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Another reframe is almost a cliche: It’s a learning experience. This is an all-purpose, fall-back reframe in case you can’t think of anything else, and it is almost always valid. You can gain some wisdom from almost any adversity if you are determined to do so.

Rather than waste time feeling bad or beating yourself up or lamenting your loss, this reframe boosts your resolve to change your future actions.

In their quest to survive the savage sea, Dougal Robertson had many learning experiences. For example, on the fourth day on their raft and dingy, he was trying to catch a fish. He had a spool of fishing line aboard, a wire leader (to keep sharp teeth from biting through the line) and a lure. His family was very hungry and needed to eat.

He cast the line out again and again, but no fish seemed interested. Then he saw three good-sized fish and excitedly cast in their direction only to see the spool, the line, the leader, and the lure all arc through the air and sink into the depths! He had made a foolish mistake. He couldn’t believe he’d been that stupid. That was the only fishing line they had! And that was the only lure they had.

But rather than wasting time beating himself up or lamenting his loss, he immediately determined never to make that kind of mistake again. It was a classic “learning experience” reframe.

“I resolved to examine every move before I made it,” wrote Dougal, “and every decision before we acted upon it, for sooner or later, because I had overlooked something, someone would die.”

A BETTER EXPLANATION

One characteristic of a good explanation is: you can do something about it. If you explain your failed marriage with something like “women are heartless,” first of all, it’s not true, it’s also unnecessarily depressing, but more important for our discussion here, “women are heartless” is automatically disqualified as a legitimate explanation of a setback because you can’t do anything about it.

In other words, if you come up with an explanation you can’t do anything about, keep looking. Come up with something else because your explanation is worthless. It may sound good. And it may even be true, but if it doesn’t help, keep looking. Find an explanation that you can do something about.

For example, Hernando de Soto explained poverty differently (and changed the lives of thousands). It started one day as he stood on a bridge in a town in Peru. He could see two communities on either side of the river. One was clearly prosperous, with businesses and big houses. The other side was completely different: no houses at all, but makeshift huts of cardboard, mud, and plywood. Each community had about the same number of people.

He was curious how this happened, so he talked with people on both sides of the river, trying to find out more. He discovered that both communities were founded by Latin American Indian immigrants — some on either side were even from the same village.

Hernando’s curiosity was fully aroused now. Why were these two communities so different? None of the usual (demoralizing) explanations seemed to apply. Here was a kind of perfect natural experiment that made it clear the usual theories couldn’t possibly explain what was happening.

For example, one of the prevailing explanations for why Third World poverty is so pervasive in these regions is that because Indians are so communal, free enterprise systems don’t work with them.

Look at that theory. It’s a theory you really can’t do anything about, unless you wanted to try making Indians less “communal.” It’s a demoralizing explanation and if Hernando wasn’t looking at the stark contrast of these two communities, it would be a hard theory to refute. But here they were, the same “communal” people, one group prospering, one group living in poverty.

Another, equally demoralizing theory is that “Yankie imperialists” were exploiting the people. But again, the difference between these two groups could not be explained by that theory.

Now Hernando just had to find out. He kept digging into the matter and found a man who had worked for over twenty years with the Housing Ministry for the area. The man was now retired. Hernando interviewed him, trying to get the full picture of how these two communities developed over time.

It turns out the two villages started the same way. Immigrants came and settled on land nobody owned. The leader of one of the communities relentlessly pestered the government to grant them property rights. Eventually, the government gave each of the residents titles to the land they had settled on.

The people across the river never did that, and they still didn’t own the land they lived on.

Now Hernando had a reframe — he had an entirely different explanation for chronic poverty. When people own their own land, they tend to develop it, to put down roots, to invest in their community, and to accumulate wealth.

When people don’t own property, they have no incentive to invest or develop. Their “home” and possessions are all temporary. They could be evicted at any moment without notice. Why would they build anything permanent or valuable?

This new explanation created tremendous motivation in Hernando. Something could be done about it. And that’s true for your explanations of your own setbacks. A good explanation of the setback will raise your motivation.

Hernando was on fire. If simple ownership could make that much difference in the level of poverty, then he could help poor people rise out of their plight. He created the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD). The institute has conducted experiments, done research, and launched grass-roots campaigns. One campaign, for example, convinced the government to grant land-ownership titles to tens of thousands of citizens.

This one reframe changed the lives of innumerable people.

