Reframing: a golden ticket during globally uncertain times

When you think you have “seen it all” after globe-trotting 37 countries on 5 continents, life throws you a new and unusual experience. It turns out, as the saying goes, when you “learn all the answers, they change all the questions.”  

While I have watched exciting action-oriented vehicle scenes in movies before, I have never been through one myself! So, here I was in a bus leaving the airport with all the other passengers who were on the plane, followed by another bus with the rest of the travellers. No one told us where we were going, the driver seemed to have instructions not to talk. Being driven to an unknown destination, particularly when you are in a country other than your own, is certainly a “one-of-a-kind experience” not one that many people have undergone before! It was 30 minutes of driving around the capital without being told where we were heading. Certainly an experience way beyond a person’s comfort zone.

These lines are not only about a personal story, but also about what I have learned along the way. The lessons learned, in my view, are applicable to my readers, regardless which region of the world you are currently based in.

So we ended up in a hotel run by a local chain, and we were told that we will be guests here for two weeks as a quarantine. Each passenger in a room, meals to be provided daily for in-room dinning, no one is to leave his “sanctuary” regardless of any reasons!  So the Denver/London/Amman/Riyadh journey came to a conclusion and here I was, a self-confessed extrovert whose profession is in the people business: facilitating, coaching, assessing and mentoring talent, consulting, storytelling, leading workshops and networking, confined to four walls, with no human contact. An extrovert’s full-fledged crisis!!

When you cannot change a situation, you are left with changing your attitude towards it. In Susan Scott’s recent article, “How to reframe situations so they create less stress” she explained that “reframing is a way of changing the way you look at something and, thus, changing your experience of it”. Often the first frame we put around an uncertain or challenging situation is not the most positive, re-framing allows us to revisit our perception.

In actual practice, I decided to look at the quarantine experience at the hotel, not as a prison or restriction, but as an opportunity! I said to myself, you have just returned from a hectic business trip to the United States, prior to that you were on a trip to Dhahran to support a banking client, and recently you have completed a certification program in Dubai. Additionally, I had been on a speaking engagement sitting on the panel of the Human Resources Day, organized by American Chamber of Commerce in Cairo. So after all these travels, “you deserve a break, a vacation in a hotel on a full board basis!” 

So I chose to re-frame the experience of the quarantine into an opportunity for rest, well-being, and catching one’s breath and recovering from a cross-Atlantic jet lag! All of a sudden, this felt like a positive experience. I reflected: you have never been quarantined before, this is a new experience, an assessment of one’s resilience and endurance, let’s ace this test with flying colours and get an A+ on this challenge! Don’t spend time on “why me?” but take it as “try me”!

I did further re-framing in my mind and “self-talked”: this will make me a better coach as I can now truly empathize with people who have been in these confinement situations. I even flipped the experience around and added, I can make this into a movie and share my experience with the world! Here I am turning it into an article and sharing the technique of “re-framing”.

As for the extrovert that I am, I decided to engage in several phone calls every day on messenger connecting with family, friends and colleagues around the world. It is what they call “Alone, Together”; keeping up to date on events at home and a dozen other countries.  This was really important, because as an extrovert I do get my energy from people interactions and from exchanging views and discussions.

I also want to be frank, cognitive reframing helped a great deal, and was a useful technique to give this experience a purposeful meaning. That said, it goes without saying that there were moments of anxiety, worry and challenge as well as concern for the wellbeing of family and friends in other locations and for being unable to reach out in person should someone need my presence. I tried to compensate by sharing positive, uplifting messages on social media from my quarantine and to be a source of encouragement and good cheer!

While re-framing was very helpful, other practical approaches had to be taken as well, including reaching out to a key contact to let them know about my experience, so should help be required, there would be a fall-back plan.

Going back to the mysterious bus ride I mentioned at the beginning, instead of the experience leaving a bitter after-taste following the experience, I re-framed it and said to myself, I now know what it really feels when people are not communicated with and are on a journey or path without being informed of the destination or the details.

Blaz Kos in his article: “Cognitive reframing – it is not about what happens to you but how you reframe it” shares the ancient wisdom that “you can’t always control what happens to you, but you can certainly control how you react to different situations”.  Choosing our attitude is powerful!

One of the most influential concepts he shares in his article is that what happens to us has no inherent meaning, it is us who assign a meaning to it. Pretty profound. Stop and think this through for a moment, I guess few of us have ever been taught that! By re-framing, we experience things in a different light and we may even re-view the experience and assign it an “opportunity” tag versus a “drama” or “painful experience” label, or perhaps even have the ability to see the “good in the bad”.

During the current pandemic, someone who has experienced a very challenging “stab in the back” from people he trusted, supported and worked with, shared that he felt pain for a few days. It was challenging, difficult and raw. But he was able to take the time to re-frame the experience. Re-framing may not be immediate, it can take patience, reflection and in some instances talking this out with others you trust.

His new angle/perspective after reflecting is: this is a “great lesson”.  He added “I am over-trusting by nature” so I needed this experience to learn to be more cautious when dealing with people in the future. He decided to be thankful for the stab! He further re-framed it and said, because this pandemic took place, I was able to discover the true colours of these people. If it was not for that global challenging event, “I would still be trusting them and giving them my heart and soul”!

Kos adds that “with cognitive reframing, you challenge yourself to illuminate positive sides of challenging situations, avoid seeing only the negative, and identify a brighter narrative of what is happening to you”.

I am also including here a download put together by Blaz Kos, this can provide a step by step helpful guide for those who would like to try out cognitive re-framing, perhaps start with a situation you wish to revisit or reconsider and aim to look at in a new light. This is an open invitation to take advantage of re-framing as a golden ticket during these uncertain times. https://agileleanlife.com/download/6559/

Reframing is not about denying the difficulty of the challenges or pretending they are not there, but about tackling the situation with more wisdom.

May I leave you with this saying to reflect on:   When it rains look for rainbows. When it’s dark look for the stars!

Ayman Madkour’s motto is “Be inspired, Be inspiring”. He is a Middle East based professional with a global exposure to 37 countries on five continents. He is a certified Talent, Human Resources and Leadership development consultant and senior facilitator, coach, assessor, story teller and author. Ayman delivers support to individuals as well as private, public, governmental and non-profit organizations in person and virtually. He is passionate about leadership development, coaching, corporate social responsibility, change management and transformation initiatives, workplace excellence and wellbeing and other consulting initiatives, to name a few of the areas which see him glow with enthusiasm