Number 15 is something that helped me immensely - 15. Create new meanings to your experiences Every experience in life has no inherent meaning to it. We assign meanings to our experiences and those meanings shape our quality of life. The psychiatrist Victor Frankl found an empowering meaning to life even while imprisoned in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. In his bestselling book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” We always get to choose the meaning we associate to an experience and the impact it has on us. If you go through an experience that puts you in disempowered state, follow the previous step by labeling the emotion you experiencing and then ask yourself what else can you make it mean. If you struggle to come up with a new meaning, spend a few minutes in your circle of joy or travel into the future to your ideal lifestyle. From that place, then ask yourself, what else can I make this mean? You will surprise yourself by what you come up with.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 08:06:39 +0000