We experience loss of relationships, spouse, even our envisioned future. And with that often comes the loss of courage. We can get stuck and don’t know how to keep things going much less face the challenges ahead. So how do we find the courage to move forward toward living our fullest life?
Well, I am really excited because we have a guest who’s going to help us do that. Annie F. Downs is a bestselling author, a sought after speaker and successful podcast host based right here in Nashville, Tennessee. She’s engaging and honest and makes readers and listeners alike feel as if they’ve been longtime friends, which is so very true. I’ve known her for a while and she is also the founder of That Sounds Fun Network, which includes her aptly-named flagship show “That Sounds Fun.” And she’s the author of multiple bestselling books, like “100 Days to Brave” and “Remember God. Annie shoots straight and doesn’t shy away from the tough topics, which we love, but she always finds her way back to the truth that God is good and that life is a gift. Annie is a huge fan of laughing with friends, confetti, soccer, and boiled peanuts, especially from a gas station.
What does it mean for you to be brave and courageous or what does that currently look like in your life right now?
I’m so glad you are doing this series because I think one of the misconceptions about courage (and I have accidentally gotten to be an expert on courage, not because of me, but because I wrote a book a decade ago that people keep reading and because they keep reading it, they keep telling me their response to it. And so I have a massive amount of stories. I feel like a psychological scientific researcher at this point in courage because I’ve gotten to talk about it for a decade. But one of the big misconceptions about being brave is that you have to change your life and move to a totally different life. That the people who are actually brave are the people who pack everything up and build an entirely new life. Now, that is brave. If you and your family decide to be missionaries in a foreign country, of course that is brave. Or if you and your spouse divorced or if you are single parenting as many of our audience is and you end up having to move to a different city in order to provide for your family, of course that’s brave. What happens for nine out of 10 of us is that God invites us to be brave in the life that we already have versus creating a brand new life.
There’s this Bible story that people love to talk about when Peter walks on water, when the chosen showed it, it’s incredible. I mean, if the Bible has classics, Peter walking on water is a classic. And I think the part of this story we don’t tell enough is that when Peter walked on water, he knew every bit of the sea of Galilee because that was his workplace? It is very foreign for us to imagine getting out of a boat and walking on water. What Jesus actually invited Peter to is to be brave at the place he went to every day for work. And so that story actually is not “Go and do this wild thing.” It was like “Go where you already go and see what God might have for you to be brave there.” And so it just changes the story when you remember that him being on that lake at night was every night of his adult life, Jesus just said, “Hey, do something different here than you’ve ever done before.”
I don’t have kids, but I’m not married yet. And like many of our friends listening, my life does not look like I thought it would. And so what does it look like for me to be brave in the life that I already have versus going, “Well, if I’m going to be brave, I’m going to have to change everything”? It’s more like “What does courage look like with the doors that are opening right in front of me with the people that are already in my life with the pains and the disappointments that I carry? What does courage look like with what I already have in front of me?”
Your book says, “You want to change the world? Be brave, don’t try to be someone else or do someone else’s brave thing. Don’t move to Africa because it’s brave—move because it sounds like the most terrifyingly perfect next step for you. So how has your brave changed over time? What does that look like for someone who wants to step in?
I know you went to New York recently, right?
I just hung up on a call with my manager and I said, “Can you believe all these doors are opening at the same time? That means I’m probably going to have to go through one of them because they all are a little bit scary.” They’re all asking me to do something I’ve never done before. And she said, “Yeah, I think we’re going to walk through one of them.” And the reason I tell you that story is because I don’t think it is very easy or all that healthy to identify courage on your own. I think saying it to other people and going like, “Hey, will you sit with me and can I explain to you these three things that are going on in our home or in my office or at church? Does this sound hard to you?”
