Logo
“Logotherapy was developed by neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, on a concept based on the premise that the primary motivational force of an individual is to find a meaning in life.”
- Wikipedia
Sorry if you were looking for a marketing post. We aren’t going to be talking about branding, marketing, or logos. If you need help with that, contact my friend Erik Svendsen at Reddoor Creative. He is a world class talent that pretty much touches every printed thing we offer.
This actually, is a far more important conversation about “logos”. It is the one referenced in the definition above.
After surviving a Holocaust experience, Victor Frankl became a psychotherapist and ended up in the Viennese hospital system where they had a tremendous problem with depression and suicide. Translating and redeeming the horrors of his experience under the Nazis helped him create a simple three-step process that is now known as Logotherapy:
Identify a simple project that if you don’t work on, someone will suffer. Something that makes the world a better place.
Find a redemptive perspective on your suffering or pain.
Get a group of unconditionally supportive people around you.
Doing these things will not only help you with depression, but it will also change your life.
It will provide an inspired purpose for your life.
It will allow you to reinterpret the story of your life for good.
It will allow your story to become powerful currency toward a much better future.
It will make sure you have the encouragement and support to get you there.
Logotherapy is very foundational to how we coach and plays a very specific role in our Lifeplan weekend experience. By the end of the weekend, you have redeemed your entire story (and found how it very specifically serves your future), figured out an inspired purpose for your life, and identified next steps in that direction with some understanding of the people who will help you get there.
Back to Frankl, his Holocaust experience, and all those depressed and suicidal patients. Frankl’s redemptive perspective on his persecution in the concentration camp that kept him from committing suicide like so many others alongside him: dying at their hands instead of taking his own life would help be part of telling the world about the evil that killed him.
It is said that he worked with as many as 20,000 Viennese patients utilizing his Logotherapy…and never lost a single one to suicide.
So is it possible to rewrite your life story, finding redemptive value in every experience? Can you use that redeemed story to powerfully inform a better future? Is there really an inspired purpose for your life?
The answer to all three of those questions is an emphatic “YES”. The proof is in Victor Frankl’s life, 20,000 Viennese patients, the hundreds that we have coached through our Lifeplan process, and my own life. I exchanged a tragic family history, an uninspiring career, and a frustrated life, for one that I still don’t believe I am getting to live.
The life I live, the client relationships I have, my friendships, and the transcendental purpose that guides all of that is more than I could have ever hoped or imagined. I feel like my life has gone from a book that no one would want to read to what feels like a real page-turner.
Consider
Are you clear about the purpose of your life?
Are you working on something with your life that is making a difference in the world?
Do you feel pinned down or trapped by the tragedy of the life you’ve lived?
Do you have people around you who unconditionally support you in the direction of a more inspired life?