Situational Prison: A condition, action or way of living that prevents you from doing the things you really want to.

Situational prison is something that I think many people inherentely get stuck in one way or another at some point in their lives. This doesn’t neccessarily mean situational prison is a bad thing, like having children for example would limit your ability to do certain things but may be something that outweighs whatever else it is you want to do. In this post however, I want to focus on the negative situational prison(s) that we can create for ourselves that really limit our abilities to accomplish our goals and dreams.

I have been stuck in many situational prisons in my life from relationships I didn’t really want to be in to having loads of debt that prevented me from doing pretty much anything. As I am sure you can relate, this is not a fun point in life and really brings down your overall attitude, which in turns drastically effects the bottom line of being able to do what you want with your life. Recently I have done a lot of thinking about situational prison and how it really impacts so many people, but more importantly, how I could get out of it when it popped up.

This takes quite a bit of honesty if you want to do it right, but can be useful in helping you figure out the things you need to eliminate or change to allow yourself the freedom to do what you want. Below is a set of questions I used to analyze myself and it may not be relevant to everyone, but I thought I would share.

1. What in my life causes me significant stress, unhappiness or anger?
2. Of these things, how many of them can I change? (Sorry, you have to pay tax)
3. How could I go about changing them?
4. What would improve if I made the changes?
5. What (if any) would the consequences of making the changes be?

Once you have listed all of these out, take a good look over them and answer each question for one specific situational prison. At the end, you should have a good overview of your current life and a path to changing it (if you really want to).