Why I Created Mental Freedom®

Mental Freedom® began with a question I asked myself in 2020:

Why am I managing COVID with less stress than almost anyone else I know?

Like everyone else, I was living through tremendous uncertainty. Plans changed. My income was drastically reduced. Normal routines disappeared. Things were happening all around me that I couldn't control. Yet I wasn't experiencing the level of stress I was seeing in so many other people.

I wasn't pretending COVID wasn't serious. I wasn't unaffected by what was happening. And I certainly hadn't discovered some magical way to make difficult circumstances disappear. I was simply responding differently.

That made me curious.

The Lessons Had Been Accumulating for Decades

As I began thinking about what I was doing differently, I realized the answer hadn't begun with COVID.

The lessons had been accumulating for decades.

COVID caused me to look backward, recognize them, organize them, and ask whether together they could explain why I was responding differently.

Some had grown directly from experiences in my personal life. Others came from my professional work. Some had their roots in Choice Theory® and Reality Therapy®. One reached all the way back to learning about Rational Emotive Therapy as an undergraduate psychology student in the early 1980s.

They hadn't arrived in a neat sequence, and I certainly hadn't recognized them as parts of a framework when I was living them. But looking backward, I began to see the connections.

Responsibility vs. Response-ability

The distinction between responsibility and response-ability came into focus during a conversation with my son, who was 36 in 2020, about the Black Lives Matter movement.

He was struggling with the idea of systemic racism. He didn't believe himself to be racist, and as we talked, I finally understood what was getting in his way. To acknowledge that systemic racism had been created and perpetuated largely by white people felt to him, as a white man, like accepting personal responsibility for something he hadn't done.

That's when a distinction I had first encountered in Stephen Covey's work became enormously important to me.

My son wasn't responsible for creating systemic racism. He hadn't participated in slavery or created the systems that continued to produce inequities. But that didn't mean he was powerless. He was response-able—able to decide how he wanted to respond to a reality he had inherited and from which he had benefited.

That conversation helped me see how often we confuse responsibility with culpability. We may take responsibility for things we didn't cause, reject responsibility that actually belongs to us, or fail to recognize the choices available to us simply because we weren't responsible for creating the situation.

Mental Freedom® begins by sorting those things out: What am I actually responsible for? What am I not responsible for? And where am I response-able?

That distinction became the first principle of Mental Freedom®.

It also helped me see earlier experiences differently.

When my husband died, I was left raising our two teenage boys by myself. There was no longer another parent to blame when things went wrong. And those boys taught me something else rather quickly: even when you're the parent and believe you know what's best, you still can't make another human being do something they don't want to do.

Years later, when my son Kyle deployed to Iraq twice, I had to live that lesson in a much more frightening way. I could support a decision he believed was right for his life even though it caused me enormous pain. Managing that pain was my responsibility. It wasn't his responsibility to live his life in a way that kept me comfortable.

The Unconditional Trust Challenge

The Unconditional Trust Challenge came from a very different experience, one difficult weekend when two good friends ditched me.

What happened that weekend mattered, but what became even more important was what happened inside my own head. Without enough information, my mind began filling in the blanks.

That experience helped me understand something I've returned to again and again: when we don't know another person's motives, intentions, or circumstances, we create explanations. Then we often respond emotionally to those explanations as though they were facts.

I learned that when I removed the lens of who I wanted my friends to be, I could see more clearly who they were. I could trust that they were both doing their best to get what they wanted that weekend. I stopped feeling hurt because I realized that when you love someone, you want them to be free to do what they want, even when it isn't what you want them to do.

The Unconditional Trust Challenge grew from learning that I could choose what I believed about another person when I didn't actually know the truth, and that some assumptions created far more suffering than others.

Victimizing vs. Empowering Language

Another discovery was much quieter because no one else could hear it. But I could.

I had become aware of how horribly I sometimes talked to myself. I would tell myself I was stupid fairly regularly. Because I wasn't saying those words out loud, I somehow thought they didn't count.

They did.

The language we use matters, including the language no one else ever hears.

I began paying attention to the difference between language that leaves us powerless and language that reminds us we still have choices.

That became Victimizing vs. Empowering Language.

Rewriting the Stories in Your Head

The idea that our thoughts influence our feelings wasn't new to me. I had first encountered that concept when I learned about Rational Emotive Therapy, now known as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, during my undergraduate psychology studies.

But years of working with military members and their families drove home just how powerful the stories in our heads can become.

Communication can be unreliable or disappear altogether during a military deployment. When a family member can't reach their loved one, the mind may immediately go to: Something terrible has happened. They're dead. They're injured. They're fighting for their life in a hospital somewhere.

Meanwhile, a deployed service member who can't reach a partner back home may begin wondering: Are they with someone else? Are they cheating on me?

Any one of those stories might be true, but so might many other explanations.

The problem is that we can experience all the fear, grief, anger, or betrayal created by a story before we know whether the story is true.

That became Rewriting the Stories in Your Head: learning to recognize the difference between what we know and what our mind has created to fill in what we don't know.

Signal vs. Solution

Signal vs. Solution came into focus during an eight-year relationship with someone I deeply loved.

When something happened that hurt me, I was sad. The sadness was real.

But eventually I recognized that I wasn't only experiencing my sadness. I was also, without consciously realizing it, using it.

If he could see how sad I was, perhaps he would finally understand how much his behavior hurt me. And if he understood how much he was hurting me, surely he would change.

My sadness had begun as a signal. It was telling me that something important wasn't working for me, but I had turned the signal into an attempted solution.

