“Put on your big-girl panties, and carry on.”

“Do it scared.”

“Fortune favors the bold.”

Growing up in a world where there was no time or tolerance for fear, a generation of women–my generation of women–were encouraged to build a facade of fearlessness. We learned how to bypass other emotions, and use our courage as the antidote for nearly every hard thing we achieved in life.

Donning courage as a constant solution, though, is exhausting. Let’s reinvent a new model to carry us beyond our midlife triumphs and into the crone space of lived wisdom.

The first step is understanding that there is not always a straight line between fear and courage. More often than not, a range of other, often overlooked and misunderstood, emotions inform and influence our reactions, our choices, and our actions.

The In Between: Journeying From Fear to Courage is a creative nonfiction collection of personal stories that aim to inspire new conversations and reflections about how we greet fear, walk through comfortable and uncomfortable emotions, and arrive to a heart-full of courage that leads us onwards and upwards.

The book–based primarily on lessons learned from a 16,000-kilometer walk from Bangkok to Barcelona–helps us identify patterns we bring to our choice points and decision-making process, and, with that knowledge, make better and more aligned soul choices.