Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore.

I'm reading to you today from one of my favorite books of all time by Alfred Adler called

What Should Life Mean to You?

Oh this is a good book I've read it reread it, and I want to share a passage that helps you realize

how powerful you are as a human being. It's in the chapter called The Meaning of Life, and Adler has always said, and I've always believed,

that human beings live in a world of meanings.

We attribute meaning to everything. Circumstances, situations, the outside world, has such neutrality and we all just receive and

interpret it differently. So I'm going to read to you a short passage here and then give you

my thoughts. Here is what he says. Let's take a simple illustration of the different ways in which childhood situations may be interpreted.

Unhappy experiences in childhood may be given quite opposite meanings.

One man with unhappy experiences behind him

will not dwell on them, except as they show him something which must be remedied

for the future. He'll feel we must walk to remove such unfortunate

situations and make sure that our children are better placed. Another man will feel life's unfair, other people always have the best of it.

If the world treated me like that, why should I treat the world any better?

It is in this way that some parents say a any better.

It is in this way that some parents say of their children, I had to suffer just as much when I was a child,

and I came through it, why shouldn't they?

A third man will feel,

everything should be forgiven me because of my unhappy childhood.

In the actions of all three men, their interpretations will be evident, and they will never change their actions unless they change their interpretations.

It is here that individual psychology breaks through the theory of determinism.

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