Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor
Frankls Principles for Discovering
Meaning in Life and Work by Alex
Pattakos
Unleash Your Power With This Practical Approach
How do I find meaning in my life? How can I find meaning in my work?
World-renowned psychiatrist Viktor Frankls Mans Search for Meaning is
one of the most important books of modern times. Frankls personal story
of finding a reason to live in the most horrendous of circumstances-Nazi
concentration camps-has inspired millions. Now, Prisoners of Our
Thoughts applies Frankls philosophy and therapeutic approach to life and
work in the 21st Century, detailing seven principles for increasing your
capacity to deal with life-work challenges, finding meaning in your daily life
and work, and achieving your highest potential. This paperback edition
includes a new chapter on how readers of the hardcover edition have put
the seven principles into action, both in their everyday lives and even in

extreme situations such as Indonesia after the tsunami (where several aid
agencies adopted the book as part of their training programs) and in post-
Katrina New Orleans.
Personal Review: Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankls
Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work by Alex
Pattakos
All those who have been enlightened by Viktor Frankl's great book, Man's
Search for Meaning, will be profoundly grateful to Alex Pattakos for
bringing Frankl's principles alive again in our own search for meaning in
our everyday personal and working lives.
Pattakos calls meaning the megatrend of the 21st century and I hope he's
right. Most people are disgusted with corporate greed, golden parachutes
and assorted scandals on Wall Street and other financial markets around
the world. Most people are tired of our own everyday race through work
and looking for something to enrich our daily jobs.
In Prisoner's of Our Thoughts, Pattakos gives us both reminders and
important new ideas, as well as exercises with which to discover and apply
meaning to our work. Ideas don't merely float by on the page. He
encourages us as readers to work interactively with his basic principles to
cement them in truly practical ways in our lives.
Pattakos also give us rich examples of people who work with meaning in
all kinds of jobs. There's Vita, the mail carrier, who whistles as she
delivers the mail, even in bad weather, because she sees her job as
connecting people and building a community. There's Tom, the CEO who
invites his employees to share in a meaning-based bottom line,
encouraging volunteerism and giving 10% of his profits to local and global
concerns. And there is Nelson Mandela. For many of us Mandela
epitomizes a life's work filled with meaning. Pattakos brings us a step
further in Mandela's experience to the moment he is released. For the
briefest moment he feels anger over having lost twenty-seven years of his
life to prison, then realizing that this was not the time to become
imprisoned again in his mind.
"It almost seems as though meaning holds forgiveness at its core,"
Pattakos tells us, "when we forgive ourselves and others, we are no longer
prisoners of our thoughts."
In my own work as a documentary filmmaker, I have tried to bring a breath
and depth of meaning to the content and the making of my films. In The
Cola Conquest, I interviewed a man who was part of a group of
shareholders concerned with the social responsibility of their companies -
an uncommon concept back in the late 90's. They pressured Coca Cola to
intervene in the murder of worker who wanted to unionize the Coca Cola
bottling plant in Guatemala. After 12 deaths, the shareholders spoke up,
Coke spoke up in turn, the murders finally stopped.

More recently, in Black Coffee, I explored the search for meaning through
the historical and contemporary story of coffee. The three-hour series
ends with the search for the "perfect cup" - the cup we enjoy best as
consumers because it tastes great, it's great for the farmer who grows it,
and for the environment in which it grows.
But my most meaningful film I will ever make is Dark Lullabies, about the
reverberations of the Holocaust on the children of survivors and the next
generations of Germans. It was this film that brought me to Viktor Frankl,
a survivor of the concentration camps like my parents, who also lived and
worked with meaning and humanity throughout their imprisonment and
throughout their lives.
I am grateful to Pattakos for giving new meaning and application to
Frankl's work, and have already begun the fulfilling task of enriching my
own work with Pattakos' suggestions and ideas.
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