Freedom to Do What You Want to Do
I often tell people, the caged bird is only confined until it discovers the door is open. The same with people, we feel free, when we discover how much more freedom we actually have.
John was like many of us, he worked hard, came home to his family and TV at night. John came to me as a client because he recently got a promotion at work, and wanted to do something with the additional income. He thought the session would only cover his finances but we discovered something much more urgent that needed to be taken care of.
John hated his life. Although he loved his family, he felt his wife and two boys were always putting demands on him. The demands from work, his family, and life in general, made him feel like he didn’t have a life.
I had him do a time study for a week. When we met the following week, his life would be changed forever.
Looking at his time study (accounting for every waking hour) John had a whooping eight extra hours per day that was just wasted time. We found his problem wasn’t the demands of people and things. John’s challenge was how he was passively living life.
I explained to John, having downtime to relax is a good thing occasionally, but human beings were made to produce. John scheduled his days to allow two hours of TV, and then began scheduling some things he truly enjoyed as well.
John joined a bowling league, a gun shooting club, a men’s group at church, and even started a small online business selling hard-to-find old computer parts.
Six months after we started working together, John continued to add more things to his schedule. One day, I asked him, “Are you feeling you have freedom in life?” He smiled and said, “I feel like I’m living a life of total freedom!”
Isn’t it great, gaining control over our lives can produce the freedom we seek, even when our schedule gets busier?
Freedom isn’t doing less. Freedom is doing more of what we want and less of what we don’t want. That is something all of us can do.
This article is an excerpt from Creating a Life of Freedom. Get your copy on Amazon Today!
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