HOMELESS TO HARVARD

Liz Murray’s mother and father were drug addicts who didn’t pay their rent and were eventually evicted from their apartment. Her mom was taken away to be treated for schizophrenia and alcoholism and addiction to hard drugs.

Liz’s father went to live in a shelter for the homeless. Liz was sent to her grandfather’s, but he was abusive, so she went out on her own to live on the streets of New York.

After her mother died of AIDS, Liz decided to complete high school. She had never really attended school. She enrolled in an alternative school and completed four years of school in two years — and the whole time she was homeless! She kept her homelessness a secret from her teachers for two years.

When she turned 18, she wrote an essay to apply for a New York Times scholarship, and she won. She was accepted to Harvard University!

At the awards ceremony where she was given the scholarship, a reporter asked Liz, “How did you do this?” He was incredulous, amazed, and so was everyone else. What she had done seemed impossible.

Liz didn’t see it that way at all. “How could I not do this,” she replied. “My parents showed me what the alternative was.”

In other words, one way to frame her life is: The poor girl had terrible disadvantages and basically no hope. She was given a raw deal in life, a terrible handicap, a wound that could never heal. Any dreams she had were pipe dreams and could never be otherwise. This is the obvious frame.

But she reframed her circumstances. After living a life like hers, she thought, how could she possibly be stupid enough to let herself suffer the same fate as her parents? Her circumstances motivated her because she saw what happens to people who are not motivated toward positive goals. Because of her reframe, her terrible circumstances actually became her advantage. It drove her on to accomplish the impossible. (This amazing true story was made into an inspiring movie: Homeless to Harvard - The Liz Murray Story.)

When bad stuff happens, see if you can reframe it into an advantage. And if something happens you can’t do anything (or don’t want to do anything about) change the way you interpret it so you feel energized and motivated and get more done.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California, “He told Jim Lorimer that he liked nothing better than the feeling of living life on the outer edge of his energy and ability.”

“Long before that,” wrote Laurence Leamer in his book, Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, “if the Davis-backed bond issue was found to be illegal, the state would find itself in a fiscal crisis unprecedented in its history. Nonetheless, the governor was smiling — not a masked grimace, but an authentic expression of his emotions. He loved it when life was on the edge, and the difference between hope and despair no thicker than a dime.”

Schwarzenegger has found a way to see challenges as something desirable, something he likes. It makes him feel genuinely good. He’s not faking his good attitude. He has trained himself to reframe problems as opportunities, and has enough experience actually turning problems into opportunities that when a problem comes along, he genuinely feels good about it.

There is a big difference between this and someone who tries to appear “positive,” who puts on a happy face, who tries desperately to believe that “everything happens for a reason.”

Never try to believe nonsense. The execution of thousands of people in “ethnic purges” is not part of some wonderful plan. This information on reframing is not carte blanch for thinking up and trying to believe imaginative nonsense. Find reframes that fit reality and that don’t contradict what you know about the world. And, ideally, reframes that make you feel stronger. This isn’t easy.

One of the reasons “positive thinking” has a bad rap is people do it the easy way with phrases like, “Everything happens for the best.” That point of view is offensive to people who have lost a loved one to a tragic accident, for example. It is an easy, all-purpose reframe that glosses over the ugliness of life, and doesn’t change your feelings because you know it isn’t true. In other words, because you know deep down it is not true, it can’t really make you feel energetic or motivated. It is just lip service.

Use your head, take some time, put out some effort, and make good reframes, and they can really and seriously change your life.

Read next: Comparison Reframes.

Tags: a way of looking by Adam Khan
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We’ve been exploring the power of reframes to renew your motivation and strengthen your determination. Read the first article about reframing here: A Way Of Looking. Three very good ways to reframe a circumstance is to see it from another time, another place, or another person.

Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist before he was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. While in the camp, he was severely underfed, he had to work in very cold weather with inadequate clothing, and all the while he witnessed unbelievable atrocities every day. It was more than many could take.

To ease his suffering, Frankl once recast his horrible surroundings into a different frame: He imagined when it was all over, he would give lectures on the “psychology of the concentration camp.”

This reframe made his circumstances look different. It gave him a certain distance from it, an objectivity, and he said it helped him maintain his strength. It helped him endure.

It also gave him a future to look forward to, and a reason to live.

So Frankl looked at his circumstances from another time, a time in the future. Lane Nemeth reframed her circumstances by thinking of her business as another person, as if her business was a child of hers. Lane was trying to get a toy company off the ground and she ran into typical setbacks — debt, excess inventory, high interest loans. She was on the brink of bankruptcy. She was demoralized and thought about giving up.

