By Mauro Libi Crestani. "I went for a long holiday for 27 years," Nelson Mandela once said of his years in prison.
There are disagreements as to whether a positive attitude in business really has positive effects. Look at those political prisoners who went to some of the harshest prisons. See how they survived. They had amazing attitudes despite all.
A warder's first words when Nelson Mandela and his ANC comrades arrived were: "This is the Island. This is where you will die."
They faced a harsh regime in a new cell block constructed for political prisoners.
Despite being sentenced to life imprisonment, Mandela always remained optimistic about his future. He wrote, “I never thought that a life sentence truly meant life and that I would die behind bars.” He continued: “Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed towards the sun and one’s feet moving forward.”
Being optimistic doesn’t mean deceiving yourself. There is very little benefit in wearing rose-tinted glasses and pretending everything is okay when it’s not. But optimism means acknowledging and accepting the situation you are in, and choosing to make the best of it. Choosing hope and action over despair and self-pity.
Natan Sharansky spent nine years in a soviet prison. How did he survive? Sharansky was driven by the determination never to let anyone determine how he would act. His mode of attack, curiously enough, consists of a truly discomfiting combination of good humor, optimism, and a sassy, wisecracking, with an amazing positive attitude to his situation. Sharansky’s habit of finding satisfaction, interest, or comic relief in the bare walls of his cell, or in the idiocy of his captors, so often in the course of his memoir does he exclaim “What a delight” and “How wonderful,” that one begins finally to appreciate how a mischievous and canny cheerfulness can be forged into armor steel-clad enough to carry its wearer unscathed through hell’s fires. It should be no surprise that Sharansky’s prison codename for a hunger strike was “celebrating to the limit.”
With attitudes as positive in these two ex-cons – is it any surprise that they political leaders upon their release?
Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankel also echoes this idea. After several years spent in concentration camps, he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”By Mauro Libi Crestani.
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