To learn about the growth mindset, nowadays, you can approach from so many points of view. However, in this article, you will experience a totally new way of how to grow a mindset in an effective way.
This call “Freedom in a Box”.
What does it mean to FREEDOM in your growth mindset? Let give yourself 10s to define it, to see what comes up in your mind first before you read this story.
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Because I want you to feel how different your definition of freedom is to the other thoughts. To let you really feel that, freedom is actually something that is very clear for each person. But it is also very vague when we come up to find out the common definition that can use for all cases, for everyone.
As Alber Camus, a very famous French author, journalist and philosopher used to define that
“Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.”
It means that we have the freedom when we can actually have a chance to grow ourselves to be a better version by the way we want to grow.
While you can find in the Cambridge Dictionary the definition of “freedom” is
“The condition or right of being able or allowed to do, say, think, etc. whatever you want to, without being controlled or limited”.
This definition is more general and is more well-known by many people about the meaning of freedom. But let think, if we use this concept to describe the society we are living in in 2021, does it really make sense?
When the COVID-19 become the global pandemic. Millions of people are positive with the virus, a hundred thousand people die,… Countries closed the border for months, schools closed, millions of people lost their jobs and were stuck at home.
Does it still mean freedom in the global concept?
The answer is NO.
Because even you are a healthy person who has a lot of money and wants to travel, you still can’t do it because all the countries are lockdown and restrict immigration. And you actually can’t get a growth mindset in this situation (when you really feel stuck in life).
These thoughts come to me when I was stuck in Melbourne, the most liveable city in the world for nearly 8 months, between 4 walls, no real face-to-face connection with friends, families because of COVID 19.
And at the beginning of this pandemic, when I was stuck in my room, I usually ask myself:
“Does I have freedom?”;
“Do I enjoy life in the place where people give it the name “the most liveable city on the planet” and for 8 months I didn’t have any real connections with people who I loved — face to face?”
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These are the tough questions for me to answer for weeks.
When you have time, energy, money, and desire to meet and greet with people but the social situation doesn’t allow you to do it. It means that your freedom can’t define by the way how the Cambridge Dictionary defines it.
And after nearly 8 months of lockdown in the pandemic, I learn 2 very valuable lessons about freedom that I believe can be used as a new way to define the meaning of freedom, or at least it is right for me in this situation. In a short phrase, I want to call it is “Freedom in the box”.
“Your true freedom comes from your mind, not from where you stay or what you can do.”
This is the first lesson I recognize about the relationship between growth mindset and freedom in the last half-year.
Real freedom must come from the way how you think about yourself and your surrounding environment. Because when your mind does not feel freedom, you can’t really have freedom. And when you don’t have real freedom, it is impossible for you to growth mindset for the long term.
Your thoughts decide your life, what you believe will become what you see.
When I stay in my room for 8 months, finally, I can fully understand it. Let me think if you are also in my case, or maybe worse where your country can be lockdown more serious than this city, Melbourne.
You can go around your house, do exercise, decide what time to eat, wake up, and go jogging for a while just in your neighborhood because of the restriction that doesn’t allow you to move far more than 5km from your house.
So in somehow, if we just have a quick consideration, we feel like we still have the freedom, not like the people who are in jail and just can see the sun for one or two hours a day, we still can go out for walking, doing exercise and take fresh air whenever we want.
But the limitation here is we can’t meet the people who we love (if they live far more than 5 km from our house), or travel back to visit parents if you are an international student or holding a working visa in another country. And these things are belongings to mental life — a very important part to define the freedom in each person.
Because the word “freedom” comes from our mind, we can’t touch it, can’t see it. Just can feel and think about it. Therefore, if your mind can’t feel the freedom feelings by itself, even you can own all the material things in the world, you still see yourself as don’t have freedom.
When I self-recognize this lesson, I tell myself every single day that “I have freedom”, even I still can’t back to my country to visit my family, and stuck between 4 walls for nearly 8 months.
I learn to make myself feel happy and enjoy the day every single day during the pandemic time. Because I understand that if I don’t make my mind feel happy, by the feeling of freedom. I will fill my mind with a lot of toxic thoughts about what’s going on right now.
Actually, I faced this issue months ago, when I lived in the first month of the pandemic. And this feeling ruins all my productivity and energy to work on my goals when all the time I just feel I lost my freedom when being stuck in my bedroom.
It looks like I live in the box without the exit door and don’t know what to do with my life when I be stuck between 4 walls.
But when I practice to teach myself to feel the freedom from my thoughts, I know that the lockdown time is the time when I can free to do whatever I want, to grow my habits that I wished I have time to do for years.
And instead of feeling stuck between the brick walls, I feel I have more free time to do the creative world, to spend time for myself to improve and learn to be a better version that is ready for bigger challenges when the pandemic finishes.
Freedom comes from your mindset, not from what you have or where you can go.
Freedom in a growth mindset must be understood as “Free to do what you want + safe for everyone”.
This is so true for this year, 2021. When we are living in the middle of the century’s pandemic.
Freedom now doesn’t mean you have your own right to do whatever you want, such as not wearing the mask in public because you can’t breathe. Or because you need to have extra income so you keep going to work when you know you have COVID 19.
These are the reality that happens in this city — Melbourne. And properly in many places in the world, we can see the same situation is happening from the daily news.
When you pay for your freedom by the risk or danger to the community, actually, it doesn’t mean you are having the freedom. It just shows that you are a selfish person who just cares about yourself.
And many people in this city are using the definition of “freedom” to do things like that “not wear the masks; keep going out and approach the community when being positive with COVID 19”.
These actions make the number of cases of coronavirus in Melbourne always from 400–700 new cases per day and make the most liveable city is become “the most coronavirus cases” in Australia.
And one of the main reasons is because there are so many people who want evidence for their freedom, but they chose the wrong time and wrong way to do it.
“Freedom in the box” — if we just think in general, we will never feel that we can have real freedom when we are inside of “the box”.
And it is not the way a growth mindset works.
But when you put it into the specific scenery, especially in this year 2020, you will see that this is suitable and necessary for us to learn how to feel freedom when we must live in “the box” of lockdown; or being self-isolation between 4 walls for months because of the pandemic.
We have no choice to ask the pandemic to stop immediately from today. But we can choose to tell ourselves that we have the freedom under any difficult circumstance.
Let feel the freedom from your mind and make sure that your freedom does charge anyone under the life risk. This is the way how we can define freedom.
If you want to read more about personal development topics, let check it out at “Wiki Personal Development”.
P/s:
Thank you for checking this blog, I am also running a Youtube Channel @anthony lecturer. On this channel, I share a lot of insights and stories related to Business, Media & Marketing, Personal Finance & Self Development that you can