https://youtu.be/IhfPyryLa04

Story (Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning): The guard looked at him, stripped as he was of all that identified him, his clothes, his shoes, his name and now his manuscript. The guard tore up the manuscript and called it "rubbish!" This manuscript contained Frankl's life's work. He had hoped to save it at any cost. The grin of the guard as he realised its significance to Frankl, a pitying, then mocking and insulting look, brought home to him with a deep chill how he was really stripped of everything. Frankl decided in that moment that his life as it had been was dead to him. But at the same time, he refused to "run into the wire". Frankl was trapped in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. In those days people in the same circumstances, out of despair, would run into the electrified fencing to end their suffering. He resolved in that moment that he was up to the challenge. We have a choice to think of the suffering we experience in life as a challenge. As Frankl says: "Suffering is intended to guard us from our apathy, from psychic rigor mortis. In fact, we mature in suffering, grow because of it – it makes us richer and stronger."

Story Essence: Although we don't have to suffer to learn, the only way to take advantage of suffering is to work out what it's here to teach us. In the supreme difficulties of the concentration camps, Frankl rose to the challenge of his suffering by refusing to give up; he chose to grow, even through the suffering.

Specific Action: Thinking about the situation you're currently facing, and ask yourself "How can this situation make me into a better, more resilient person? How can I better rise to the challenge? How can I turn it into a victorious moment?"

When you see your difficult situations as opportunities to rise to the challenge, your perspective will change completely. Instead of shrinking away from life's challenges, you'll face them head-on. Tomorrow we will look at how fear limits us.

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