From Courageous to Flourishing by Bonnie Baty

The past few years I have stepped away from making resolutions, instead, opting to choose a focus word for the year. For 2022 that word was ‘Courage’.

I chose courage because I was left facing a completely new journey after choosing to leave my industry of employment due to new regulatory mandates that were introduced at the time.

I was presented with a hard-line choice, and I chose to let go of the comfort and safety of what I had come to know and lean on for my whole adult life. It was a choice that came with a feast of mixed emotions, frustrations, struggles and hardships in one aspect, and freedom, liberation, and self-belief in another.

I had not realised until taking the time to sit and pen this article, the depth of those emotions because right now, there are a flood of tears streaming down my face as I sit and write, and all I can do is allow them to flow freely. Wow! This is such a powerful feeling to be with and it’s so very healing.

I worked through so much grief in the past year but hadn’t taken the time to sit and process what has arisen as deep anger and resentment of that hard-line choice and what I had left behind in my colleagues, clients, and their families. People who held a very special space in my heart that up until now all contact has been severed and that realisation is where those deeper emotions have lain dormant. As I raise them to the surface, I can only feel a humbling sense of gratitude for their role in my journey and know the reason they were there.

I quite often would say to my colleagues that I was not going to be in the role much longer as I was going to work for me and get my own business up and running. That story became an ongoing narrative through the years, and I never actually made the effort to completely action it. The comfort of a good and consistent income always overrode my decisions.

That’s where the word ‘courage’ came in and made me grateful for that hard-line choice, for if it had not presented itself, I would still be repeating that same narrative and not living my heart’s desires.

Through courage came the willingness to confront the fear and uncertainty of creating a whole new narrative and one that I could become the master of. Institutions of any sort, (my prior workplace included) always had me feeling stifled and suffocated and I yearned for freedom, the freedom to be and do me on all levels.

I leaned in, ‘felt the fear and done it’ anyway. I would effectively choose it over and over again.

The root word of courage is cor which is the Latin word for heart, and I can ultimately say that by choosing the unknown and leaning into courage in my decision-making processes, that I am now living from the heart-space as opposed to allowing myself to be driven by the headspace and what is logical, rational, and safe. It’s like I forgot about the magic of imagining, dreaming and be-ing.

There is a quote I came across after choosing the word courage and that is:

‘The secret of happiness is freedom; the secret of freedom is courage’ – Carrie Jones.

Thank you, ‘courage’, for all that you were for me on so many levels in 2022, you were always by my side and having the knowing that it always works out, you supported me time and time again to keep pushing through the fears, barriers and stories into a new way of life, one that has me at the helm.

I am eternally grateful and now that 2022 has come to a close and 2023 has dawned upon us, I choose a new word.

That word is ‘Flourish’.

I look forward to sharing its story in time to come x

Bonnie has recently launched her gorgeous Wairua Intuitive Guidance Cards. And to find out more and purchase them please visit: www.bonniebaty.com and https://www.facebook.com/bonniebatycreatrix