But then she reframed the problem. “If this were my daughter,” Lane asked herself, “and she were seriously ill, what would I do?”

Of course, she wouldn’t even consider giving up. And it wouldn’t matter how difficult it was, she would do whatever needed to be done. And so she did what she had to do to save her ailing business. She cut payroll. She got another bank to help. And it worked.

Reframing her failing business as her suffering child gave her the motivation to persist and succeed. It gave her the will to do what was necessary. It was difficult and sometimes her decisions were painful, but that is often what it takes to make something happen.

Reframing the suffering itself is often a powerful generator of motivation.

When Morgan Freeman was first starting out as an actor, for example, he struggled with the few acting jobs he could find, and the ones he found were flops. He made almost no money, and would sometimes go days at a time without even eating because he just didn’t have enough money to buy food. He worked in low-paying jobs to make ends meet.

A lot of successful people have a similar story of suffering, of privation, of long hours and the prospect of a bleak future. How do they continue to press on? Have you ever wondered? They understand that this is what it takes. That’s how they do it. They ask themselves: “Do I want it badly enough?” That is a kind of reframe of the circumstances.

In other words, instead of “poor me, I suffer so,” it’s more like, “everybody wants to be an actor, but I’m willing to work harder and suffer more than my competition if that’s what it takes to make it.”

The movie, As Good As It Gets, had lots of great lines, but one in particular I’ve used many times on myself. Melvin (Jack Nicholson) is thinking about going to visit Carol (Helen Hunt) and tell her how he feels about her, but he is very nervous. He really wants to go, but he’s scared.

He’s talking to Simon (Greg Kinnear). Simon says to Melvin (giving him a pep-talk): “You can do this, Melvin! You can do this.”

Melvin says, “She might kill me if I go over there.”

Simon’s comeback is a classic. “Well, then get in your jammies and I’ll tell you a story!”

I’ve said that line to myself when I was thinking about avoiding some suffering (inconvenience, effort, privation, anxiety, embarrassment, rejection, or hardship) for the sake of an important goal.

The line kind of reframes the “problem” doesn’t it? It actually frames it as a challenge — do you want it or not?

For Melvin, who really loved Carol, the question was, “Do you really want her? And if you don’t want her, if you’d rather play it safe and live without her, if you’d rather live out your life always wondering what might have happened if you had mustered a little more courage, then get in your jammies and I’ll read you a story!”

The unsaid part is: “But if you’re willing to risk being embarrassed or rejected, if you’re willing to suffer to get what you want, then get moving!”

That’s a great reframe. You will get a lot farther in this life and toward your goal if you would simply be willing to suffer — to see the suffering as legitimate and worthy and necessary to get what you want.

I know a woman who wanted to get a job in the accounting department of a large firm — a job she had education and experience in. She sent out 11 resumes and heard nothing back. She gave up on the idea and kept doing what she was doing — something she doesn’t like (selling computers).

She was hurt by the lack of interest. She thought she had something to offer these firms. The way she put it was “I was under the delusion I was desirable.” The lack of response told her otherwise, or so she thought.

And sure, one way to interpret the lack of response is to think, “I’m not as desirable as I thought.” But what’s another way? What’s an alternative explanation for this setback? How would you reframe it? I’m sure you can think of hundreds if I gave you enough time — hundreds of other ways to frame this event that are all more or less plausible.

We’re not talking about facts here. She doesn’t know the facts. She doesn’t know why there was a lack of response. So her interpretation of it has to be based on something else besides accuracy.

Because she doesn’t really know, her interpretation should be based on what will serve her. The first explanation she made — the one that popped into her head and she felt stuck with — doesn’t serve her. Thinking she is undesirable makes her want to crawl back into her shell and never venture out again. The interpretation doesn’t help her get what she wants.

One of the traps of negative emotions is they make you narrow and uncreative. In a better mood, she would see there are other possible explanations. But the explanation she came up with first was so depressing, she was unable (without the knowledge you now have) to think of something else.

As you can see, she needed a reframe. She needed to see the same event in a different frame, a frame that would help her, that would prevent her from feeling bad, that would motivate her to strive for her goal. In this case, she wanted a better job in a field she liked.

