Changing your perspective or reframing

A few weeks ago a good friend of mine in the UK wrote to tell me she had been feeling out of sorts, she wasn’t sure why.

The following week she wrote and said she had moved her garden bench to a different place where she could sit have her coffee and strangely she felt much better. Her view was different, she was enjoying life. Literally she had changed her outlook on life.

In NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming[1]) we talk about ‘Reframing’ (so this might be walking through the door frame or putting an imaginary frame around something, or changing where we sit etc.) to create a different meaning. For example to turn a bad experience into a good one, or to notice that there is actually something positive in what is happening.

There have been many times in the last few (or is it many weeks? That depends on how you process language, more on that another time), many times, when reframes have been useful for me.

Here’s an example of how you could use a reframe, at any time, for anything that you need to change your thoughts about, your self-talk, or your outlook (and you could help someone else with it, maybe).

A. Remember an occasion where you got angry. Imagine that you can see this occasion, out there in front of you.

B. Looking at that image - See/imagine yourself in the picture.

C. Now put/imagine a frame around the picture.

How does your response to the situation change when you put a wooden frame around it? What about a metal frame? A multi-coloured frame. An oval frame? How about a colourful frame with balloons hanging from it?

How do you think about that now, have your feelings changed? Has your outlook changed? If not, give it another go and notice what you need to do differently to enable the change.

You can make these changes stick by imagining or actually walking through a door.

Make a conscious effort to stop briefly and think about the thing you want to do, or are going to do, or are have been doing. 

Then make a mental image of this thing and place it up to your left.  Looking up to your left see this thing, this object, this person, this task, this memory, see it in colour and see it standing still.

Making sure it’s still there, move on out of the room and when you’re out of the room, look up to your left and see this thing, this object, this person, this task, this memory, still (very still) standing there.

And hey presto, you’ll remember this - a new, reframed way of acting in the future. 

If you find this tricky, practice.  Only perfect practise makes permanent. 

(Some people you might need to place this image up on their right. It works better for them that way) 

Try it out and let me know what happens for you, then walking through the door will be much easier and your memory will improve.

Sometimes when we’ve met up with someone, or had a thought about something we want to do, we get up and walk off, maybe through a door, or to another place and we forget what the thought we had previously was. Or what it was we intended to do. 

Well most of us do at times. Some of us believe making notes will help, not so good if you then leave all your info somewhere.   Do not worry this is a normal, common human phenomenon 

According to an article in Scientific American online, which being scientific has lots and lots of references and could be (for me) a tad exhausting; when we walk through a door we forget.  Well actually the article was interested in why walking through a door makes us forget.

The article: Gabriel A. Radvansky, Sabine A. Krawietz & Andrea K. Tamplin (2011): Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Further explorations, The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64:8,1632-1645 found at click here  states that walking through a doorway causes what they call ‘an event boundary’ and we update our model of events in respect of what happened previously.  They maintain that this ‘can reduce the availability of information in our memory for objects associated with the prior event'. And then they do some scientific speak about how memory is essentially (in my words) dependent on how or what we associate with the previous event.  What does that mean, you might be asking? Well it means we need to remind ourselves in some way of what happened or was happening before we left the room. 

Which in this case therefore means that if we’ve reframed and/or walked through a door we’ve changed our perspective.

---

[1] NLP - The process of creating human excellence in which the usefulness, not the truthfulness, is the most important criterion for success. The study of the structure of subjective experience.  It is a process developed by a group of individuals who wished to explore new perceptions of reality and gain practical methods for themselves and others to develop their thinking, well-being and success.  NLP now embraces many ideas and “tools” taken and adapted from many other disciplines.  These tools are useful in self-development.  The best practitioners of NLP are those who have the courage, openness and flexibility to develop themselves using all methods available to them.