The Story

A Word I Created.
A Tribe I Later Discovered.
Why That Changed Everything.

The Question Wang Yangming Left Unanswered

Wang Yangming's 'Unity of Knowing and Acting' has guided thinkers for five hundred years. In his framing, genuine knowledge carries its own action — and when we fail to act, it proves we did not truly know. But modern psychology has revealed a harder case: the person who sees clearly, whose awareness is complete, and who still cannot move. Not because the knowing was incomplete. Because the cost of acting is real, the fear is real, the resistance is real. That is the gap AwaCourage is built to name.

What do you call the capacity that crosses that gap? There was no word for it.

So I made one.

AwaCourage.
Awareness + Courage.
Pronounced: Our Courage.

Not the courage of the fearless. The courage of the clear-eyed. The courage of someone who sees exactly what it will cost — and still chooses.

One Day in Colombia

I flew to Colombia specifically to meet Christian — a retired American who had settled there. I stayed one day.

When Christian first heard the word AwaCourage, he said it sounded like just a sound. Awa. It lacked meaning.

Then I told him what I had found.

His response changed: "Now Awa has meaning. Those indigenous people have the courage to fight for their culture and land — so the association of the word Awa absolutely goes with courage."

Christian's mind didn't change because the word changed. It changed because his awareness of what the word carried changed. That shift — from not seeing to seeing — is the mechanism AwaCourage is built to address.

The Awá

The Inkal Awá — People of the Forest. Approximately 40,000 people in the mountain rainforests of southwestern Colombia and northwestern Ecuador.

Five hundred years of sustained pressure. They have never forgotten who they are.

"Our land is not a battlefield."
— Awá leader Olivio Bisbicus, 2024

I coined AwaCourage without knowing the Awá existed. Finding them afterward was not inspiration.

It was recognition.

The Harpy — The Happy Eagle of Colombia

There is one more layer to the story. A coincidence so precise it no longer feels like coincidence.

The Harpy Eagle — our brand symbol — is native to the tropical rainforests of Colombia and Ecuador. The same territory the Awá people have called home for five hundred years. When I traveled to Colombia to test the word AwaCourage with Christian, I was unknowingly standing in the Harpy Eagle's homeland. The word, the tribe, and the bird all share the same soil.

And there is one more thing. Say the name slowly: Harpy. It sounds like Happy. The Harpy Eagle is, in sound, the Happy Eagle. A bird whose very name carries joy — and whose life embodies everything but the easy kind.

Why the Harpy Eagle

The Harpy Eagle was not chosen for its power alone. It was chosen because, of all creatures on Earth, it most completely embodies the two words that form AwaCourage.

In the complexity of the tropical rainforest — a world of dense canopy, hidden movement, and constant change — the Harpy Eagle does not survive by force. It survives by clarity. It holds still. It reads the environment. It waits for the moment that is truly worth moving for. This patience is not weakness. It is the highest form of Awareness.

The true strength is not in the one who moves first.
It is in the one who sees first.

And when it moves — it moves completely. No hesitation. No wasted motion. No retreat. The Harpy Eagle does not launch unless it is certain. But once certain, it acts with everything it has. This is not recklessness. This is Courage built on Awareness.

There is also a quality of leadership in the Harpy Eagle that most do not notice at first. It does not need to announce itself. It does not make noise to prove its presence. It is simply there — focused, independent, consequential. The entire ecosystem feels its influence without ever hearing it shout.

This is the spirit AwaCourage aspires to represent: not the loudest voice in the room, but the clearest. Not the most visible, but the most grounded. Not the fastest to act, but the most certain when action is required.