Instead of using the information my sadness was giving me to decide what I wanted to do, I was hoping my pain would cause someone else to change.

Eventually, I had to face a painful truth: loving someone harder or better doesn't turn that person into the person you hope they will become.

Once I had clarity about what was happening, the responsibility returned to me. I had to decide what kind of relationship I was willing to have.

Ultimately, I ended the relationship, not because I stopped loving him, but because I realized I had to love myself more.

Appreciating the GLOW

The genesis of what I would eventually call Appreciating the GLOW came during one of the most painful periods of my life, while my husband was dying.

At the time, I was reading John Demartini's The Breakthrough Experience. He used the periodic table of elements as an analogy for considering whether difficult life experiences might contain both negative and positive elements.

The idea made me ask a question I did not want to answer: What could possibly be positive about my husband dying?

I didn't even want to entertain it, but I knew I was going to have to help our two teenage boys through losing their father, so I let myself go there.

Two things came to me almost immediately.

First, we had the opportunity to say goodbye. Our last words wouldn't be hurtful, angry, or inconsequential. We had time to say what mattered.

Second, when my husband learned that benzene exposure had been linked to his type of leukemia, he immediately stopped working as an auto mechanic. He wasn't too sick to work. He simply couldn't see the sense in continuing to work around a chemical that might be contributing to his illness.

That gave him something extraordinarily valuable: time with our children. He coached Little League and soccer. He taught them about wrestling, hunting, and how to work on cars—with latex gloves. As a family, we took a trip to Disney World.

Those things didn't come close to balancing the pain of losing him, but they showed me that even in one of the most painful experiences of my life, there was GLOW.

And as the years passed, I found more.

Our family, friends, and community raised enough money to add 350 people to the national bone marrow registry. My life eventually took me places I never could have anticipated. I've traveled the world, written books, helped thousands of people, experienced another wonderful relationship, and built a life filled with people and conversations that continue to stretch me.

I couldn't possibly have known in those early days what else would emerge from the life I hadn't planned.

Over time, I came to understand GLOW differently.

It doesn't ask us to minimize pain or pretend something terrible was actually good. It invites us to keep looking for what we gained, learned, overcame, experienced, or became until we can find enough GLOW to balance the pain.

That became particularly important in the way I came to understand grief. I believe the process of grief becomes complete when we are able to balance the pain of what we've lost with an equal amount of GLOW, allowing us to live our lives without letting grief hold us hostage.

That doesn't erase what happened. It transforms our relationship with it.

The pain no longer gets to tell the whole story.

The Six Principles Emerge

By the end of 2020, I could see that these weren't simply unrelated lessons I had accumulated over a lifetime. Together, they formed a framework.

By 2021, I had organized them into the Six Principles of Mental Freedom®:

1. Responsibility vs. Response-ability
2. The Unconditional Trust Challenge
3. Victimizing vs. Empowering Language
4. Rewriting the Stories in Your Head
5. Signal vs. Solution
6. Appreciating the GLOW

I was ready to find out whether they could help other people the way they had helped me.

I didn't know whether they would be enough. In fact, I expected they wouldn't be.

I assumed that eventually someone would bring me a situation Mental Freedom® couldn't address. I expected to discover a gap that required a seventh principle—or perhaps several more.

So I kept looking.

As of 2026, I still haven't found one.

That doesn't mean Mental Freedom® can change every circumstance. It can't. Nor does it mean these principles prevent grief, fear, anger, disappointment, or pain.

What I have found is that I haven't encountered a situation in which the six principles couldn't offer a way to work with our response, even when we can't change what's happening.

Together, they provide a practical framework for answering a question all of us eventually face: when I can't control what is happening, what can I do with what remains within my control?

Rooted in Choice Theory, but Not the Same as Choice Theory

I would never tell the story of Mental Freedom® without acknowledging William Glasser and Choice Theory®.

His ideas shaped me as a professional and as a person. They gave me an understanding of human behavior, internal control, personal responsibility, and relationships that became foundational to the way I see the world.

Mental Freedom® grew on those shoulders, but it isn't simply Choice Theory renamed.

Over decades of living, counseling, teaching, coaching, leading, and working with people in difficult circumstances, other ideas and experiences became part of my thinking as well. Mental Freedom® brought those influences together into a framework focused specifically on what we can do when life doesn't go the way we want it to.

It is my contribution, built on a foundation I remain deeply grateful for.

What Mental Freedom Means to Me Today

What began as a personal question during COVID has grown into something much larger than I imagined in 2020.

Mental Freedom® is now taught through emails, Mental Freedom Moments videos, Experiences, Conversations, certification, speaking, writing, and a growing community of people learning to apply the principles in their own lives and with others.

But the purpose remains remarkably simple.

Mental Freedom® isn't about controlling life. It isn't about eliminating painful emotions. It isn't about pretending everything is okay when it isn't.

It's about recognizing where our power actually is.

When circumstances are beyond our control, we can still examine our assumptions, question the stories we're telling ourselves, choose the language we use, become curious about our emotional signals, and decide how we want to respond.

We can't always choose what happens, but we have far more choice in what happens next than we sometimes realize.

The Vision

My hope for Mental Freedom® extends far beyond me.

I want these principles to be taught, questioned, refined, practiced, and carried forward by people who may never meet me.

Because ultimately, Mental Freedom® isn't about Kim Olver.

It's about what becomes possible when more of us learn to create less unnecessary suffering for ourselves and one another.

That is the world I hope Mental Freedom® helps us create.