I watched my 4-year-old ignore me for 10 minutes straight. It was the best lesson on courage I've ever received.
We didn't lose our courage. We lost the space to feel it.
Someone asked me how to develop the courage to follow your own path.
I thought it would be easy to answer. I was wrong.
The question sent me spiraling—not forward into advice, but backward into something more unsettling. Watching my four-year-old, I realized we've been asking the wrong question entirely.
The Space to Feel What's Yours
He was doing his thing the other day. Building something elaborate with blocks, completely absorbed. I called him over to help with something trivial. He ignored me. I called again. Still building. It took three attempts to pull him away from his project.
That's when it hit me: he wasn't lacking courage to follow his path. He was already on it.
But more than that—he had something most adults have lost entirely: space to feel what actually interested him.
No notifications pulling his attention. No voice in his head questioning whether block-building was "productive" or "practical." No anxiety about whether this activity would lead somewhere meaningful.
Just pure, undiluted connection to his own impulse.
The Great Theft
We didn't lose our courage. We lost the space to feel it.
Modern life systematically removes both simultaneously. You can't follow your own path if you can't feel what it is. And you can't feel what it is if you never have space to sit with yourself without distraction, without judgment, without the constant input of what you "should" want instead.
Think about it: when did you stop having space to feel what you actually wanted? When did other people's voices become louder than your own instincts? When did being busy become more important than being aware?
School taught us to ignore our internal rhythms and follow external schedules. Culture taught us to optimize for metrics that had nothing to do with what made us feel alive. Technology taught us that empty space was a problem to be filled rather than a gift to be protected.
We weren't born without courage. We were trained out of the space needed to access it.
The Connection Crisis
This is why your relationships feel hollow. This is why your career feels like someone else's life. This is why you can't connect authentically with others.
You can't give what you don't have access to.
If you don't have space to feel what you actually want, how can you know what you bring to a relationship? If you don't know what energizes you, how can you share that energy with others? If you can't feel your own path, how can you walk alongside someone else on theirs?
The relationship advice that never works—"communicate better," "be more vulnerable," "listen actively"—fails because it assumes you know what you're trying to communicate. But if you never have space to sit with yourself, to feel what's actually happening inside you, you're trying to share from an empty well.
Watching the Theft in Real Time
Here's what terrifies me as a parent: I catch myself stealing this space from my children. The same phrases I heard, the same "reasonable" advice that slowly eroded my own connection to myself.
"Stop wasting time." "Be productive." "What are you going to do when you grow up?"
These aren't protective statements. They're space killers.
My four-year-old has both space to feel what he wants and courage to follow it because I haven't fully trained him out of it yet. But I can see the machinery already at work. The slow, systematic replacement of internal navigation with external approval.
My job isn't to give my children courage—they already have it. My job is to protect their space to feel it.
Connecting the Dots Backwards
Steve Jobs said you can't connect the dots looking forward, only backwards. Everyone quotes this. Few understand what it actually means for daily decision-making.
When I decided to become a plastic surgeon, nothing in my background pointed that direction. No research, no observerships, no obvious pathway. But when I needed to make my case, I went back and created the narrative.
Dermatology experience became "wanting to learn more about skin." Random encounters became "meaningful exposure." Unrelated skills became "foundational preparation."
I wasn't lying. I was authoring. Taking the scattered dots of experience and connecting them in a way that made sense of where I was going.
But here's what I understand now that I didn't then: the dots were only meaningful because I had space to feel which direction actually called to me.
Without that space—without time to sit with myself and notice what energized me versus what drained me—I would have been connecting dots toward someone else's vision of my life.
The Liberation
Here's the psychological breakthrough that changes everything: if you create space to feel what's actually yours, and you can connect the dots backwards any way you choose, then it doesn't matter which dot comes next.
The path isn't predetermined. You're not missing some cosmic roadmap. There is no "right" choice that you might mess up.
You take the next step that feels most alive. Then the next one. Then you look back and create the story that makes it all make sense.
This isn't delusion. This is how humans actually navigate.
But it only works if you have space to feel which direction feels most alive.
The Return to Feeling
Your four-year-old self knew exactly what to do because they had both ingredients: space to feel and courage to follow.
They didn't need permission, validation, or a ten-year plan. They had something more powerful: uninterrupted connection to their own impulse.
The courage to follow your own path isn't about becoming someone new. It's about creating enough space to remember who you were before the world convinced you to be someone else.
This is why the relationship with yourself is the foundation of everything else. Not because you need to "love yourself first"—that's therapeutic cliché. But because you can't share what you can't access.
Create space to feel what's actually yours. The courage will follow naturally. The path will become clear. And the relationships—with yourself, with others, with your work, with your life—will finally have something real to build on.
Your courage isn't lost. Your path isn't missing.
They're both waiting in the space you're afraid to create.
Time to stop filling every moment and start feeling what emerges in the silence.
To more in life,
Nicco
The vocal help to find your path