My counselor said,“You know that all that together is really hard.” And I was like, “Is it? Thank you. I needed someone else to say, ‘I bet that’s hard.’” How do we know the first thing to do and how do we know what the brave thing to do is for us? I think the first thing is to ask some other adults. If you have teenagers, ask at dinner, “Hey, what could I do that you would call brave?” and see what your kids say. What if your kid says, “If you ran a 5K, I think it’d be really brave for you to run a 5K.” My kid doesn’t know that in college I was running all the time. And your friends get invited into that too. And the other people that are parenting around you, the people you work with, the people in your church. That also protects me. When I invite other people in that I really trust, it protects me from doing something stupid that I think is brave because often, what feels out of reach, we deem as brave. And sometimes it is. And sometimes it is out of reach because if you lean over to grab it, you are going to fall out of your chair. I need someone else to go, “Stop leaning. You’re doing too much Annie.” And sometimes to go “Lean just a little bit farther and grab that thing. You are so close that you may fall out of your chair, but I’m with you that this is worth grabbing for.” Me and the Lord talk about things for a little bit before I bring somebody in because there is that need for a secret place with God where you’re kind of dreaming. But pretty quickly after I’m starting to feel the bubbles in my belly about something, the butterfly feeling, I’m bringing in some other people.
So single parents often lose the ability to be courageous, especially in relationship with other people. How would you encourage someone who’s afraid of the vulnerability needed in deep relationships?
I have found in relationship with single parents that often they will say no for me before they’ve given me space to say no for myself. Oh, you won’t want to come to dinner with us. The kids are crazy. Just you won’t want to do that. Or, oh, I won’t bother you with this. It is a lot. I know you’re busy. It’s a lot. I’ll talk to someone else about this. Often parents who are on their own raising their kids assume their life is too much for the rest of us. And we don’t get a chance as your community to say, “You are not too much for me. Your life is not too much for me. And you have not missed the chance to be brave. You have not missed the chance to do relationship again. You have not done anything that would make us decide we can’t be in a relationship with you anymore.” Especially as people are all on their own healing journey.
I think this is something single adults that are not parents have to think about: Do I trust that the people in my life will say yes and no and do I believe them? For single parents who are concerned about doing a relationship, again, I can speak from the person who dates people who are single parents. I need you to let me determine what my boundaries are as far as what your life offers. Because guess what? My life is not normal. And so I have baggage going into intimate relationships in friendship or in dating. I have baggage of what I bring in my life because I have a public life that isn’t going away—that’s increasing because people recognize me in public. I have things that I’m bringing into a friendship or intimate relationship that is going to be too much for someone. And so I think that’s a challenge for a lot of us to go, Can I trust that the people I am in relationship with are mature enough that they are going to tell me what their boundaries are versus me deciding I’m too much? And I think it takes courage to say my life is valuable and what I bring to the world is a gift. Not every single parent wants to date again. But there are a lot of us who want to parent and have not had their own kids. And so I think sometimes there is a narrative in my experience with some single parent friends where I go,That’s the story you tell yourself? That you’re too much for us? You actually have the thing I want. You actually are the life that I’m looking for. But you’ve told yourself ‘I’m too much for everyone else.’ And I’m going like, No, let me watch your kids while you go on dates. I love your kids. This would be a joy to me. And so Robert, I’m thinking about all this because it does take such courage for people to believe that they are a gift to the world no matter what they bring along. It actually takes courage to believe that you are a gift to the world, and single parents, married parents: We are a gift to the world. And the healthier you get, the healthier the people in your life are because that’s who you pick. And so you can trust them more.
But I can see how people have a hard time believing it. And so I want to encourage people who have single parents in your life: You can tell when someone doesn’t believe that they’re a gift to the world by what they say, by the way they show up or don’t show up. And so encourage your people around you to know that they’re a gift to the world, that they’re a gift to you, that there’s nothing that they could do or not do to make you believe otherwise. Because there’s been so much hurt and I am just sitting here thinking about the times in my life—even today, it could happen today—I walk out of here and I’m feeling down and I don’t have that within me to know I am valuable, that I am a gift. And there are times that we need that. So encourage the people around you.
I’m married now. I was a single dad for eight and a half years and while I was a single dad, I felt depleted because going through litigation and all these things being thrown around, you’re not that or you’re this, and all the labels, right. So you don’t feel you’ve taken a hit relative to what you’ve got to give. So being on the opposite end of that and listening to single parents share their stories, and they see it as broken, fragmented, nothing to offer. I as a married person now get so much from that. So I affirm exactly what you guys are saying in that you do have something to give even if it feels tarnished and broken.
