If you can honestly say you love your life, Mental Freedom is probably not for you. It’s not that you don’t face challenges in your life, but when you do, you know how to quickly get yourself back on steady ground. If people offer you solutions for what something you can try to help you in a situation and you greet their efforts with a, “Yeah, but… I’ve tried that already,” again, Mental Freedom is probably not for you.

I believe everyone can use more Mental Freedom in their lives. When I first started teaching William Glasser’s Choice Theory psychology in the late ’80s, I would ask the question, “Whose behavior can you control?” I would hear answers like, “my partner,” “my spouse,” or “my kids.” I often see messages on social media spouting truths like, “The only person’s behavior you can control is your own,” or “It’s not what happens in your life that’s important; it’s how you respond to it.” Do you read those sentiments and think, “Yeah, I know that, but it’s easier said than done.” Then, Mental Freedom is for you!

Mental Freedom dives into information you might understand logically without knowing how to apply it, or if you find you can apply it, it’s only for a while before you gradually slip back into your old ways. I like to start with the question, “Whose behavior can you control?” And after everyone is satisfied they know the correct answer, follow it up with, “Whose behavior do you try to control all day?” This is often met with nervous laughter, until someone admits, “Everyone else’s.” This is an awesome realization, but what do you do with that information?

Mental Freedom is psychoeducational, more like a class. In six sessions, it teaches you the information you need to learn to deal with any of the troubling things that might be happening in your life. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll never have a tough time again, but those tough times won’t last long. After years of practice, I experience discomfort or pain from challenging circumstances for no longer than about 15 minutes, and you can too.

Mental Freedom takes six concepts and dives into what you can do to overcome the things in your life. The beauty of it is that it’s just information; you can take it or leave it. If you enact all six concepts in every part of your life, you will experience maximum Mental Freedom. But if you only apply one, you will have more Mental Freedom than before. It’s all up to you. Mental Freedom is invitational rather than prescriptive.

Here are some things that can rob people of Mental Freedom:

1. Not taking responsibility for your own actions and thoughts.
2. Not taking responsibility for meeting your basic needs.
3. Giving the responsibility for your happiness to someone else. (“I’ll be happy when you…”)
4. Expecting other people to fix the things you are upset about. That’s your job, not theirs.
5. Complaining about the people you have relationships with and believing that your life would be so much better if they would just do what you believe is best.
6. Overtaking responsibility for other people’s actions, happiness, and relationships, especially your adult children’s.
7. Expecting people in your life to behave how you want them to.
8. Thinking the behaviors of other people is personal. It rarely is.
9. Using language that puts you in the role of the victim. We do this every time we say we need something that is just a want, when we tell ourselves we have to do things, when we think we just ran out of time to do what we wanted to do, and so on.
10. Telling ourselves stories in our heads about people and circumstances without any evidence. These stories are almost always worst-case fabrications that may never come true, but we suffer under these narratives.
11. When we don’t deal with our emotional pain and the physical pain we have without medical causes. We either ignore it, deny it, or stuff it down inside where it turns into something that’s bad for us.
12. When we are haunted by painful, traumatic things that have happened to us.

If any of these things describe you and you’d rather they didn’t, you could use more Mental Freedom in your life. You can preorder the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or ask your local bookstore to order it for you from IngramSpark.