Like most, I’m spending a lot of December reflecting on my 2016 and looking toward my 2017. Over and over, one word keeps ringing in my ears in looking toward the new year: Bravery.

And then, inevitably, another word follows immediately after: Fearlessness.

Fearlessness and bravery surround the same theme, but they are drastically different. Bravery implies acting despite one’s fears. Fearlessness implies one was never afraid at all.

The tension between these two words has me baffled. In my coaching, I constantly tell my clients who get nervous before speaking publically that the fear they feel is a good thing, it’s just about how they use it. I speak publically all the time. Coaching itself is public speaking. And every time, still, I get nervous. If I didn’t get nervous, my performance would fall totally flat. It’s our nerves that push us to do better. Our nerves prevent us from becoming complacent. With this in mind, bravery is what drives us toward perfection. We recognize our fear, but we harness it to challenge us and make us better. In this sense, bravery seems to trump fearlessness.

But then again, fearlessness is perhaps what was responsible for getting us up on that stage to speak in the first place. Sometimes, in those final seconds before walking on stage to speak, it is not about harnessing any fear. It is about shutting off your brain for a just a moment so that your body can walk itself in front of that mic. When I gave my TEDx talk in 2015, I was so nervous every second for weeks leading up to the big day. Finally, it was my time to get on that stage. And in that moment, I didn’t feel fear. I didn’t feel excitement either. I felt quiet. I felt fearless. If that moment of fearlessness hadn’t happened, I might never have gotten onstage in the first place. From there I was able to harness my nerves.

Fearlessness shuts our brains off for a minute and lets our intuition do the work. Bravery allows us to use our fear effectively. When we’re speaking publicly, we need the two to work together.

Between the two, I find myself more frequently striving for the fearlessness-intuition side of things. In this New Year, my goal will be to find a healthy balance between fearlessness and bravery. There is a world of opportunity waiting for me, waiting for all of us. Yet so few of those opportunities are seized for fear of…many things, really. All different kinds of fears. But with the dynamic duo of fearlessness and bravery, those fears will be transformed into action, and those actions will be transformed into results.