No time to read? Listen here:
If you had to name a thing you can do with absolute confidence, what would it be?
Maybe you can bake the perfect cake, coax a garden into bloom, patch a wall like a pro, or change a flat tire without breaking a sweat. Whatever it is, chances are your confidence comes from having done it dozens, maybe even hundreds of times. That’s the power of experience. Repetition and consistency build confidence — not just in a skill, but in ourselves, in our ability to learn and improve and rise to meet challenges.
Each time we practice a skill, we’re calibrating an internal compass, learning what works, what doesn’t, and which direction is forward for us.
Through the fire
The same is true for the tough times we encounter along the Beautiful Road. Once we’ve walked through fire a few times, the next rough patch doesn’t scare us the same way. It’s not that crises get easier, but somewhere deep inside, we remember that we’ve been here before. Maybe not this exact challenge, but something hard. Something that felt impossible at the time. And yet we’re still standing and definitely stronger for the experience. Every hard thing we survive becomes another calibration of our compass.
We also earn something we can’t necessarily name but definitely feel. Resilience, maybe. Or faith in ourselves. Or just the personal knowledge that we’re more capable than we thought. Whatever it is, it stays with us, an inner guidance system we carry everywhere.
So when the next unfamiliar (bumpy, scary, never-before-traveled) stretch of the Beautiful Road appears? We meet it with courage instead of fear, because our compass tells us: we’ve covered uncertain terrain before.
Personal True North
In navigation, True North is a fixed point — the actual North Pole, unchanging and reliable.
There’s also a personal True North. It’s who we really are. It’s our authentic self, core values, the causes and people who genuinely matter to us. It’s the choices that feel right deep in our bones. The path that, even when it’s hard, feels honest.
And here’s what experience teaches us: every time we face something difficult and come through it, we learn a little more about our personal True North. Each challenge strips away what doesn’t matter and shows us what does. Every hard-won lesson points us more surely toward who we really are and what we’re genuinely capable of.
Even (especially?) our toughest experiences are useful in this way. They’re no longer just things that happened to us, but beautiful and important events and circumstances that taught us something incredibly valuable for the road ahead.
The pain was real
Beautiful someone, it’s not that the pain wasn’t real—it was. But we refused to let pain be the only thing we took away from the experience. Instead we found wisdom and with it resilience and the confidence to say:
I’ve got my compass.
Bring. It. On.
Dig deeper:
Braving It: The gentle art of living boldly
You, Beautiful: Getting gorgeous from the inside out
#TrueNorth #InnerCompass #BeautifulSomeone #WisdomFromExperience #PersonalGrowth #Resilience #CourageOverFear #TheBeautifulRoad