I came up with a few ideas off the top of my head. She could look at her rejection in any of the following ways and she would have more motivation to pursue her goal, more energy, and more creativity and power, and she would feel better. The lack of interest from those companies might have been because:

1. Her resume needs to be improved. This explanation could motivate her to learn more about resumes, or hire a resume consultant, or just spend a few weeks making it as good as she could.

2. She didn’t show up in person. This reframe would encourage her to show up in person and at least find out if that makes a difference.

3. They already get hundreds of resumes every week. They don’t even bother looking at one until an applicant shows up at least three times — this weeds out the ones with only a weak desire. This interpretation would motivate her to try much harder, to remain determined and to keep trying. Her first response, her natural, automatic response only made her want to give up.

4. Maybe she doesn’t really want to be an accountant. Maybe her heart isn’t in it, and this was a lucky coincidence that she didn’t get any interest from these companies. This would motivate her to give it some thought. Is she sure this is what she wants to do? And if she gave it some thought and decided the answer was yes, she would feel more motivated because she clarified her goal. If she found out she really doesn’t want to do it, she would be free to find something she really wants to do.

5. Maybe the lack of interest is only because of the season. Maybe at this time of year, they don’t hire new people. This would motivate her to find out when is the best time to apply, and while she’s at it, she could try to find out what is the best way to apply.

I could go on and on, coming up with reframes. Any of these and any of hundreds more would be useful interpretations to make, and would motivate further action. And any of them are better than the demoralizing point of view that came naturally to her.

As it turns out, the real explanation was: Large corporations move slowly. Shortly after our conversation, she got two calls back, long after she had already given up. She had only worked in small firms before, but her recent resumes were only sent to large corporations. She didn’t realize they moved so much slower.

Many people, of course, don’t even get as far as she did — they’re too afraid of feeling that kind of rejection so they wouldn’t even send out the resume. The good news is, you’re probably not one of them. The bad news is: That means you’re going to have to deal with rejection. Depending on what you want to do, you might have to deal with quite a lot of it. The way you reframe it will make a huge difference in how you feel and in how successful you will be eventually.

Writers, for example, typically experience lots of rejection. The manuscript for the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was rejected by over 120 publishers. That was in 1974. It is still selling well. Even today, 34 years later, its Amazon sales rank is 1,180th — out of four million.

When Dr. Seuss was in high school, his art teacher told him, “You will never learn to draw.” In college, his fraternity voted him Least Likely To Succeed. His first manuscript, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, was rejected by 27 publishers before it was accepted.

Danielle Steel has over 550 million books in print and she was in the Guinness Book Of World Records for having eleven consecutive books on the New York Times bestseller list. But the first five novels she wrote were turned down and have never been published!

Clearly, each of these authors found a way to reframe rejection in a way that didn’t destroy their motivation to persist.

The ability to reframe has served me well. For example, when I first started giving public speeches, I began at service groups like Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis, and I was basically their 20 minutes of entertainment, and that’s how the audiences took it. I didn’t like that. I wanted them to listen intently and take it seriously. When they listened so casually, it was disheartening to me.

But I reframed the situation. I decided I would make them get how important this was. I came up with a lot of different reframes, but this particular reframe appealed to me the most.

At the time, my speeches were about the Antivirus for the Mind. I had seen it do great things for people and it had made a huge difference to me personally, and I would be damned if I would let those people walk out of the meeting unmoved by it. I was determined to speak in such a way that they would get it.

Whenever I felt downhearted or discouraged or nervous about an upcoming speech, I would say to myself with feeling, “I will make them get how important this is.” And I said it to myself many times while I was speaking.

And I did get them to listen. I sometimes even yelled at them! I was impassioned and determined to get through to them, and they sat up and took notice. People would come up to me afterwards to tell me how much it meant to them.

I’ve used reframes in so many ways. For example, I sometimes run into people (or hear from them online) who are against my work, who feel that self-help stuff in general is nonsense, and that people are genetically predestined to be as happy or optimistic or depressed as they are, and it gives people “false hope” to tell them otherwise. Trying to help people become happier or more successful, they imply, is all just a big scam.

This used to feel demoralizing. My natural, automatic “frame” was: “I’m not appreciated.” Or sometimes I thought, “There is just too much negativity in the world.” And I felt negative feelings.

But I reframed it. “This is a noble struggle,” I would say to myself, “People are suffering and feeling unnecessary negative emotions, and I know some things that can help them.”

In my more dramatic moments, I would frame it more like this: “The forces of Darkness are enveloping the world and I am fighting the good fight. I’m fighting for the cause of sanity and health and happiness.”

