Exercise Your Freedom Fully

 Many people become self-employed to have more freedom and flexibility. Not as many take full advantage of those benefits though.
It’s common for people to find themselves self-employed in ways that make them slaves to their desks. They may have removed their old boss, but they ride themselves just as hard as their old boss did.
Others find themselves swimming in free time and squander it on low-quality rewards like TV and web surfing, the same rewards they took after working at a regular job.
So where is that extra freedom? A freedom that isn’t exercised doesn’t feel particularly freeing.
If you are self-employed, recall some of the reasons you made that choice. Are you exercising those reasons today, or did they fall by the wayside?
As any self-employed person knows, one of the main challenges is balancing freedom and responsibility. Some end up working very long hours and take little time off. Others have the opposite problem and slack off, finding it difficult to motivate themselves to work very much.
A good solution to both situations is to more consciously partake of the rewards of this chosen lifestyle. Don’t push them into the future. And don’t waste your time on low-quality rewards day after day. Instead, take a real reward like going on a trip you’ve always thought about but never made real. And do this often enough that it makes your whole lifestyle feel like it’s full of grand rewards.
When you make this commitment, it will give you a lot more motivation to work — and to get your work done faster — since then you’re not just working for an imaginary future benefit or a low-quality present benefit but for a very tangible and exciting benefit that will really sharpen your saw.
Regardless of whether you’re self-employed or unemployed or something else, embrace the benefits of your chosen lifestyle as fully as you can, in whichever ways matter most to you. If you don’t claim the full extent of these benefits now, you may never receive them at all.
Claiming a benefit now doesn’t mean you have to leave your desk and go do something else right this moment. You can get just as much of a motivational boost by deciding specifically when and how you’ll exercise your freedoms next, such as by adding something new to your calendar.