Prisoners of Our Thoughts should be on a mandatory reading list for universities all over the world. The husband and wife team Alex Pattakos, PhD was a colleague of Victor Frankl, and Elaine Dundon, MBA a personal and organizational leader, who are both the founders of the Global Meaning Institute, modified the words of Frankl’s Man’s Search Meaning to help others realize that big or small there’s meaning to everything in life. The author’s whole purpose in writing Prisoners of Our Thoughts is to address the crisis on meaning in people’s daily lives including in their work. First Pattakos was urged by Frankl to write this book and then his wife Dundon teamed up with him because many people revealed to the duo that “they feel overwhelmed, lonely, and unfulfilled.”
It’s quite common for people that don’t find meaning in their lives to be left with a dark hole inside that makes them feel like their life is spiraling out of control. The couple created this self-help book with Frankl’s “seven core principles” and their concept of meaningology, which happens to be “the study and practice of the meaning in life, work, and society.” To build a ladder that helps people struggling with the crisis on meaning, so they can begin to climb out of the dark hole and find meaning in their life’s. Throughout the book the formatting of the text is very simplistic and organized. Meaning that the chapters are all very similar in the way they are organized. Each chapter there is a topic spoken about and as each chapter is prolonged you can see the why the book is such hit a with the many examples, exercises to try at home, and situations that the readers can to easily to connect to.
The authors put the wise words of Frankl and their own words in meaningology in a fresh, simple, and easy language to understand so readers of all ages can relate. For example, a good visual they put in the book is the “existential analysis” which has a horizontal axis with failure to the left and success to the right, and on the vertical axis, it has meaning at the top and despair at the bottom. They used this visual exercise to challenge readers to take a step back and really look at their lives and ask, “what is important in our lives”. A format like this so readers can actually be interactive as they read which is a big reason why it’s so easy for many to understand and connect to.
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