Part of my way of reframing my mission is to think about the women who fought for the power to vote in America. Lots of people were violently against them in their struggle. It took more than seventy years of hard fighting to win the vote. It seems hard to believe now. It seems so self-evident that women should be allowed to vote! But it was hard going and people were against them.

And yet, isn’t that what made their struggle noble? That it wasn’t the popular thing but that it was right?

Happiness and optimism may not be popular but they are right and good and have positive, healthy, sanity-producing side-effects, not just for the person who is feeling better and getting more done, but for other people in their lives — children, spouse, friends and family, people they work with — everybody is influencing everybody else, and someone who thinks better, who makes strong, healthy reframes on unexpected, unfortunate events helps others see things more sanely just by example.

Anyway, because I know all this, I am able to reframe negative responses to “self-help” and accusations of giving “false hope.”

Whatever you have that brings you down, try to see it in a different light. Try to reframe it in a way that gives you strength, that boosts your fighting spirit, that makes you want to persist, and that helps you feel motivated and determined to accomplish your goals.

Read next: The Classic Reframe: It’s a Learning Experience.

Tags: a way of looking by Adam Khan
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Most survivors and most people who become very successful are good at reframing. The ability to see things in a helpful way is one of the skills that gives them persistence and the ability to endure. A survivor who became very successful was Nelson Mandela. And, not surprisingly, he was good at reframing.

When Mandela was in prison in South Africa, for example, he was a political prisoner and of course many of the other prisoners were simply thugs. Mandela wrote, “I saw the gang members not as rivals but as raw material to be converted.” And Mandela, in fact, recruited many of them to help in the cause (ending Apartheid).

He could have legitimately seen the gang members as bad people, dangerous, and viewed it as a terrible misfortune to be thrown in with men like those. Nobody would argue with that point of view.

But he saw these men through the frame of his goal. Instead of wishing things were different so he could accomplish his goal, he had the attitude, “How can I use circumstance as they are to accomplish my goal?”

That question can help you reframe your circumstances. When you use it this way, your goal becomes a lens you see the world through, and it can reframe setbacks with the all-purpose question, “How can I use this to accomplish my goal?”

Mandela had dedicated himself to his mission. The South African government responded by cracking down harder and harder. Did that discourage Mandela? One possible way to see the situation was demoralizing: “The more we try, the harder they make it for us, so it would be best to give up. We can’t win.”

That way of seeing the situation is certainly valid, but of course, the goal could not have been achieved with that point of view.

Mandela had an attitude more like this: “I will fight until we have our freedom — jail, beatings, whatever I have to endure.” He eventually reframed it this way: “The harder they suppress us, the more justified we are in fighting them. The more repressive the government, the more determined people will be to fight for their freedom.” That’s the same reframe Gandhi used. The reframe gave their followers fortitude and helped them gain new converts.

Let me point out here that these reframes were not pulled out of a hat magically. Both of these men spent the time to think. They came up with many ideas and discarded most of them.

And when you have a challenge or difficulty or setback and you want to reframe it, take longer than thirty seconds to come up with something. Give it some thought. Come up with lots of ideas. You will be able to find a good reframe. That will change the way you think about it which will change the way you feel about it which will change what you do about it, and make you more effective.

IT HAS TO BE REAL

If you’ve seen the movie, Stand and Deliver, you’re familiar with Jaime Escalante. He was an immigrant from Bolivia who taught math at Garfield High — a run-down, dangerous ghetto school in East L.A.

Most of the students’ parents were immigrants from Mexico. These students felt they had no future and they couldn’t care less about mathematics, especially higher mathematics. But Escalante inspired a group of them to study for and take the AP Calculus exam — this is the Advanced Placement exam for higher mathematics — and most of them passed! The following year, even more of them passed. The next year, even more.

How did he do it? He used a reframe to motivate himself to do “the impossible” against overwhelming odds.

The natural and automatic way to see the kids at the school is “They give me no respect, they are lazy, they don’t pay attention, they don’t care, they don’t do their homework, they’re not interested in school, the system is a disaster and works against reform, and the students will probably never amount to anything. I’ll just go through the motions here and try to get moved to another school.”

That’s the point of view many of the teachers had. Their demoralization was almost total. Escalante, however, saw the situation with a different frame. He thought, “I need to find a way to get their attention.”

