This month in the United States we celebrated the 4th of July, Independence Day.

As an entrepreneur, this holiday always make me think about the meaning of the word independence.

My Google dictionary defines it as:
 
“freedom from control or influence of another or others”… and gives as synonyms…

freedom, independency, liberty, self-sufficiency, self-support…

“Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
– Viktor E. Frankl

This is one of my favorite quotes.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived 3 years in Nazi concentration camps. There he lost his wife, his unborn child, his parents, and most of his friends, and in spite of all these terrible life circumstances, he rebuilt his life, remarried, had a child, developed a great psychotherapy model and wrote many books including the famous “Man's Search for Meaning.”

He must have had a great genetic set point for positivity and happiness, but he also worked a great deal on his mindset.

I love this quote because, we usually see a stimulus as something that activates a response almost automatically.

There Frankl sees a space.

A brief space where we have the power to choose our response.

A brief space where we can learn to be creators of our lives and not just be reactors.

Ready for a practical exercise?

I'm a person who likes to thrive for personal integrity by walking her talk. It's not always easy or perfect and, as with many things in this life, it's an ongoing process.

My last adventure on this domain has to do with staying healthy and fit.

I recently re-read Frankl's book “Man's Search For Meaning.” It's really a powerful book, no wonder that there are more than 12 million copies of it circulating around the world! The book is divided into two parts. Part One–of less than 100 pages–is an account of Frankl's experiences in several concentration camps during the Second Word War. These experiences are written almost as notes in a diary. It's sad, moving and inspiring at the some time. In his words:

This a great short inspiring video. Enjoy it.

Check out this short video (4:22) of Viktor Frankl.

See it to the end, you will not regret it!

“When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.”

– Goethe (1749 – 1832)