How free are you feeling right now? What’s the difference between a good day and a bad day? Isn’t it the case that often the outside circumstances of our lives are not significantly different on our good versus bad days? And yet somehow we feel great, or we can have the blues. 

Most folks are about as happy as they decide to be – Abraham Lincoln

We do in fact get to choose our thoughts and perspective which in turn affect our feelings and our behaviour.  Isn’t that good to know?  That we can feel as free or restricted as we choose to in this current situation.  Once we have accepted the new rules of lockdown living then we are in fact free to be as creative as we choose to be in terms of adapting and even enjoying aspects of this new way of life.  

True freedom is a mindset.  Be honest for a moment; weren’t there things pre-Covid that you complained about or resented doing that you would relish to be able to do now? I think that’s true for most of us and it’s been humbling hasn’t it? 

True freedom is having the ability to exercise control over our thinking and since our thoughts create our feelings, how we happy we feel.  This of course all starts with the awareness and understanding that we can in fact do this and this takes practice.  When many people start down the path of personal development they may not even realise that they have any control over ‘the voice in your head’.  The whole self-talking thing has probably never been more articulately and amusingly described than by Michael Singer in his book “The Untethered Soul”. 

You can free yourself from unsupportive thinking by asking questions.  This is a common trait in successful (and by that I also mean happy) people, they ask themselves better quality questions which stimulates more creative, and better answers.  Tony Robbins is superb in this area.

It’s also extremely useful to focus on something or someone outside of ourselves to get off a negative thinking loop. One technique is to ask yourself questions such as

What is something I can do for someone else today?

What is something I can do to add value to the world today?

What is something that I can offer to other people?

Not only does this expand your thinking but they’re pretty good questions as a foundation to living a meaningful life wouldn’t you say?

How serendipitous then that quite by accident I came across this conversation between Tony Robbins, Sage Robbins, and Michael Singer– if you have time and are interested see what you think https://bit.ly/2W9Ec9A

So as we head into this long Bank Holiday weekend I’ll be taking time to reflect on freedom.