There is so much insight in being (at what some would consider) a deficit because you have a perspective that is so unique and closer to God in some ways. I’ve been a Christian most of my life, raised a missionary kid. But it wasn’t until I walked through this valley of the shadow of death that I really understood that he walked with me. Sometimes it is a good reminder to talk to single parents living that. That is a gift from single parents that probably don’t think they’re giving me anything, but they are.
You have a book “That Sounds Fun” where you invite people into fun. Can you talk about why fun is so important and how it’s made a difference in your life?
I love talking about fun because scripture tells us that eternity is set in our hearts. And I think what fun does for us is give us this free moment, this light moment, and it is a check-in with the eternity that’s set in our hearts. That’s one of the reasons that matters. One of the things I want to remind our friends listening is that everyone thinks that someone else is the fun mom. I’m not the fun mom. I’ve got too much going. We’re just working too hard. I’m handling all the kids by myself.The reality is you are the fun mom or the fun dad that your child needs. And until they get in a situation where you’ve deemed something else more fun, they don’t know. They think you are the fun mom because you are the only mom or dad they have ever seen. And so my encouragement would be to find fun in your life already. So here’s an example. If you’ve got your kids on Friday nights and y’all always eat Mexican, one way to up the fun 1% is to find the five closest Mexican restaurants. And in one night, go try the guacamole at them all. Guacamole is $6 and you give your kids a scorecard and you have spent an hour and a half laughing with your kids, and it has not changed your budget, it has not changed your time that night, but it has given your kids this memory they will never forget. So what are the things you can do? For my sister and her husband, every Friday night is pizza movie night. My nephew is only four and he can tell you it’s pizza movie night. All he knows is his parents are fun because they do pizza movie night. You and I know that the reason we do pizza and a movie on Friday is because we’re exhausted.
I think a lot of times our feeling of fun is inward and outward pressure. The inward pressure of I want to be the fun mom. We don’t have as much money as them. I don’t have as much freedom as them. I don’t know how we do this. I can’t take my kids to Disney this summer. The external is Instagram telling you all the fun moms go to Disney and all the fun dads are the coach of the team, not just supporting. And we can’t do all of that. So what does it look like to back up and go, Okay, let me ignore this internal pressure I’ve brought upon myself that fun has to be big and expensive and let me ignore this external pressure I’ve brought upon myself that fun has to be big and expensive. What does it look like if it is a normal part of our rhythms? What if fun was just a normal part of our day? Every morning Alexa plays a different song that makes my kids laugh.
And so I think there are some ways, I mean we did a devotional called “Chase the Fun” because we wanted to give a hundred days of how you could do this. Because based on my personality, I can come up with ideas like this all the time. I know that isn’t true for everyone, but I can give you 50 different guacamole kind of competitions because my brain works like that, but I don’t need to do that for everybody. I don’t live in your house, but everyone in your house knows what a little bit of fun feels like. What does it look like to take that one more step once a month? I was at dinner last night with all moms, and one of the moms (it was her birthday) said, “I only get one day a year that’s for me.” And it fell apart last week. And the thing she was supposed to get to do, she didn’t get to do. And it made her cry all day. And I said to her, We have got to take the pressure off your birthday and start getting you some fun the rest of the year because your birthday does not deserve this level of respect. Right? It is one day. And so that’s my encouragement to parents too. If you want to find fun, take the pressure off the one week every summer that you’re supposed to have Camp Dad and it’s supposed to be the biggest and baddest week of their lives and start going like, No, we do something fun every week. We do something fun every time we’re together and it removes the big pressure and your kids are going to be thrilled anyway. They think you’re fun already.
I hadn’t thought about this for a while, but speaking of this fun that was so ridiculous, one of the things I did with my daughters is I would march around the house with a bucket of chocolate ice cream and they would follow me like little ducklings. And we would just stomp up and down the house and then sit in the middle of the floor somewhere and start eating it out of the bucket with the spoon. And I remember how random that was, but honestly it came out of desperation. I’m like, What am I going to do? And we love chocolate ice cream became kind of a mantra and we started walking around. But you’re right. I know those memories carry with us.
It’s a perfect example of how it took no extra time for you, but the idea that they didn’t have to have bowls or sit at the table is a memory, and that is really fun.
