Live Free
Sometimes we can't help but get stuck living inside of a box, doing the same thing over and over, worrying about what other people will think of us and our actions. If you want to break out of that box, and learn to live life to its fullest, start with Step 1 for more details.
Contents
Steps
Worrying Less
- Give less value to what other people think of you. Other people are outside your control, and if you can't get past worrying about your own image, you can't live freely. You can't please everyone, so thinking that you can will leave you alienated and disappointed.
- Don't let other people's views become the words you mold yourself around. Once you get to the point where you are saying to yourself and everyone else that you're just trying to be what everyone else wants, you have reached a point where you cannot be free.
- Detach yourself from "toxic" people in your life. These are the people who try to tie you down through manipulation, negativity, and other forms of control. Better still, learn how to disarm such people by learning non-violent communication techniques and standing your ground through being less reactive and more responsive and assertive; you have the power within you to remain free of such people and to live free from their harmful ways. Good friends will help you find your balance.
- Stop focusing on the bad. Be free by focusing on what can be done, rather than on what cannot. Shift your attention to what you can do to make things better for yourself and for others. By doing this, you'll find greater freedom to live the life you want to live.
- Remind yourself of your successes instead of your failures. If work or school isn't going as well as it might, focus on your family, your relationships, or how awesome you've become at shooting three-pointers. Focus on the positive.
- Watch your language. Avoid negative statements like "I can't." Language is powerful, both in convincing yourself and in convincing others. By changing these negative phrases to ones focused on what can be done, you will free yourself from inaction and procrastination. Instead, say, "I've got to do this."
- Be honest. Lies create a tangled web of deceit that keeps you from being free. Learn to recognize the lies you tell yourself and others. Being sincere and truthful allows you to connect better with people you can trust because they can identify with your vulnerability.
- Lies are one form of reacting defensively; for many of us, it is natural to feel a need to defend ourselves in a situation of conflict.
- Lying during a conflict may seem like a good, defensive way of getting someone to leave you alone but it binds you even more tightly to that person because you've made things less clear and have evaded your real needs rather than stood up for yourself.
- By responding with loving kindness, you regain your freedom in relationships because you learn to acknowledge the pain, hurt and other negative feelings of others without escalating the conflict and still make it clear that you retain your power to make your own decisions and choices.
- Come to terms with money (and any lack of it). Many people associate "having enough money" with freedom, but your attitude toward money says much more about freedom than money itself. Treat money as a tool in your life, not the driver of your life. Learn to save, budget and Avoid Fads.
- Look for what you can do to remove yourself from parts of the consuming cycle that you feel burden you. For example, if you're fed up paying high prices for organic food, dig up your lawn and plant a beautiful vegetable and fruit garden instead. Tend to it regularly, knowing that the fruits of your labor are repaid through communion with nature, health through quality food and role modeling sustainable behavior to your children, neighbors and friends.
- Make things that you're good at making. Start bartering your skills with others who have skills in making things you can't or don't enjoy making, so that a virtuous cycle kicks into place. From this, you will also gain friendships and connections that might just amaze you.
- Make use of online resources to connect with like-minded people, share items and services, and to encourage others to get involved in ways of living more freely. One site you might find useful is Sharehood, a collaborative consumption website that helps you to bring together local community and your neighbors for sharing resources and skills.
Getting Healthy
- Exercise. Exercise can release endorphins that change your mood for the better, and staying in shape will ensure that you're able to do the things you want to do. Don't let your lack of health keep you from being free to do what you want to do. Choose something you enjoy doing, as exercise should be fun in itself rather than being viewed as a means to something else.
- Release endorphins to free your spirit. Endorphins are your body's own mood lighteners, bio-chemicals produced by your brain in response to pleasant experiences. Endorphins help you to free yourself from unhelpful emotions that can trap you in ongoing cycles of negativity. The ways to help release endorphins do you good, such as exercising, socializing and laughing, all freeing you up to focus on the things that truly matter to you in life.
- Laugh and smile whenever possible. Your smile changes your frame of mind. Make a point of laughing at something every day. Start with laughing at your own antics or fun thoughts, then expand to watching a funny movie or going to a comedy club or just doing something that will encourage you to laugh. Laughing and smiling boosts your immune system as well as making you feel better by releasing endorphins. Laughing lets your brain know you're happy, and gets you in a great mood, in the right state of mind.
- Spend time in the sun. The sun can brighten up your day as well as your mood. Go to open spaces, do some trekking, enjoy nature and spend time around people. Obviously, observe sun safe procedures during the hottest months.
- Spend time with friends. Being with friends brings out your empathy; understanding and being understood can improve your sense of well-being, also helping to release endorphins. In addition, spending time with friends and being social has been shown to increase serotonin levels, also important for improving your inner well-being.
Shaking Up Routines
- Do something new as often as possible. Being open to new experiences is a source of freedom because you're expanding your horizons, discovering new hidden talents and keeping yourself open to the goodness of life.
- See new experiences as opportunities rather than as burdens or something to be worried about. Most of the battle is inside your head, before you've given the new activity a go.
- Congratulate yourself every time you try something new. And tell others what you've done, to reinforce its good. Your story may help others to live more freely too
- Pretend you've got background music in everyday life. Movies all have soundtracks and so should you. Walking down the street on a horrible rainy day, pick yourself up with something that gets your feet moving and your mind entertained.
- Do something outrageous or spontaneous. Spontaneity is often lost upon entering the adult world of work, parenting and societal obligations. Conforming to what's expected of each adult in society tends to quell the opportunities for breaking free now and then, to do something out-of-character. Restoring a little spontaneity and impulsiveness to your life can bring back some balance.
