Try to change your relationship to your fears. Don’t banish them. Don’t fight them. Don’t turn and face them down. Instead, see whether you can learn to honor your fears—which means listening to them, being curious about them, and admiring them as part of the real you. Do this—gently, generously, kindly—and they will show you what you truly love.

On your journey, you’re told to dismiss your fears, to confront your fears, to step outside of your comfort zone. Yet this is all so misleading. Your big choice in life is not “comfort or no comfort.” It is “love or no love.” When you step into things you love, you will feel fear. That’s not just OK, it’s fundamental. So fundamental, in fact, that if you’re doing something and you feel no fear, then you’ve lost your love.

So, take the path of fear, because the path of fear is the path of love.

The vulnerable child in each of us gets caught between the urge to be himself and the fear that doing so will bring shame and humiliation. The temptation to stay unseen (and, thus, safe) is strong.

For many, that place where we’ve come to think we belong has become stultifying; it’s where we are small, unseen, unsure, and unwilling to claim our strengths, our capacities, our courage, our leadership. We are frozen by the belief that it’s just too dangerous to reach into the black bag and grab hold of the disowned, dismembered parts of ourselves.

All Loyal Soldiers then have one basic task: to keep us safe from the wars that raged in our childhood. No matter how awful these strategies have come to make us feel as adults, they were brilliant in their own ways.

It’s one of the great ironies of life—and the subject of millions of songs, films, and great works of literature—that the people who make us feel the most alive and who know us best are also the people able to hurt us most. This doesn’t mean that the people who hurt us are malicious, or that we are acting maliciously when we hurt others. Sometimes there is no fault. As we travel on our own unique paths, we can hurt each other without intending

to.

This is the conundrum we find ourselves in as human beings, and how we deal with challenges often defines the course of our lives. Do we face the music? Or do we bury our heads in the sand?

Courage, the saying goes, is not the absence of fear but the ability to act in the presence of fear. Katherine Graham lived and led with fear and anxiety that would never fully abate, no matter how successful, or powerful, or famous, or wealthy she might be or become. Warren Buffett described her as marching forward with knocking knees. Ben Bradlee related that she talked about worrying awake at night, “picking the wool off the blankets.” She paid a hefty Stress and Drudgery Tax, not just in leading through dramatic episodes, but also in shouldering the more routine duties of effective leadership such as giving speeches. Even the prospect of making remarks at the staff holiday party would loom for days or weeks ahead of time, filling her with dread. Graham herself copiously conveyed her inner turmoil; I quick count across her memoir yielded some permutation of words of fear or anxiety (for example, “dread,” “terrified,” “anxious,” “worried,” “fretted,” “frightened,” “nervous,” “anguish”) 289 times in reference to herself.