That’s right. I remember one time my dad called the pizza place and he said on the phone, I need you to make the crust so strong that my daughter’s teeth can’t bite through it. It needs to be that crispy. And I’ll never forget how fun I thought that was that he was telling the pizza guy that it had to be crispy.
I’m a guy and I’ve got all girls. And so Zoe, my oldest, was getting into middle school and everyone was getting highlights and we couldn’t afford getting highlights. And I was like, Okay, well I’ll do it. And so I said, Let’s go to the bathroom. And she was kind of scared and said, Dad, I’m going to bleach and whatever. And I said, It’s not me. And I said, my name was Jean Marco. And I’m like, no, sit down Jean Marco take care of you. And she just laughed and laughed, and it actually turned out pretty good. But what’s the worst that could happen? I totally mess it up and then we go get it done professionally.
Accents are also great. An accent goes so far to make kids laugh. So again, I think everyone feels like you’ve got to take the family to Disney World and buy them every fast pass, and they just want you to let them eat ice cream out of the container on the living room floor.
Most mornings I wake Jax up with an accent or with some crazy song that I just made up on the fly and I’m tickling him and getting him out of bed that way. So when it comes to our kids, I have a pretty easy time. You and I are both sevens, Annie, so it just comes a little more naturally. And especially with a kid, and I know you have all kinds of kid best friends. But for ourselves as single parents and especially those of us who’ve been through really hard things, it’s really hard to even know what’s fun to us anymore. I know I lost myself in my marriage. I didn’t know who I was. I knew who I was as Jax’s mom, and I had a lot of fun with that even obviously while I was married. He was little and we had a lot of fun together, but then when I was out on my own, it was like, Well, what do I like to do? Who am I? What do I want to do?
How can you rediscover what’s fun to you, especially after you’ve been through such heartache and hurt?
I first want to affirm that it is very hard to find fun when you are grieving, suffering, head down, working really hard. It’s hard to locate. Even for me as a seven, my nephew passed away two summers ago; I tore up my knee; we had a real heartbreaking story happen at church, and it all happened in a week. And I wasn’t myself for months. So I totally understand that. But I think what you’re saying is so valuable because the first thing people can do is very much “Runaway Bride” with the eggs where she didn’t know what kind of eggs she likes. And that is one of the things you can do with fun is go like, Do I actually like playing tennis or do I play tennis because that’s the sport in our country club? Do I actually like doing puzzles or have I just always done puzzles? That kind of thing. So I think it’s an assessment, but if I am getting coffee with someone, I would ask, What was fun to you when you were five? What was fun to you once you knew how to read? Because a lot of people will answer with “reading” but so you need to be about third grade. So what was fun when you were five and what was fun in third grade and what’s the iteration of that exact same thing right now? A lot of people judge their own fun.
It’s one of the funny things that happens on my podcast because our last question on “That Sounds Fun” is, Tell me what sounds fun to you. Five out of seven times it starts with, Well, I don’t know if anyone else will think this is fun or this might not be very fun. And I’m like, Why are you judging your fun if it’s fun to you? And it doesn’t hurt anyone. It is fun. That would be my encouragement the next time you have an hour to yourself, or the kids are with another parent or with their grandparents or at school or asleep. Take 20 minutes to write down what was fun to you when you were in elementary school and let that sit. One of my bets is you’ll grieve something when you start thinking of that because there’s something that’s been lost. You’re like, Oh man, I can’t bike around like that. Or Oh man, so many of my core childhood memories are because my grandparents were across the driveway and they both passed away.
And so when I think about what sounds fun as a kid, there’s a grief attached that I can’t go do cross stitching with my grandmother. My grandmother taught me how to cross stitch Christmas ornaments. I know I can’t go back and cross stitch Christmas ornaments with my grandmother, but I can still cross stitch. And last Christmas, I made little red cardinal ornaments for all of our cousins because it reminded me of my grandmother. There are ways you can find the iteration of what was fun to you as a kid after you grieve that moment of I’ll never actually get that. I’ll never be able to get that exact thing. So, what can you do? I was talking to a radio host and I asked him What was so fun to you when you were a kid? And he said, All the kids in our neighborhood used to stand outside together and we would sing in a choir and I would direct it. And I was like, That is adorable, and why don’t you do that now? And he started crying live on the show, and he said, Why don’t I do that? And he joined a choir. You’re not going to have the neighborhood, but you can go join a choir right now in any city you live in; there’s a city choir everywhere. And so there is an adult iteration to the fun you had as a kid that will remind you of the things you’ve forgotten. It’s just going to take a journey to get there. You’re going to have to make time to think about it. You’re going to have to make time to write it down and then you’re going to have to make time to move forward with courage.
