It’s All in How You Look At It

This is a lightly edited re-publication of an earlier article.

Most of our experience does not come from our circumstances. But, when we are in the midst of it, it definitely feels like the circumstances are the problem!

Yet, if you could take any two people in identical conditions, each would experience them differently. In fact, we have natural experiments in many families. If you have siblings, you know this phenomenon personally. Choose what you recall as a salient moment in your childhood and ask you sibling about it. They will have a very different way that they tell the story.

They framed the circumstances differently than you did. And it’s the frame —or the story we tell ourselves about circumstances—that dictates the way we experience them.

The Frame That Sells the Pork

One of the most important services that executive coaching offers is “reframing”. Reframing is a very interesting and scientifically validated approach to altering our emotions about something. And when we alter our emotions, that ultimately alters our behavior.?

What reframing does is It takes a specific set of facts and places them inside of a different “story”.?One of my favorite examples is the following passage in Mark Twain’s classic Tom Sawyer. In the story, Tom has been charged with whitewashing the fence and Ben is chiding him with the fact that Tom won’t be able to go swimming since he is “stuck” working:

__________________________________

Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said:

“What do you call work?”

“Why ain’t that work?”

Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:

“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”

“Oh, come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”

The brush continued to move.

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

That put the thing in a new light….

__________________________________

It isn’t long before Ben is pleading with Tom for the brush!

We run across reframing in our lives all the time. When we are selling, we use it to address “objections”. When politicians position themselves and address their adversaries they reframe their past performance. And advertisers reframe products for us. Do you remember when pork was fatty, salty and unhealthy? Now, it’s “the other white meat”: healthy, lean and inexpensive.

Fact or Story

Reframing can be a powerful tool in crafting our personal experience of the world, our relationships and those areas of life where we struggle with our own perceived weaknesses and challenges.?

The idea is that our experience of life can be divided into two domains.?The first domain is the universe of facts.?These facts are free of any emotional charge. They are just what happened. They are reality.?

The other domain is our minds. In our minds we interpret facts. We attribute to them meanings, consequences, narrative structures and judgments.?All of our emotional responses to life are really responses to our interpretations of reality — to the narrative structures in which we hold them — not to reality itself.?We NEVER respond to facts, only to what we interpret them to mean,

Since the meaning originate in our minds, we can choose ones that lead to optimal experience and therefore, optimal behavior.?

Frame Selection Instead of Inheritance

Given any set of facts or events, there is an innumerable number of possible stories we could create to contextualize them. Each will engender different meanings and emotional responses.

In my own life, I used a powerful reframing technique to quit smoking thirty years ago. Instead of trying to quit, using lozenges or weaning myself off of smokes, I told myself that from the moment I threw out my last pack, I WAS a non-smoker. Then, every time I thought about smoking or had the feeling that I wanted a cigarette, I internally asked myself why I was having such a crazy thought. After all, I was a non-smoker. How bizarre that I should want to smoke!

It worked, and I have been smoke-free since then.

Where Is Your Current Frame Unhelpful?

Think about the most challenging issue you have in your work or your life right now. Are you too busy? Do you need to start working out? Are you struggling with getting yourself to confront firing an underperforming employee, or feeling demoralized by a lack of potential investors? You can take any set of facts and create a new story for them. Here are some examples:

Avoiding firing an employee?

You are giving him the opportunity to find a position where he will thrive --and giving yourself the opportunity to find the perfect new addition to your team!?

Haven’t been to the gym in two months?

Perfect. Now, you will get in shape super-fast and lose weight faster because your body isn’t “used to” that extra calorie burn.

Getting lots of no’s from investors?

Excellent. If they say no they can’t see the vision and would have been terrible partners. The right investor exists. Each No brings you closer.

It sounds a bit like a mere trick of language when summarized like this.?But our brains can’t differentiate between when we are thinking thoughts that “come naturally” versus thinking new, invented stories about our circumstances.?The brain interprets and responds to whatever we think, and our feelings, experiences and emotions are then synced to those newly crafted stories as we consider them.?

So if we change our stories we have changed our thoughts, and that changes our experience. Try it for yourself. Reframe a specific challenge and then keep truing up your thinking to the more empowering story every time you notice your thoughts backsliding to your reflexive story about those facts. It’s a super-powerful tool to alter your life.

Your team can massively increase their effectiveness and satisfaction with access to tools like reframing, and the coaching to utilize them. ?Schedule?a call with me to discuss how Beyond Better Coaching-as-a-Service can benefit your organization.