To be free has an infinite number of meanings. From the freedom of speech, choice and expression to the freedom to vote and to the freedom to protect and provide for your family, there’s anything and everything in between. But without an all-encompassing freedom, are you really free?
It’s easy to look to the past and see the suffrage and bondage of specific groups of people, and today, many people are still fighting for basic freedoms all around the world. But when we think of freedom for ourselves, we often leave out financial freedom, a limitation that causes us to be in bondage, and maybe that’s because many of us don’t believe it exists.
Pursuing a life of holistic freedom means that you will need to develop emotionally, mentally and spiritually in order to achieve true self-mastery. When you master yourself, you can create freedom in all areas, including your finances.
Discipline is freedom.
If you cannot discipline yourself, you cannot be free.
Disciplining yourself in your finances is one of the most important and challenging areas to get into alignment. Achieving financial freedom requires you to get focused and intentional with how you spend your money and letting go of spending it as you desire.
Lacking self-restraint in spending habits forces enslavement over every decision we make each day because of the money we do or do not have.
But Holistic Freedom is about more than just making money. Holistic Freedom is about building and designing a life that energizes you, pursuing a calling that gives life to your dreams; that fills you with purpose and passion. It’s a life that you can only achieve when you first find freedom in your finances.
If you find yourself stuck trading the most important commodity that you have, your time, for money, you will never truly be free. Too often we get trapped sacrificing our lives (and sometimes our dignity), helping someone else build their dream, because we’ve been given a false sense of security in the form of a paycheck every 2 weeks.
Has working a job stopped you from being who you were truly meant to be because you’ve been so focused on succeeding in your career?
Can you honestly say that you know what you stand for, what you represent and what you value, and do you have the freedom to filter decisions through those values, or are you limited by your income?
When you start to pursue something and you do it with tenacity and vigor, you’re going to be out of balance in your activities, but you will be in balance in your values.
Moving into a place where you establish balance with your values will often demand an imbalance in activities. You may lose sleep, you may find that your free-time suddenly becomes productive and others may take notice … or they may not. But living out your values allows you to pursue freedom in the emotional and spiritual areas of life, becoming authentically you, exploring who you are and how you want to live.
When you get serious about how you want to live (an outcome based formula), you have to take inventory of where you are currently at in your life. Chances are, to move beyond your reality you will need to find people who are living in a way that you would like to be living and seek mentorship.
This is the way entrepreneurs think.
A big piece of the Holistic Freedom puzzle is personal growth and change. For many of us, we’ve been socialized to think a certain way, to be just like everyone else, because that is what the system is designed to do.
You will never master yourself by thinking and doing exactly as everyone else.
If we know that personal growth and changing our thinking will lead to a life of self-mastery and freedom, why do so few people commit to doing it? Because it’s hard! No one else is going to do it for you, but without it, you will never be free.
How do you make decisions? Are you living for the moment or are you thinking 5 and 10 years down the road? Do you know what your desired outcome is in 5 or 10 years from now?
Do you have a vision for your future?
If you don’t have a vision for your future, one that looks different than your life today, you will continue to make decisions that take you down the path of least resistance because you don’t have a Why that stretches you embrace discipline.
Think about this …
Good Decisions – Daily Discipline = A Plan Without A Payoff
Daily Discipline – Good Decisions = Regiment Without Reward
Good Decisions + Daily Discipline = The Master Of Your Potential
It is absolutely clear that you have been called to a free life. Make sure you don’t use perceived freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want and destroy your true freedom. But instead, use your freedom to serve one another and love.
This is how freedom grows.