So you’ve been open about heartbreak and your desire for love in a romantic relationship. How have you found the courage to get back up and move forward with hope without cynicism? And how do you move past the fear when it comes to just putting it all back out there over and over? Because, especially for those of us who are trying to get back out there again, it’s really hard.
After every breakup I’m like, I’m hanging up my jersey, I’m retiring, we’ve done it. I can’t get a home run for the life of me. Part of it is therapy. My counselor really helps me recircle at the right time to come back around to, okay, are you ready to try again? Are you willing to try again? I think you can really trust yourself about when you want to try and when you don’t. There is a reason in your body or your story or your stress level that there are seasons. There are weeks at a time where I’m like, I don’t want to meet anybody right now. I’m exhausted. I’m too busy. I am unhappy about this other thing. I can’t sort it out right now. Then you don’t offer your best relationship anyway. So I think part one is you trust your body and trust yourself.
Driving home after dinner with my married friends last night, I just said, Hey, have y’all thought of anybody for me lately? Have y’all met anybody? I think there’s this opportunity to say it out loud to people and then the power leaves from whether you’re ready or not, and they go, Oh, I did think of someone. Can I give them your number? You’re like, Well, I better get ready now. I better get my jersey on now. Part of it is inviting other people in. Do your own work and get your own counselor, therapist, mentor, to be speaking into it as well. The reality is we can only control so much. You can only be as healthy as you can be. You can only put yourself out there as much as you can put yourself out there. You can only be on as many apps as you can emotionally handle, which is about 1.0 to me on my best days. I’m 44, and I think for a lot of my twenties and thirties, I thought If I do enough, I will get what I want. And what I’m learning and what our listeners probably have some profound knowledge on is you can do everything the way you were raised to do it. You can be as healthy a person as possible. And you do not get everything you want. And that is the tension of life with God. My friend Dallas Jenkins who does “The Chosen” taught me this, so I want to give credit where credit’s due. This is not my idea. It’s really important to acknowledge when you’re doing everything you can do and you’re not getting what you want because it’s a reminder that God is in control. Because then, when you do everything you can do and you do get what you want, you also didn’t cause that; God did. God is always more in control than we give him credit for, and we are less in control than we think. So our job to do intimate, healthy relationship is to pursue being who we want to be in a relationship and then believe that God is going to do his part and trust that he’s going to do his part. I know that’s such a Christian-y answer to be like, trust God, but what else do we have to do? What other option do we have? It gives him so much more glory in our stories when we go, Hey, I didn’t do anything different in 2024 than I did in 2025, but it worked in 2025. The other analogy that works for me is business. I can do all the same things and a business can crumble and I can do all the same things and a business can succeed. And both of those are in God’s hands. His invitation to me is, Can you be excellent in everything you put your hand to? And then he decides success. And so that would be my encouragement for all of our friends listening who are hoping and ready to do relationship again: Are you who you want to be in that relationship? Are you ready? So have you done enough of your work that you’re ready to try? And can you trust that God is actually going to handle this for you too?
You’ve said, be brave for yourself. Be brave for your God. Be brave for the onlookers, the ones who will be inspired by you to inspire others. So for you, who has inspired you to be brave?
I’ve got some real dreams of other media I want to try. I love podcasting like y’all do. I’m never going to quit podcasting unless someone pries the microphone out of my cold dead hands. I just love it so much. So I’m watching some other creators who are doing interesting things on socials. I’m watching people doing TV really well. I’m watching people doing radio really well. So that’s some of it, Robert. I like to say a lot that it feels like when you are brave, it shoots off a confetti popper and confetti lands on everybody.
