Contained or free: Which do you choose?

How often do you see yourself as a hostage to circumstance? Without choice and limited by the opportunities around you? How often do you feel the yearning to do something and then find that you’ve not done it? Have you ever noticed yourself not expressing your opinions in meetings or at home?

I put this to you: If you answered yes to any of the above then you’re containing yourself and not stepping in to the freedom that is yours for the taking and is only ever a thought away. That’s right, only ever a thought a way.

We contain ourselves in our mind made prisons, allow ourselves to be boxed in, to play roles that others expect us and want us to play. It's easy to fall in to the trap of believing that we are contained by these circumstances and by other people’s ideas about us. Rarely do we see the walls of the container that we’ve either created or have allowed to grow. The truth is that it’s our own thoughts and processes that keep us limited, contained, boxed into our daily routines.

By choosing freedom the world around us opens up and opportunities present themselves as though they were never there previously. We have a choice:

a) to play the roles that others want us to play

or

b) choose to step in to roles that we want to try out.

No one has to tell you who or what you have to be. No can tell you not to go for a dream. We allow others to limit us, to keep us contained. It’s not generally done with malice or thought. It may flow from wanting you to be safe; in their eyes. Yet that doesn’t have to be your role. Your response can be to choose freedom and to consciously choose where you direct yourself and how you go about doing it.

Of course there may be obstacles in achieving your aim or your dreams. As a society we’ve created a number of obstacles for people. Our education system may be one of the most stringent obstacles to people freeing their creativity and ideas. Yet that doesn’t have to stop you striving to be the person that you want to be. And it doesn’t have to be big. Not everyone wants to sail round the world, be the Prime Minister or CEO of a major organisation. This is about first acknowledging the constraints, second allowing you to step outside your constraints, and finally choosing to live within them or do something different.

Coaching can aid people to develop the awareness of the constraints that we impose on ourselves and to support you while you take steps to freeing yourself from the limitations and to start to express your choices in the world. Freedom can be frightening to the point of inaction. It can also be delightfully liberating, fulfilling and exciting to be alive and in charge of your choices to a greater degree.

Coaching helps you to look at your thoughts and to asses if they are what you really want to be doing. Coaching can help evoke change and create new neural pathways through the combination of feelings, thoughts and action that support change in to the future.

And finally:

Exercise - Take a look around you and:

First notice how many green things there are around you.

Now

Take a look around and see how man red things there are.

Would you have noticed the red without having your attention brought to it? Can you see more than you first thought?

For the next day turn your attention to a goal you have. What one thing would take you closer to that goal? Over the next 24 hours keep your mind open to finding ways to achieve that one thing. Be clear what that one thing is. Be awake, open you mind and be intentional to see the opportunities around you. Having seen opportunities, make a choice which one to try and go for it. Take action.