Meanings Make All the Difference in Your Success

Holocaust & Nazi concentration camp survivor Victor Frankl, a world reknowned psychologist, wrote a book titled "Man's Search for Meaning." His concentration camp experience transformed his life's work into studying the effect of the "meanings" human beings place on their circumstances, which he called "Logos Therapy." "Logos" being the latin word for "meaning."

It was the meaning Frankl placed on his experience while in the Nazi concenctration camps in World War II that allowed him to create survival mechanisms and actions, while millions of others gave up hope, and meaning, and ultimately perished.

I bring this up because what I'm learning in working with more and more people in my coaching practice is that "meaning" makes the difference in everything. What I've come to realize is that our "meanings" are the driving force behind just about everything we do, think, have and feel in our life, including:

- our overall Quality of Life
- our level of stress
- our level of happiness
- our communications with others (and ourselves)
- our ability or inability to overcome obstacles
- our ability to inability to overcome failures
- our ability to take action and move forward, or stay stuck

I returned to this concept recently in working with a client who was stuck (if he's reading this he will probably know who he is). He joined The Achievement Gym back in the late spring and we set some goals for bringing on new business, and seemed like we had some momentum with each coaching call, but nothing ever got accomplished.

He continued to be distracted and sabotage whatever commitment he made to himself on each call. In one of our most recent sessions, I was at a loss for where to go next, and knew I owed him something more than what he was getting from me. So, I asked him this question, "what does a new client mean to you and your business?"

Now, I'm no genius and I wasn't going anywhere special with that question except to try and get some leverage on him by having him express, in financially quantifiable terms, the impact of a new client. But what I got was golden.

He answer me with a laundry list of activities that immediately put me into overwhelm just listening to it (imagine what it was doing to him?). When he finished reciting the overwhelming list of stuff he immediately had to do for a new client, I said, "no wonder you don't want to bring in new business."

He wasn't focused on the positive things a new client could mean, such as a new long term business relationship, new income, a step closer to fulfilling his dreams for his personal and professional life, making a difference and helping someone make their business function more effectively, etc.

He was focused solely on immediately setting in motion all the "demands" this new client was going to place on him. Now, although I could say its easy to just change the meaning of that situation and focus on all the positives that come from the new client (what is called "reframing"), that's not enough in this situation.

It's not enough because he had developed a habit of responding immediately upon the demands of each new client on their terms (does this sound familiar to you?), in a way that did not support a shift in his meanings. Therefore we had to work on setting boundaries first (see Part 3 in our "Setting Boundaries" series).

Although it wasn't initially possible in this case, in many, many instances (as Victor Frankl has shown us) it is as easy as just deciding to change the meaning of the experience to something that supports our more desired outcome. You do this by asking yourself a couple of questions:

1) What meaning have I placed on this situation?
2) What else could this mean?
3) What is the most positive, powerful meaning I could place on this situation that would support my most desired outcomes?

Try it for yourself and let me know how it goes.

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