- Check out the fun things that Improv Everywhere has done, like gathering over two hundred people to walk around downtown using the famous "invisible dog" toy and pretending they were real. Doing something that makes people stare is a great way to live free and get out of the box you're trapped in.
- Look for flash mob videos online to find actions that have brought laughter and enjoyment to people's lives.
- Take walks. Go outside and start walking. Just keep walking in no particular direction and don't stop until you have to. There's something great about taking a walk with no direction or goal in mind.
- Indulge the occasional impulse. It's okay to act on impulse without thinking it through sometimes. Have pie for breakfast or shave your head without warning if you want to. Embrace surprises and spontaneity. Shaking up the regular way of things can help you to become more enthusiastic about each day. Who knows what will happen!
- Regularly do something you're truly passionate about. You don't have to be good at whatever it is that fills you with passion, you just have to love it. Maybe it's writing, maybe it's drawing, maybe it's playing sports of some kind. Whatever it is, embrace it with all your heart and allow yourself to get completely involved with it. Tell your family about it, convince your friends to try it, go crazy and let your life revolve around that something you love.
Tips
- Don't hush yourself. Expressing enthusiasm, joy and a sense of awe are things to be proud of. If people tell you to shut up, don't be dissuaded; instead, work on your presentation skills until you know just how to adjust your pitch of enthusiasm to every type of audience possible.
- Always veer toward increasing your levels of energy. It is by being energetic that you will live more freely because you don't feel lethargic and held back. Tired people tend to make "same as always" choices because resisting requires energy and the status quo means that they can stay put. However, inertia is never freedom, it's imprisonment. Therefore, eat healthily, focusing on foods that restore maximum energy to your body. Exercise regularly to increase both energy and strength. And be spiritual, whatever your faith or secular bent––finding what moves you spiritually provides an inner energy that helps to restore you every time that something seeks to break you.
- If you don't like something, be tactful in letting other people know but don't lie to cover it up. Most times, such a lie will rebound on you when you're caught disparaging it later on. People are generally stronger than you think, and even it they mutter about the audacity to make your point known, they will respect knowing where they stand with you, even if it's deep-down
- Find the perfect balance of being stubborn and willing to go with the flow. Sometimes, it's better to let the world flow as it should, while other times, being proactively involved in diverting the flow is essential. You'll learn this with experience but you must jump in and try in order to learn.
- Choose to find life fun. Sure, there are hard and challenging moments in every person's life, yet life isn't made of just these experiences. Unfortunately, the way some people go on, you'd think that that hardships equate to life. It's important to challenge the negative phrases people throw out regularly, to help them to see that they are imprisoning themselves by creating such an energy-sapping outlook. Without belittling truly challenging situations people are going through, look for the brighter side of the run-of-the-mill situations people tend to complain about, like the weather, a queue, a missed deadline or the like. Most things are not life-and-death situations, so most things are not worthy of divesting intense energy on being negative about. Be kind as you fill their lives with more positive ways to see things!
- Manage your stress. Living free means living free of stress too; stress ties you down and threatens your health and general well-being. If you cannot manage it alone, get help from support people or groups, or relevant self-help reading
- People will always judge. It is easier than looking inward and finding what lacks inside and needs attention. What matters is to learn to tell the difference between constructive judgment (the type that contains truths about what you need to do to improve, usually imparted from an expert or experienced person) and hurtful, spiteful judgment (the type that simply criticizes from ignorance, hatred, jealousy or cowardice, and generally comes from people who have no or very little knowledge or who think they could do better but would never put their money where their mouth is.) In knowing the difference, you can learn from the one and ignore the other, and become free.
- Choose your battles wisely. Know when it's better to let go than to enter the fray (note, this will be most of the time). Stand up for what matters to you when to not do so will result in harm or non-constructive outcomes. And learn to defuse difficult conversations or arguments rather than adding fuel to them––by being a non-violent communicator, you can help people to reach compromises and understandings instead of retreating to lick their wounds, only to come back even fiercer next time
- Get adequate sleep for your age, gender and personal needs. Sleep deprivation builds up and can take a person unawares, until you think that the groggy, half-aware state you're living in is normal. Sleep-deprived people tend to be a lot more negative than those who get adequate sleep and they also lack energy and resilience when faced with life's challenges. Stop overdrawing from the bank of sleep and start depositing back into it and you'll find yourself a lot freer to show the world your real personality and oomph!
- The world is full of haters. They are the people who don't want to/can't live free and certainly don't care for anyone else doing so either. As Ellen De Generes says though, turn your haters into your motivators. Whatever they say, be discerning about their attitude and, for the most part, do it anyway. Remember that if you ran home with your proverbial tail between your legs and hid, you'd be criticized for doing that too, so choose to do what makes you feel free, not trying to conform to things that don't work for you. What's best is to not let haters take away your power by giving in to their disapproval.
- Acceptance is everything, acceptance of yourself and who you are and acceptance of others and who they are. Not everyone wants to live free in the ways outlined here––in fact, some are extremely threatened by the thought of losing routine, acting spontaneously or doing new things. While you can help open the minds of others to the possibilities of this world and their talents by being a role model and a motivator, you can't force anyone to do or be anything. Avoid forcing your preferences onto anyone––to do so is to enhance your sense of freedom at the expense of any freedom they feel they have. Be aware that your idea of reality is just that––yours––and that for them, freedom may come in the guise of something very different from your perception of it. Make space for them in your life without hounding them.
Warnings
- Living free doesn't mean living outside the law.
