Before we introduce you to the concepts and theory of this topic,
let us first explain where these ideas comes from and illustrate their power.
Let us talk about Viktor Frankl.
Viktor Frankl was a psychologist who lived around World War 2.
He was trained in the methods of Freud, that assumes that whatever happens in our
childhood largely determines the person you will be as an adult,
and there is little you can do about it.
If we put it into a diagram, it looks like this:
there is an impulse, and a determined response.
For example, if I hit you,
you hit me back Because he was Jewish during world war 2,
Viktor was sent to the concentration camps, where,
needless to say, he saw and experienced terrible things.
It was in this environment that the deterministic view he had been taught was not correct.
His environment did not determine who he was and what he did.
He discovered that in the absence of freedom, the only freedom he had was to decide his
response to whatever happened around him.
He learned that there was a freedom to choose between stimulus and response.
If someone hits us, we have the freedom to choose our response.
We can for example turn the other cheek.
We can use our self-awareness, imagination,
conscience and free will to determine our response.
Leadership can be associated with responsibility.
Let’s deconstruct that word: response-ability.
Our ability to determine our responses.
In short, for our development as a leader it is critical
that we understand and exercise this freedom.