COURAGE AND PRESENCE OF MIND MEAN THE SAME THING.

• Presence of mind implies command of mind. 
• Cowardice and lack of mental control mean about the same  thing.
• Cowardice is rooted in hurry, the habit of hurry or lack  of repose. 
• All degrees of success are based on courage-mental or physical. 
• All degrees of failure are based on timidity. 

You can cultivate courage and increase it at every minute and  hour of the day. You can have the satisfaction of knowing that in  everything you do you have accomplished two things-namely, the  doing of the thing itself and by the manner of its doing, adding  eternally to yourself another atom of the quality of courage. You can  do this by the cultivation of deliberation-deliberation of speech, of  walk, of writing, of eating-deliberation in everything. 

There is always a bit of fear where there is a bit of hurry. When you  hurry to the train you are in fear that you may be left, and with that  comes fear of other possibilities consequent on your being left. When  you hurry to the party, to the meeting of a person by appointment, you  are in fear of some ill or damage resulting from not being in time. 

This habit of thought can, through an unconscious training,  grow to such an extent as to pervade a person’s mind, at all times  and places, and bring on a fear of loss of some kind, when there is  absolutely no loss to be sustained.

For instance a person may hurry to  catch a street car and act and feel as if a great loss would occur did  he not get on that particular car, when there may be another close  behind, or at most two or three minutes’ waiting will bring it. Yet the  fear of waiting those three minutes grows to a mountain in size, and is  in that person’s mind a most disagreeable possibility.

Through mere  habit a similar condition of hurry may characterize that person’s  walking, eating, writing-in short, everything he does, and will ren-  der it more and more difficult for such person to act with coolness  and deliberation. 

The quality of mind or emotion underlying all this hurried mental condition and consequent hurried act, is fear. Fear is but another  name for lack of power to control our minds, or, in other words, to  control the kind of thought we think or put out.  It is this kind of unconscious mental training (which is very  common), that begets a permanent condition of mind more and  more liable to large and small panics at the least interruption or  trivial disappointment. It makes disappointments when none are necessary. It is the ever-opening wedge letting in more and more the  thought current of fear. For if you so cultivate fear of one thing you  are cultivating and increasing liability to fear in all things.
(Excepted from: Thoughts Are Things Author, One Way to Cultivate Courage Essay: Prentice Mulford     More …)