Many people live with an unnoticed pattern. They wait for reasons, certainty, or permission before acting, assuming that careful thinking must precede expression. On the surface, this appears responsible or rational. Beneath it lies a quieter dynamic. Authority over action is handed to explanations, and self-leadership is gradually replaced by justification. Over time, this shapes how people relate to their work, their voice, and their lives. Ideas remain unspoken, expression becomes conditional, and resignation begins to feel like realism.
This article examines that pattern through the lens of writing. What began as a simple question, “Why don’t you write?”, revealed something more fundamental about authorship and courage. Rather than negotiating endlessly with reasons, the inquiry explores what happens when expression is allowed to precede explanation, and when permission is reclaimed from within. The intention is not to motivate or persuade, but to clarify how courage functions as the gateway to aligned action, and how listening to oneself restores the relationship between being and doing.
Why Don’t You Write?
It’s a question I’ve been asked before, and one I’ve been asked again recently. I’ve written articles in the past, usually about whatever I was grappling with in my own life at the time. That has always been my way in. Even when I was a seminar leader, my life wasn’t separate from the work; it was a live, in-the-moment laboratory for what I was exploring.
So when I was asked to write, what surprised me wasn’t the suggestion itself. It was what immediately arose in response.
A list of reasons why not.
In that moment, I saw the real issue.
When Reasons Become the Authority
The moment you require a reason to act or do anything, the reason becomes the authority, and self-abandonment follows behind.
Here’s the problem with reasons: they are unstable, socially conditioned, context-dependent, and endlessly arguable. They shift with mood, circumstance, and opinion. When the reason weakens, disappears, or is challenged, whatever was built on it collapses, a house of cards held together by justification.
That collapse doesn’t happen because the action was wrong. It happens because authorship was outsourced.
This is where people sidestep self-leadership. Authority is handed over to explanation rather than claimed from within. Permission is sought, often dressed up as logic.
I want to be clear here. I am a fan of logic. I wish it were taught properly in schools.
Logic serves truth. Courage initiates action.
Without courage, logic becomes a refuge.
Reasons are not meaningless, but they are provisional. They are the stories we tell after the impulse, often retrofitted explanations to make what already wants to express itself feel acceptable. If self-expression and the expression of our unique being is part of why we’re here, then waiting for reasons is backwards.
Expression precedes explanation.
Being precedes justification.
Courage Is Acting Without Permission
I sat with the idea of writing and let it move through me, rather than trying to reason my way into it or through it. What became clear was simple: I do have something to say, and this is a platform to say it.
That realisation didn’t arrive with certainty or confidence. It arrived with courage.
Courage, as Aristotle understood it, is not bravado or force. It is the capacity to act in the presence of fear, not once, but again and again. Courage is the gateway virtue, which is why it is central to The Courage Framework. Without it, awareness remains theoretical, authenticity remains aspirational, and responsibility is endlessly deferred.
It takes courage to stop negotiating with your reasons and start listening to yourself.
Once that inner directive is heard, the choice becomes clear: honour it, or don’t. Funny how quiet the mind becomes when the decision is made and aligned action follows.
Resignation Is the Quiet Killer
What I see in the world is not a lack of intelligence or goodwill. Most people are doing the best they can with what they have available to them. What I also see is a growing number of people surviving their lives.
Henry David Thoreau named this almost two centuries ago when he observed that people live lives of quiet desperation. He wasn’t pointing to drama or despair, rather to underscore something far more common: people conforming, enduring, justifying, and surviving rather than authoring their lives. Resignation mistaken for realism. Routine mistaken for necessity.
This is how it plays out.
They stop expecting alignment.
They swap intention for acceptance.
They convince themselves it’s too late, too hard, or too risky.
They buy into their own stories.
Over time, these stories harden into cynicism, a protective posture that looks like maturity but feels like contraction.
From an ontological perspective, resignation is not a personality trait. It’s a Way of Being, and like all Ways of Being, it produces predictable outcomes.
Ashkan Tashvir’s work on Being makes this explicit. Our behaviours, decisions, and results are not driven by surface-level intention, but by the underlying quality of how we are Being. When that Way of Being is resigned or avoidant, contraction reliably follows in action, opportunity, and life.
We buy into stories of powerlessness.
We go along to get along.
We stop challenging the shape of our lives.
Rarely do we look at the one person we have the most influence over.
Ourselves.
At what cost?
Speaking Up and the Cost of Self-Abandonment
I’ve seen this pattern clearly in my work with women, especially women who struggle to speak up, express their ideas, speak their truth, and shape the environments they move through. When they do muster the courage, it is often with hesitation, trepidation, and restraint. Part of this comes from the repeated experience of not being heard.
I don’t say that lightly.
When your ideas are dismissed, spoken over, overlooked, or attributed to someone else, it’s not just career-limiting. It’s soul-eroding. Over time, people adapt. They soften their edges. They modify their delivery. Eventually, they stop offering ideas altogether.
The internal dialogue is familiar.
They won’t listen anyway.
Why bother?
Before anyone else shuts them down, they do it themselves. That is the real cost to the individual. Not rejection, but self-abandonment. The cost to society is harder to measure, but no less real.
Permission Is an Inside Job
Here’s the irony.
If you want to be listened to, the first person you must listen to is yourself. This is where self-trust lives. Without self-trust, courage has nowhere to stand.
If you don’t believe you are worth listening to, no one else will either. Not because they are cruel, but because confidence is ontological. It is communicated long before words arrive. Who you are being speaks louder.
Speaking up may feel uncomfortable. Your voice may shake. You may not feel ready.
That doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It means you’re reclaiming authorship.
Speak anyway.
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the refusal to let fear make the decision.
No More Square Pegs in Round Holes
If there were one thing I could change in the world, it would be this: no more square pegs in round holes. Let people be who they were born to be. Let them celebrate their unique being and let it be celebrated. What a different world that would be!
This is the essence of diversity.
I don’t mean diversity in the performative or politically correct sense. I mean the kind of diversity nature relies on, difference as strength, not inconvenience. Ecosystems thrive because of variation, not despite it.
Human systems are no different. They require courage, the courage to stop contorting ourselves to fit shapes that were never designed for us, and the courage to stop demanding that others do the same.
Choosing to Speak
Which brings me back to writing.
This article is me giving myself permission to speak.
Not because I have the perfect reason.
Not because I know exactly how it will be received.
Not because every doubt has been resolved.
But because something wants to be expressed.
Living from that place, rather than from resignation, cynicism, or justification, is what courage looks like in practice.
That is the work.
Today, I’m in the arena.
References
Thoreau, H.D., 2004. Walden; or, Life in the woods. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1854).
Tashvir, A., 2022. Human being: A guide to the being framework™. [self-published] Ashkan Tashvir.