71. The Art of Framing: Shifting Perspectives for Success

Hi, we're Cinthia Varkevisser and Michelle Walters, co-hosts of Mind Power Meets Mystic.

Our weekly show is here to expand your mind to what's possible, to uplift your spirits, to move forward with confidence and joy, and to create a space for your collaboration with the invisible.

Welcome to Mind Power Meets Mystic!

Hello, this is Michelle Walters, the Mind Power part of Mind Power Meets Mystic, and I am doing a solo episode today.

Cinthia Varkevisser, our mystic, has the week off.

What I want to talk to you guys about today is the importance and value of framing.

So what do I mean by framing or changing your frame?

So the idea of changing your frame applies to both businesses as well as people.

And I was actually first introduced to this idea when I worked at a decision analysis consulting company in the early 90s.

When I worked at this company called SDG, we helped people think about how to make very important business decisions.

huge multi-million dollar business decisions.

And one of the important elements in our process was talking about how to think about it, how to frame the decision.

And in the context of major corporations, we were looking at things like, are we trying to figure out how to make the best investment or how to save jobs?

Are we looking at how to expand nationally or globally.

These kinds of frames have huge impacts in terms of the way that companies decide to pursue their goals and objectives and projects and all the rest of it.

In a personal sense, thinking about frame can matter a whole lot in terms of how you look at an issue and how to resolve an issue.

And so one of the examples that I like to think about for this one is thinking about when you have a problem come up, are you a victim or are you a victor?

And my little story about this particular application of the idea of FRAME comes from a time when my son was young.

When my son was in his early teen years, he was invited to go off to a Boy Scout camp for the weekend.

And the idea of this camp for the weekend was that they were going to have the boys do some difficult tasks and grow past them and get stronger and braver and mature in a way.

And so there were some simple, some kind of stupid things that they needed to do at this task, at this camp.

And so my son was off to the races for this camp.

Anyway, he came home from being gone for like 36 hours and just whined about the whole thing.

He whined about there being some drizzle at night.

He whined about needing to camp kind of on his own in a solo area where he was probably 100 feet from the next guy.

He complained about needing to do this stupid task of moving rocks from one place to another.

And so he really arrived home with this tale of framing his experience at the camp as being the victim.

He was the victim in this whole thing.

And my boyfriend at the time, who had been to a similar camp for scouts in his youth, probably in the 70s, made a little bit of fun of my son, pointing out that there were really multiple ways that he could frame this experience.

He could frame it as being a victim, the way he already had, or he could frame it very differently, where he was the victor, and he had overcome all of these obstacles.

And there's really a clear difference in terms of when you have an experience like this, how do you wanna look at it?

How do you want to see yourself?

Do you want to see yourself as the victim?

Or do you want to see yourself as the victor?

And I would hazard a guess that for many of us in many of our circumstances, that it will be a much more positive way of looking forward at the rest of your life if in some of these situations, you might be able to reframe what you've gone through and see yourself as the victor instead of as the victim.

So that's my little story about my son and Boy Scout Camp.

I have another example from a client I worked with recently.

I've helped a few clients with wanting to reduce their alcohol consumption.

And it turns out that hypnosis has been a very powerful tool, very powerful way to help clients who are not alcoholics but who are drinking more than they want to significantly cut back the amount of alcohol they consume.

I had a client who we recognized in the course of therapy that she had really started her drinking when she had started a very negative and bad marriage.

And as I worked with her, I recognized that we needed to think about how to talk about her use of alcohol.

And in the course of working with her, I recognized just how important how using a good word can B for how to frame something.

And so for her, we reframed her idea that she had used in the classic term alcohol as a crutch to she had used alcohol as a tool to get her through those difficult times.

And because this marriage was over, she didn't need to continue using that tool that way and so it made it much easier for her to drop her habits of heavy alcohol consumption to a much, much lower level of alcohol consumption which made her much, much happier.

So just using the right word for something can really help to change the frame on it.

The perspective is so very important.

So when you are having a problem, think about are you making yourself out to be a victim or are you making yourself out to be a victor and would that help?

And if you're having a business challenge or business problem, think about are there multiple ways to look at this?

What is the most productive way to look at this?

And how do you as a team or an organization ensure that you're all looking through the same frame at the problem because one of the problems that especially large organizations where lots of people have lots of different viewpoints is that if you're not looking at the problem through the same frame, you are very likely to have different opinions about the best way to move forward or resolve that issue.

Frame is important.

I want to take a little moment now to remind you all that you are listening to Mind Power meets Mystic.

I am Michelle Walters, resident hypnotherapist and the mind power part of our equation.

Cinthia Varkevisser, our mystic, has the week off.

I'd like to take this moment to ask you to please pause this recording and give us a rating with some stars or even a few words.

We'd love to know who you are, where you're from, what you're looking for, and how we might be able to talk about topics, talk with people who you would find interesting and inspiring.

If this podcast is curious for you, if you think we have something to say that might benefit a friend, please don't hesitate.

Share this episode or the episode that was so good for you with that friend.

We really want to expand our message and you, our community, is a big part of how we do that.

I want to talk about frame in the context of thinking about different ways to look at a problem.

So it's really helpful sometimes to recognize that the first reaction, the first way that you're looking at a problem, might not really be the only way of looking at it.

And that by slowing down a little bit and making space for other interpretations of what's going on with the situation, you might be able to find out some new things or bring about a very productive resolution that was otherwise unachievable with your original frame.

