I awoke to deep sweats only to find out it wasn’t a dream. I had locked myself up behind the bars of life. Dripping furiously with fear, anxiety, and worry that I let life over exhaust me, I became invisible to myself. I had sought the acclaim others gave me all the time on my validation of worth. I literally was being controlled by others opinions of me. Eventually I lost sight all together of whom I was and goals I had set.

This book came to me like a surprise party—planned and ready, waiting for me to just open the door.  I had just started working as a personal coach when I realized my clients were doing the work of humanity.  By changing the way they chose to live and their perspectives on what they wanted out of life, they were making a positive difference in the world around them.  And, yet, that’s not the whole story of how this book came into my life.

Gay Hendricks is an internationally famous author, seminar leader, web entrepreneur, and filmmaker.
He is the author of more than 20 books, including the national bestseller Conscious Loving and the founder of the Spiritual Cinema Circle. He resides with his wife, author and seminar leader Kathlyn Hendricks, in Ojai, California.

Five Wishes describes a conversation that changed your life. Who was it with and what happened?

It was a brief conversation at a party I didn’t even want to be at. I went to the party with Kathlyn, who would later become my wife (now 27 years into a great marriage that probably would not have occurred had I not gone to the party.) I met a man named Ed Steinbrecher, who seemed about as uncomfortable at the party as I was. We decided not to engage in any small talk, so he asked me a question that definitely qualified as Big Talk.

In order to begin to understand the extent to which his life and work stand today as symbols of strength and unwavering determination in the face of unimaginable suffering, one might first try, as much as it is possible, to imagine what life must have been like for Viktor Frankl living in Vienna in the months and weeks leading up to his internment in a Nazi concentration camp.

In 1942, at the age of thirty-seven, less than one year after being married, Frankl was granted a visa from the United States Consulate in Vienna. Emigration to the United States would allow the gifted doctor to escape the pervasive Anti-Semitism by which he was surrounded in his daily life as well as imminent imprisonment by the Gestapo. The visa, for which Frankl had waited years, also meant that he would be able to continue his very important psychiatric work in a relatively free and unabated intellectual environment.