Week 368 (brendan@brendanbarca.com)

Here's your weekly dose of Fuel Your Mind Friday where I share business building ideas, lifestyle design hacks, and inspirational content to help you thrive in your work and find purpose in your life.

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PSA: My wife, Pema Sherpa, and I have another blog called The Mindful Minute! Check it out here.

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DITCHING OLD THOUGHT PATTERNS TO FIND FREEDOM

"There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect."

-Ronald Raegan

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In the early 20th century there was a tiger named Ozzy who lived in the London Zoo. For most of his life, he lived in a cage designed for big cats — a 12 x 12 cage made of iron bars on all sides. During his childhood, adolescence, and much of his adulthood he circled in his cage tirelessly day after day. Eventually, the staff at the zoo decided to build a bigger, more natural habitat for him. The new area would have trees, hills, grassland, and even a pond.

After a few years of preparation, when the new habitat was finally ready, the zoo staff excitedly released Ozzy into the expansive new exhibit. But it was too late. Scared and bewildered, Ozzy sought shelter in one corner of the habitat. He spent the rest of his life walking in circles in a 12 x 12 area of the exhibit until the grass was torn up and worn out.

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While anyone reading this is human and is fortunate enough not to have been born in a cage, how many of us create our own cages barred by fear, anxiety, and self-judgment? If we're not careful, we can live our entire life as if we're in a 12 x 12 cage and, like Ozzy, miss out on all the opportunities out there beyond our self-created limits.

To learn how to escape from our own self-created cage, we must first examine what it's made out of and why it was constructed in the first place. For many of us our cage, or our limits, are created based on old habits and thought patterns. For example, if one negative event happened to us in high school, we continue to carry fear around that event and build a cage in hopes that it'll prevent it from happening again. Just like Ozzy, we will continue to try to seek safety in our cage even when there's nothing to seek safety from. The cage has become our entire world and anything beyond it is not worth exploring.

But, how silly would you feel if, like Ozzy, you were released from your cage into an expansive field and you couldn't take advantage of any of it? You just couldn't let yourself be free?

The good news for all of us is there is no cage. There are no barriers around us except for the ones we put there. All we have to do is recognize that we do in fact live in an expansive and limitless landscape and release ourselves from our old thought patterns so we can roam free.

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Until next week,

- Brendan

p.s. Shoutout to Larry for teeing off!

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