Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Those are some of the words from the beautifully optimistic children’s book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there? Hope yis are all well.

This is Episode 13 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I talked about myths and lies, and today I want to talk about courage, trolls and human walls.

One way of looking at it would be to say: We have to start thinking from our heart mind not our crotch mind. Thoughts of other bodies, entering them, touching them etc. is the mind of our crotch. Thoughts of compassion, kindness and oneness come from our heart mind. And we have to the courage to create from our heart mind, from compassion and kindness for others, not condemnation and troll-like behavior.

Courage itself literally means “heart”, from the old French word for heart “cuer”. So, it means to have heart. To have the heart to do something. To create, you have to be courageous, true to yourself. The existential psychologist Rolo May wrote a whole book about this very idea, The Courage to Create. As many mystics and indigenous people would say, the heart is what we’re forgetting. We’re forgetting that the heart has a mind of its own, apart from the mind in our heads or crotches. Institutes like HeartMath actually study it.

Courage not to be blinded by the billboards to what is really important. The billboards only appeal to our base, instinctual drives, the crotch mind.

Survival is a creative act. People survive wars, famines. Diasporas are so creative because of their courage to survive. Instead of being passive, giving up, they keep going, find the heart to create a better life.

Courage is a virtue, to be bold. We all have something profound and wonderful to give to the world. Be audacious about it. See it, whatever you’re creating, as something that’s going to be great. It’s not a question of whether it deserves to get out there, but that it needs to get out there. That’s courage. Others will say you’re being delusional, and that’s fine, because that’s what you have to do to become what I called in episode 8, Black Sheep. You allow and en-courage yourself to be joyful about what you’re creating.

I particularly like a line that Tina Fey used in her acceptance speech for the Best Actress Emmy in 2008. In her list of thanks she said:

I’d like to thank my parents for giving me confidence that is disproportionate to my looks and abilities. That is what all parents should do.

That’s where courage can come from, from being en – courage.

Which brings us to how we pay courage forward. Who cares what others expect of you? When you’re criticized by trolls – those nasty hidden social media ones or the ones in plain view – you have to accept it and allow it to make you stronger, because it’s not about what happens to us that’s important, it’s about how we adapt to it, our attitude to criticism and setbacks.