They kind of go like, Where’d this come from? Oh, I could do this too. And they shoot off. It’s shrapnel that lands on your friends and your kids. And so I’m thinking of some of my friends in New York. Big cities are interesting and this is true of Nashville, and true about me moving here too. Most people pack up everything and move to a city by themselves. And so we talk a lot in Nashville about how friends become family because nobody brought their family, particularly when you’re in your twenties and early thirties. Everybody’s single because everybody just came here. And so you take care of each other. I’m seeing that in New York too, where people In Nashville often I hear, I don’t know why I moved here, but I just felt like God told me to.
With New York, what I keep hearing is I had a dream and I’m chasing it. And so I think they’re both really interesting. I’m watching people in both seats where I’m going, Man, it is so brave of you just to follow God’s voice. I want to follow God’s voice. Oh man, it’s so brave of you to just lace up your shoes and run as hard and as fast as you can after the dream you want to see accomplished in your life. I want to do that too. And so I feel inspired. I’m getting shrapnel in two cities currently of: Look at them obeying God’s voice. Look at them making the thing. And I want to be a person who makes the thing out of obedience to God. I’m trying to put together what these two cities are shrapnel-ing to me and be the person who builds something wild and crazy and fun, but does it because it’s obedience.
What’s something you’re going to take away from this conversation?
The whole idea of finding something fun in the day-to-day life versus thinking you have to have these big ideas, big plans, big vacations, whatever. I just love her talking about the guacamole thing, and I’m really interested in her book “Chase the Fun: 100 Days to Discover Fun Right Where You Are.” I love to incorporate fun. It just brings so much joy to what can be really mundane, can feel really draggy and down at times. To be honest, this past weekend I had a really hard weekend and I probably could have used even just a little spark of joy to be able to get out and run around or do something fun.
The topic is about the courage to move forward, but I couldn’t help but think how much fun plays into that. I’m in a place in my life where I’ve got a lot of decisions to make. There’s a lot of things going on weighing heavy on my head and my heart, and I don’t take time to make fun. If we hadn’t talked about that, I don’t know that I would’ve remembered the ice cream story or the Jean Marco thing; I looked for things to try to be fun. And I think that ties into courage. I really do. I think that you can become so obsessed with, I’ve got to get the courage to move forward. I’ve got to figure this out. I don’t remember what seminar I was in, but I learned the importance of breaking patterns in our life. If we’re trying to figure something out that’s really difficult, it’s really important to break the pattern every so often. If I’m speaking to you and it’s deep, deep, deep, deep, throw some levity in there, it will help. You’re breaking a pattern If you’re sitting in a conference, get people to stand up, break the pattern—it just gives a reset. Fun ties into courage so much in that regard. I’d never put that together until this conversation.
Listener Question
What is your happy place?
I guess it depends when you ask me. I love being in the shade on the beach. That’s a happy place for me. Also a dark room is a really happy place. I’ve been so busy lately, and I was telling someone the other day, what sounds better than anything in the world right now, is just air conditioning, a fan, and a dark room. But I’m different. I recharge in that kind of thing, I’m not a camper, nature is something I’ve really come [to enjoy]. A friend of mine did this silent retreat at his house or his farm and encouraged us to just go out and observe things like observe grass, observe, just sit there for an hour with nothing to do. Just look at bugs crawling around. I mean, it sounds so weird, but it wasn’t at all. A lot of times we associate a happy place with some kind of activity, and sometimes it’s just being still.
I was thinking about what she said about what sounded fun to you in third grade. And we used to ride our bikes around our neighborhood. We had this one area we lived in and the backyards kind of all connected together. And so we would go out and put a big kickball game together with all the neighborhood friends, or we would get out and ride our bikes and pretend like they were cars. And we would turn the entire thing into a little town. We called it “playing town.” We would play town and we would, a tree would be our gas station. We’d have a McDonald’s drive through, we’d have a bank, we’d have a grocery store. And we just turned it into a thing. Going along with your nature thing, getting outside and having an adventure and making things up as I go [is my happy place]. And I do that with Jax, not as often as I should, but I’m reminded now that I need to do that more with him. That brings me so much joy to even just think about. I could go sit on the beach and be really happy. Engaging my mind in that sense of adventure and wonder and exploration, not knowing what’s going to come along around every corner, just being out and walking, wherever it is—is a really a happy place to be.
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