The art of finding personal meaning in challenging times

The world feels like a pretty chaotic place at the moment. People are anxious and fearful about what the future might hold for themselves and their children. Under these conditions of stress - what can you personally do to find more hope in the headlines?

Dr Victor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor, psychologist, the founder of logo-therapy and author of the international best-selling book; Man's search for meaning.

Dr Frankl's main thesis on how some who were interned in the Nazi concentration camps survived, and others didn't - was dependent on the level of purposeful intent in the future an individual held.

If people attached themselves to the idea that in spite of what is going on in the present - they will become what they envisage themselves to be; they maintained a degree of hopefulness that carried them through the immediate challenge and into the manifestation of that envisioned future.

"It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

Even under extreme conditions of stress you have the power to determine your response to it. If you can find meaning in your suffering, you can turn this into a personal triumph as part of your greater journey.

Those that survived the death camps of WWII were often those who's minds were orientated towards the future. Who were orientated towards their vision of the future of being free again. Orientated towards a meaning that they had to fulfill in the future - a task that they had to complete in the future.

Life expects something from you - your mission is to deliver on that obligation.

“Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it”
― Viktor E. Frankl

Now more than ever it is time to discover unique personal purpose, which the future offers you the opportunity to explore.