Tip 679: Choosing Our Attitudes

From the Personal Development Workshops: Choosing Our Attitudes

There’s no such thing as “That makes me mad.” 

Nothing makes us mad.

Attitudes are choices. We choose to become angry. Or we choose to remain calm.

Dr. Viktor Frankl survived three years in four Nazi concentration camps. He lost his father, his mother, his wife, and their unborn child. After the war, trying to understand what he went through, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.* 

The book has sold over twelve million copies and has been translated into twenty-four languages. It’s a fast read; you can read it in an evening. 

On page sixty-six of my copy (Beacon Press, 2006), Viktor Frankl writes—

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Consider— 

“The last of the human freedoms.”

“To choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

Frankl spoke from bitter experience.

We love this stuff.

Your thoughts? 
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*The original title: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp