“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?

Write down on a piece of paper the word “reactivity.”

Do you see the letter “c” between the “a” and the “t”?

If you take this letter out, the “c”, and put it at the beginning of the word –
what word do you read now?

Quite amazing!

We have to remember that:

Small changes can produce big changes.

Written by Ana Melikian