years later, she found she did have that courage. I think many of us believe we lack courage, but we can surprise ourselves. Often, when we dip our toes into courageous waters, we find the temperature isn’t as cold as we thought. And although we may protest that we don’t have the courage to begin, we very often do, we just don’t know it yet.
May you find the courage to start. And when you fail, may you find the courage to start again, and again, and again, until starting becomes second nature and courage becomes your constant companion. And when you get to a bend in the road and halt, wondering what’s around the next corner, may Courage take you by the hand and gently nudge you forward, guiding you with the wisdom and strength of an old friend.
May it be so.
OTHER READINGS FOR REFLECTION:
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected female head of state in Africa and president of Liberia from 2006 to 2018:
“If your dreams don’t scare you, they’re not big enough.”
I cannot say
where it lives,
only that it comes
to the heart
that is open,
to the heart
that asks,
to the heart
that does not turn away.
It can take practice,
days of tugging at
what keeps us bound,
seasons of pushing against
what keeps our dreaming
small.
When it arrives,
it might surprise you
by how quiet it is,
how it moves
with such grace
for possessing
such power.
But you will know it
by the strength
that rises from within you
to meet it,
by the release
of the knot
in the center of
your chest
that suddenly lets go.
You will recognize it
by how still
your fear becomes
as it loosens its grip,
perhaps never quite
leaving you,
but calmly turning
into joy
as you enter the life
that is finally
your own.
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