So here's what I think is a little example that maybe many of us can relate to.

Imagine you have a roommate who's not doing the dishes.

Maybe this comes up for me 'cause I have a 20 year old son and this is one of the things on our list.

We're not always clear about this.

So if your roommate's not doing the dishes, there could be a lot of different reasons what the problem is.

And I like this idea of trying to come up with at least six, because if you try to come up with at least six, then you really will have started to expand your perspective about why this roommate might not be doing the dishes and figure out some different and maybe more curious and maybe more productive paths forward to get this issue resolved.

So for example, if your roommate's not doing the dishes, here are six possible situations.

The first one is that she doesn't know you want her to do the dishes.

Maybe you haven't really been very clear about that.

Maybe she has a listening problem and she hasn't heard it.

So the first example is maybe she just doesn't know you want her to do the dishes.

Example number two, maybe she doesn't know how to do dishes.

Maybe she grew up in a house where there were lots of other people or someone else who did the dishes all the time and she just doesn't have any idea what to do.

And so because she doesn't know what to do, she doesn't do the dishes.

No, this might not be the answer, but you know, it goes on the list of the possible explanations.

Number three, maybe she's a person who only wants to do the dishes when the sink is already full of dishes.

She just likes to do them in batches as opposed to doing them more frequently.

And maybe you're a person who always puts things in the dishwasher immediately, and so the sink never gets full, and so she never does the dishes.

Now, I don't know that this is the case, but it's certainly a possible explanation for why she's not doing the dishes.

Here's a fourth one.

Maybe she's a person who just feels grossed out doing the dishes unless she has dish gloves to wear.

She likes wearing those yellow gloves on her hands to do the dishes, and there aren't any dish gloves in the kitchen, and because there aren't any dish gloves, she's not doing the dishes.

But if there were dish gloves, she would do them.

I actually have a friend who always wears dish gloves, And so this seems feasible to me.

Anyway, in this example, example number four, it's really that she's just feeling grossed out.

She doesn't have those dish gloves.

That's the problem.

Frame number five.

Maybe she has a mental issue and she just doesn't see that the dishes are dirty.

Maybe it's kind of like a gap in her brain that she doesn't register that there are dirty dishes and she needs to train to see them, or she needs some other kind of cue, or she needs it on her calendar, but there's some sort of mental gap there.

So those are six different frames of why the roommate might not be doing the dishes.

So let's go through them again, because I want you to see how looking at this in one of these different ways might really impact how the dish getting done problem gets resolved.

So the first problem, she doesn't know that you want her to do the dishes.

Well, that's kind of an awareness and a communication issue.

So that's not gonna get resolved until those awareness and communication issues get fixed.

Number two, she didn't know how to do the dishes.

Well, that's a skill problem.

She needs to be taught by somebody how to do the dishes.

a very different solution to fixing the problem if she didn't know she was supposed to do that.

Number three, maybe she prefers to do the dishes when the sink is full.

Well, you two have different practices.

The two of you have a different way of getting the dishes done and that's just the way it is.

If you have a conversation about that, you could just wind up getting kind of ticked off and angry she never does it, but you're never in fact giving her a chance to do it her way because the dishes never get full in the sink for her to do them.

So this different practices is leading to a communication problem.

Example of frame number four, this is where she didn't have the dish gloves and she would do them if she had dish gloves.

This is a resource problem.

If she had those dish gloves, she would be doing the dishes.

And so sometimes maybe the problem is really a resource problem.

And so by putting a different resource, like gloves, the problem gets resolved.

Number five, that she's constantly pissed off at you and not doing the dishes is her way of getting your attention is another example of a communication issue and attention problem.

And this isn't one that I think would be really easy to think that this was in fact the reason like jumping to this frame when we're starting to see that really there's a lot of different potential frames that might be appropriate to this situation.

And then the last one, she has a mental issue and she doesn't really see the dirty dishes.

Well, that's kind of a her problem, not a you problem.

It's perhaps fixable.

Maybe you can teach her to see the dishes.

Maybe you can teach her to see the dishes.

But it's definitely another example of looking at this in a different way.

So I want you to just take all of this in for a moment and start noticing when you are getting upset with someone or when you are telling a story about how something went for you.

or if you're in business, how you're looking at a business problem and making sure that everybody is looking at that problem through the same lens, the same frame.

You need to have a conversation if you've got a lot of you working on it to ensure that you're all solving the same problem because if you try and solve different problems, you might not get anywhere.

I think framing is one of the most important things in the way I look at the world the way I teach others to look at the world.

And before I finished this episode, I wanted to have one more quick word.

I heard an example last year and I thought it was a fabulous example of frame.

So for this last example, I have a friend who was diagnosed with osteoporosis.

Osteoporosis is that bone disease that happens sometimes more often to women where your bones start getting more fragile in your older age.

Now my friend could have looked at this as an example of getting older and aging and negative effects of things that were on the decline, but instead she chose to look at this in a very different way.

She chose to look at this as osteoporosis.

That's the problem that NASA astronauts have.

I have to solve the same problem as an astronaut.

Think about how the frame of that sounds so much more high-tech and positive and upbeat than I have osteoporosis because I'm getting old.

So what are your thoughts?

What are some of the things that you are framing today that you could find a more positive frame for.

This is so likely to help you look at the world with a little bit more of rose-colored glasses and from a happy and positive perspective.

Please share this idea of framing with your friends by talking to them about it or even better sharing this episode.

Thanks so much for listening to Mind Power Meets Mystic.