This fall, Girls on the Run Piedmont is launching a new curriculum called Hello, Bold Heart.

When I first heard the title, I thought immediately about the girls.

After all, they are growing up in a world that seems determined to make them doubt themselves. They face pressure to fit in, pressure to be perfect, pressure to keep up, pressure to grow into someone before they've even had a chance to discover who they are.

Of course they need bold hearts.

What I wasn't expecting was how much I would need those lessons myself.

I didn't realize that just a few weeks later I would be helping my husband begin recovering from a life-changing event, helping my daughter navigate all the emotions that came with it, and trying to figure out what a bold heart looked like for me.

Most mornings begin the same way. At 5:00 a.m., my alarm goes off. The house is quiet. The dog is asleep. Abby is still in bed. My husband is finally sleeping soundly. For a few precious minutes, it's just me, a cup of coffee, a devotional, some journaling, and a legal pad full of half-finished ideas.

Some mornings, those ideas are about Girls on the Run. Some mornings, they are about homeschooling. Some mornings, they are about rehab appointments, blood sugar numbers, grant deadlines, insurance paperwork, and whatever new curveball life has decided to throw at me this week.

Eventually, I drag myself to the treadmill. Lately, I've been joking that my workouts are less about fitness and more about keeping my stress response from completely taking over. Some mornings I don't want to do it at all. But I've learned that if I'm going to keep showing up for everyone else, I need to do a better job of showing up for myself.

By 7:30, the day is in full motion. Right now, Abby and I are trying to balance summer fun with the realities of helping someone recover from a life-changing medical event. Some days it feels like we're barely holding it all together.

As I watch Abby standing on the edge of another new season, I find myself thinking about the girls we serve through Girls on the Run. Growing up has never been easy, but lately it feels like girls are carrying more than ever.

Which is probably why Hello, Bold Heart feels so timely, not just for girls, but for all of us.

When I first heard the title, I assumed it was about bravery. But lately I've been wondering if a bold heart is something different. Maybe a bold heart isn't about feeling fearless. Maybe it's about being honest enough to feel what you're feeling and courageous enough to keep moving forward anyway.

Because whether you're preparing for a new school year or handling life's surprising changes, courage isn't something you only need once. It's something you keep building.

Then the lessons stopped being theoretical.

A few weeks ago, my husband suffered a brainstem stroke. For a while, the scans kept coming back clear while we watched him lose more and more function. Every few hours seemed to bring another reminder that something was terribly wrong, even when the tests couldn't yet show it.

Looking back, I don't know that I handled all of it particularly well. I worried. I cried. I got frustrated. I second-guessed decisions. There were times I felt completely overwhelmed and moments I was convinced I was failing everyone around me.

And that is where I discovered something surprising.

The lessons are easy to teach. They are much harder to live.

Over the past few weeks, I've been struggling with some uncomfortable emotions of my own. Fear that shows up at 3:00 a.m., which lately seems to be the hour my brain decides it needs to solve every problem at once. Frustration when progress feels slow. Exhaustion from trying to keep a dozen spinning plates in the air. Some days it feels like I'm balancing Girls on the Run, homeschooling, caregiving, doctor appointments, work deadlines, and the normal responsibilities of life all at the same time. And underneath it all is the quiet fear that if I stop spinning any of those plates for even a moment, everything will come crashing down.

One night, while her dad was still in the hospital, my daughter finally opened up. She was angry. Sad. Frustrated. Scared. Not one emotion. All of them at once, like most of us would be when someone we love is hurting.

As she talked, I realized she wasn't looking for solutions. She wasn't looking for me to fix anything. She just needed someone to sit with her in the middle of it. And I found myself saying something very similar to what we teach girls in Girls on the Run.

"It's okay to be sad. It's okay to be frustrated. It's okay to be scared. It's even okay to feel angry. This is hard stuff."

The goal isn't to pretend those emotions don't exist. The goal is to notice them. Name them. Talk about them. And keep moving forward together.

As I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I realized I wasn't just talking to my daughter. I was reminding myself.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us learned that courage means not feeling afraid. That resilience means staying positive. That confidence means having all the answers.

This year has challenged every one of those assumptions.

I'm learning that courage isn't the absence of fear. Resilience isn't pretending everything is fine. And maybe confidence was never the thing I needed most in the first place.

Maybe what I needed was the willingness to be honest about what I was feeling and the courage to keep showing up anyway.

A bold heart isn't a heart that never feels fear, sadness, anger, or uncertainty. A bold heart is willing to feel those things honestly and keep showing up anyway.

The funny thing about working with girls is that they have a way of exposing what you still need to learn yourself. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if these curriculum themes arrived in my life exactly when I needed them. First Hello, SuperStar. Then Hello, Mountain Mover. And now Hello, Bold Heart. Each one teaching a lesson I thought was meant for the girls, only to discover I needed it too.

We teach girls about confidence, then life asks what happens when confidence alone isn't enough. We teach girls about healthy relationships, then life asks if we're willing to lean on our own support system and do the scary thing of asking for help. We teach girls about standing up for themselves, then life asks whether we're willing to do the same. Sometimes that means asking another question. Sometimes it means trusting what you're seeing even when the experts aren't seeing it yet. Sometimes it means speaking up when everyone else in the room seems to know more than you do. We teach girls about courage, then life hands us situations that require it.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that growth doesn't happen because we master these lessons once. It happens because we keep coming back to them again and again and again.

So tomorrow morning, my alarm will go off at 5:00 a.m. I'll pour my coffee, open my devotional, spend a few minutes journaling, step onto the treadmill, look at my never-ending list, and try once more to practice the same lessons we're teaching hundreds of girls across the Piedmont.

Not because I've mastered them, but because I'm still learning them too.

Maybe that is the real gift of this work.

Every season, the girls remind me that courage isn't the absence of fear. Confidence isn't the absence of doubt. And a bold heart isn't something you're born with.

It's something you build, one hard day at a time.