Have An Open Mind?
Dear Friend,
To pursue creative family lifestyle design, you must have an open mind.
Hello from the foot of Stone Mountain at Stone Mountain Park, Georgia!
Today, while enjoying the sights and sounds of this beautiful location with our children, my wife and I talked a bit about her experience of transitioning from our old, traditional lifestyle to our new, open-ended creative family lifestyle of adventure.
For her, this was not an easy process. It took her well outside of her normal comfort zone. She told me that only when she had decided to adopt an open mind did the possibilities of our new lifestyle become apparent to her.
In fact, she said that adopting an open mind was the most important thing she did during this process. Without an open mind, she believes that she could not have wrapped her head around this new creative family lifestyle. And once she had loosened up, and our family had begun our new creative family lifestyle journey, having an open mind resulted in her seeing so much more than she had ever imagined she would.
Without an open mind, she said, she would’ve been trying to understand the world with her eyes closed.
You may be like my wife. You want to make a change. You want to pull your family together. You want to rediscover a connection with your partner and create a new and unbreakable bond with your kids. But what will all of this require?
Well, first and foremost, if you want to get your family’s lifestyle out of its rut, you must have a reasonably open mind about the way you might live your life everyday.
If you cannot adopt this open mind, then you are already dead in the water.
What do I mean by an “open mind”? How about way open.
Perhaps you aren’t really interested in making fundamental changes to your lifestyle. Maybe you are comfortable where you are, if a bit bored or uninspired. Maybe you have invested huge amounts of time and money into your current way of life. You have a career with financial potential. You have a home, mortgage, bills, and kids with ultra busy lives. You have a partner with his or her own activities, career, and priorities. Is there a way to get your family out of its rut, to bind all more closely together, without shaking up everything that you have built to date?
I don’t know.
But you need to be willing to consider that it is the very way that you are today living your life that is the cause of your family woes.
I suggest that your current family lifestyle and priorities may be slowly destroying your family.
The way your lifestyle will look after you have completed this process is unknown to all. But I warn you, if you try to limit what you will and will not consider as possible future paths for you and your family, then your process will fail.
Now is not the time for limitations. Now is the time to imagine the universe.
Why?
What we are dealing with here is feeling free to challenge your fundamental assumptions about how your adult life can be lived.
You must be open to the possibility that you may one day find yourself following a path that is unique and unexpected. Even one that others around you do not easily accept, though you will find that they generally cannot articulate why they can’t accept it. You have to be open to any possibility, no matter how unlikely you now think it might be.
The process of getting your family out of its rut is primarily a mental and emotional process.
The actions that you will take later will be much easier. The challenge, as my wife so succinctly put it, is to “put your head around” a new point of view, a new way of thinking about your life and your family.
You will have to suspend your inner judge and be open to anything.
Please understand that your judgments today are heavily colored by your current point of view. And if you follow this program, you will be challenging that point of view.
You will have opinions later, of course. There will be family paths that appeal to you and others that you cannot stand. But first, you must be prepared to take a second look at every belief that you have previously held about how you and your family might live your life every day. Even if you are certain that a particular direction will not work for you, I implore you to drop all of your biases and try to look at all options from an open viewpoint.
It is quite likely that your new creative family lifestyle will be much more unique than you now expect.
You may be quite surprised by how much that you change. Your ultimate creative family lifestyle may turn out to be a miss-mash of styles, money-making tactics, and living arrangements, that you borrow from others. Some of these others may not personally appeal to you. But they still might be able to teach you something. So don’t self-limit what you check out.
The Internet is by far the best tool to use when you begin your creative family lifestyle exploration process. When you start to find others whose family lifestyles you find appealing, read their discussion group posts and blogs.
Even better, travel to conventions and gatherings, where all of this theory can become more concrete for you. There you will see real people who have actually done it – they’ve broken out of their rut and they’ll never go back. The impact of this on your motivation and confidence cannot be overstated.
So, your first step to family freedom is to dump your inner judge.
Do it, or you might as well stop wasting your time. This is a mandatory threshold step to moving on to the lifestyle of your dreams.
Be prepared to step out of your imagination’s comfort zone.
This is a journey into the unknown. For now, this will only be a theoretical leap. You don’t have to make changes to your lifestyle yet. But you will begin to get a feeling for what your life could be like. And you will discover inner feelings and impulses that you never knew you had or had long forgotten.
You will discover, and rediscover, your most deeply-held dreams.
This is the beginning of your journey to a new life. And a new way of living. With new priorities. And new attitudes. Very possibly in new places and around new people.
Are you ready? I hope so!
So, go ahead and mess around on the Internet. Get this process started.
Later I will start discussing what you will need to do next.
All the best,
Hugh
