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Choice: Between Stimulus and Response
By Penny | September 14, 2007
Have you ever tried to smile and think a negative thought? Usually the result is that one of the feelings will win out. Whether it is you will feel better because you smiled or that you will eventually feel bad and frown, this is an important fact in human psychology.
Humans cannot really hold attention on more than one thought at a time. This is the key to mastering oneself in this life.
Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who ended up in a concentration camp during World War II. He witnessed numerous atrocities and was a victim of German experimentation himself.
However, he observed that people trapped in the camp had different ways of dealing with their dire predicament. Some people lost the will to live, others went mad. Some men turned on their fellow inmates, while some ended their lives in suicide.
There were others, though who turned out quite differently. There were men who went from hut to hut, and gave away their last piece of bread. They encouraged the men, women, and children of the camp to keep on living. They gave them a reason to hope for a better future.
Why were these men, in the face of overwhelming despair, still able to master themselves enough to help others with their problems? This is what puzzled Frankl. But even he would eventually find out why when he was tortured.
Frankl believes that between stimuli and response lays the choice of man to react to any given circumstance. He has practiced this in the concentration camps and his sense of future vision helped him survive. He realized he had a choice, and his choice was to live.
Topics: Self-confidence |