Network marketing companies know that personal freedom leads to financial freedom, that’s why they promote personal growth. Personal freedom is freedom from the perceptions, habits, anxieties and fears that you have acquired in the course of your life that prevent you from being happy and achieving what you want. When personal growth is your primary goal, your other goals also become easier to achieve. That's because this goal transforms your perceptions and makes you happier on the way. Setbacks don’t throw you.

Know some financially free people whose personal growth seems stunted? It’s definitely possible to have financial freedom without personal freedom, but would you want to be unhappy while indulging your every whim, yet not find lasting satisfaction? You can probably think of some rich, unhappy people right now (if not, check out the tabloids at the supermarket checkout line). Studies show that once you’re at a modestly comfortable level of income, happiness doesn’t relate to how much money you have. It relates to your freedom from emotional or psychological conflict and from positive relationships. Of course money can always add enjoyment and ease to life, but it truly can’t buy happiness. That’s why it’s nice to go for both.

Two approaches are necessary: releasing what’s hindering and adding or allowing what’s helpful in you. First, make room for the new by transforming the obstacles so they don’t sabotage you. When your primary goal is becoming the best person that you can be, every stumble along the way is something that you can use and even be grateful for. Grateful for pain? Have you read about people who’ve had life-threatening illnesses or become paralyzed, and actually ended up happier for it? The personal growth that they achieved made them not wish to go back to the way they were before with their full faculties and their old perspective. Fortunately, most of us experience much easier lessons. Of course those people who don’t grow with their challenges end up even more miserable than before.

A Buddhist friend says when s—t happens, it’s the fertilizer that promotes growth, so welcome it! Just viewing it as an opportunity or something to be grateful for transforms it and frees you from wasting energy being angry with it or yourself. Of course, when you’re covered in manure it can be really hard to see it as an opportunity for growth unless you’ve made it a habit to think that way, and that takes time and techniques.

When you come down to it, what everyone is looking for is to feel good. Some think that fame will do it, but check those tabloids again. Feeling good also can easily be achieved momentarily though fame, or addictions like chocolate or even drugs, but if that’s the way you’re achieving it you are spending a lot of time feeling bad, too. Short term approaches tend to backfire, like when you eat to cope with unhappy feelings and gain weight that makes you feel worse. When you let your anger control you, instead of guiding it, you often end up doing something that makes the situation worse. It may feel so good to cut off your nose to spite your face momentarily, but there are far better solutions.

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