This may be your most important responsibility. There’s a story behind that. This is your daily message from Chad number 656 to upgrade your mental game so you can tell yourself a better story today because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to the consistently creative coach, Rob Gilbert.
They confiscated his home and belongings. He was imprisoned. They stripped him naked and shaved his head. They took his life’s work – his research and writings. They executed his family, including his wife, who was pregnant with their child. Yet through these events, he maintained that life had meaning. My question to you is, what kind of story does a person have to tell himself to preserve such a perspective?
This was the story of Dr. Viktor Frankl, neurologist and psychiatrist, who passed through four concentration camps at the hands of the Nazi during WWII. He had already begun to write what would become “Man’s Search for Meaning” in Vienna before the war. He hid it in the lining of his coat and it was confiscated when he was processed in Auschwitz. He began to mentally reconstruct the message in the camps and published it a year after the war. He dictated it just nine days under the original title “Nevertheless, Say Yes to Life.”
What kind of story does a person tell himself to experience so much meaninglessness to come out on the other end with that message? My question to you is, would the stories you tell yourself sustain such a stance? You are telling yourself different stories all day long. They either sustain or drain. They are helping you grow into the best version of yourself or holding you back. One of the storylines Frankl told himself can be summed up in the equation E + R = O (event plus response equals outcome). One of the most quoted lines from Man’s Search is “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.“ Frankl maintained his ability to respond. As Covey has phrased it, that is the power of response-ability. Is the story you are telling yourself helping you maintain that power?
You can tell me the stories you tell yourself by emailing at fromchadsmith@gmail.com. You can find these messages on YouTube by searching @fromchad. You can read the transcript of this message and hundreds of others at fromchad.com.
