Like we saw in Choose Your Feelings, you can voluntarily influence your involuntary feelings by building a strong core. Over time this will produce a trained response more often and more quickly, and a triggered response less often and for less duration. When you give your feelings the freedom to control you or shut you down, your performance will be adversely affected. So will your relationships. And so will your joy in work and life.
Friedman is right. Freedom without self-regulation of basic instincts is no freedom at all. Such freedom becomes a license for full-grown adults to remain infantile in their emotional maturity.
Toto reminded us last practice how Viktor Frankl discovered true freedom in, of all places, a Nazi concentration camp. No matter how badly he was being victimized and enslaved, the freedom to CHOOSE his response was his, and no one could take away this most basic part of his human dignity unless he let them. This “response-ability” led to Vicktor-y over his feelings having the freedom to control him or shut him down.
“Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into more arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.”. – VIKTOR FRANKL
When it comes to freedom AND response-ability, you either CHOOSE it or LOSE it. Choose to build a strong core. You will experience more “freedom FROM” and more “response-ability TO-o.”
Together we improve.
BUILT TO LEAD 