Why is attitude so important?
Because, as Viktor Frankl taught, it is the one and only thing that can never be taken from us.
What about your health? Maybe.
What about your family? Maybe.
What about your reputation? Maybe
What about your money? Who the heck knows.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor best known for creating logotherapy, a form of existential psychoanalysis that prioritizes finding meaning in life. Frankl wrote the book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” in which he describes his experiences in Nazi concentration camps. Frankl endured unfathomable suffering in the camps, which included being the only survivor in his family to emerge from the war. If there’s any person whose perspective on life is worth listening to, it’s tough to find someone more credible than Frankl.
So I take Frankl seriously when he says, “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.”
We can control almost nothing of what happens to us in life. We need to be honest about that. We don’t choose the circumstances we’re born into. We don’t choose our bodies. We don’t choose how the people around us behave. There is actually very little under our control.
Our attitude, however, is ours.
And ours alone.
What will yours be today?