This is a purpose reframe. He wanted to teach math. The only students he had were these. But to teach them math, he had to get their attention, and that became his focus. You can see that if that was his focus, rather than seeing their lack of attention as proof the kids were hopeless, it was now simply feedback — “Okay, that didn’t work. I wonder what else I could try?”

He saw it as a challenge. How can these kids be reached? His reframe motivated him to find innovative ways to teach. He saw the setbacks along the way through the frame of his goal — he wanted to teach and inspire these students, to show them with hard work they might find a way out of their dismal surroundings.

And Escalante succeeded. Many of his students went on to college and promising professional careers — almost a miraculous result in those seemingly hopeless circumstances.

Reframing can make a huge difference by intensifying your motivation. And remember, motivation is not just nice, it is tremendously powerful. What one person can do when sufficiently motivated is sometimes astonishing.

Sichan Siv, for example, came to the United States as a refugee from Cambodia. He barely escaped the country with his life. When the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia, it brought starvation and privation and hopelessness throughout the country.

Sichan’s entire family was eventually executed (they were too educated — a crime punishable by death). Sichan was the only one of his family to make it out of the country alive.

In America, he worked hard. His first jobs were low-paying labor work, sixteen hours a day. And yet he was glad to do it. Not just lip service, he was very happy. He couldn’t believe his good fortune! He was in America now and nobody was trying to kill him.

He eventually got more education and better jobs. For a long time, he had a little note posted above his desk that said, “The road to success in America is paved with hard work.”

This is a comparison reframe. On the one hand, sixteen-hour days are exhausting and difficult — especially scrubbing floors and washing dishes. Such long days of work would seem like torture to a lot of people. But compared with suffering and actual torture and no prospect of a better future, the sixteen-hour days in America were wonderful. His past (and his point of view) reframed the long, hard days into a privilege.

A good attitude and hard work tend to pay off, and Sichan eventually got a job as an assistant at the U.N. And then one day he got a call from the White House inviting him to become the first Asian refugee to ever be appointed as a ranking Presidential aide.

Sichan was able to work hard and keep a good attitude, in part because of his reframe. Instead of feeling bad because he had to work so hard, he felt glad to have the privilege to work so hard — and get somewhere with his hard work.

Why did he feel good and work hard? Because thoughts produce feelings, and feelings produce action. The thought, “poor me” produces negative feelings, which produce bad actions. The thought, “I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to work toward my goal” produces just the opposite.

But you can’t just say “I’m fortunate.” For a reframe to have any effect on your feelings, it must be genuine. If you don’t believe what you’re saying, it will have no impact on your feelings. This is not a magic formula — it requires you to use your mind, not robotically repeat “affirmations.” You have to really look at your circumstances and think about them until you can come up with something real that makes you genuinely feel “this is good.”

When I was working on the manuscript of this book, I often felt disheartened when it seemed to take forever, or there was too much material to work with, or organizing it seemed like a boggling task.

But one way I reframed it worked well for me (because it was genuine): Even if this book never gets done — even if the worst case scenario happens and I die before it’s finished — I need to learn this material. This reframed the job so I was more patient and persistent. I was more motivated during those times when the end result seemed very far away.

Since one of my strongest motivations is to learn, I was able to protect myself from disheartening myself with an all-or-nothing point of view.

My reframe worked because it was real. I really do want to master this material and writing a book on the subject is a great way to do that.

The movie and book, Alive, is the true story of two boys who reframed their circumstances and saved the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes mountains. Nando and Cannessa had suffered with their fellow survivors, hoping for a rescue that never came. So the two decided to hike out of the mountains themselves.

They had no warm-weather gear, no hiking gear, they didn’t know where they were, they didn’t know how far they would have to hike, and they had very little food. First had to climb the enormous peak in front of them. When they got to the top, they were hoping to find green valleys on the other side, but all they could see were more snow-covered mountains stretching into the distance.

They were filled with hope as they climbed that first mountain, but when they saw the endless mountain ranges they would have to climb, they thought their chances of making it home alive were slim to the point of hopeless. They were probably going to die in these mountains, they thought. But if they went back to the plane, they would be even more certain of dying in the Andes. If they stayed where they were, they would freeze to death. Their situation seemed hopeless.

After they got over the shock and horror, they decided as long as they were going to die, at least they would die walking in the direction of salvation.

This is a reframe. Instead of seeing it as an all-or-nothing goal, where failure was almost certain, they decided to view every step in the direction of salvation as a victory. They would not give in. They would fight as long as they could.

Their ordeal was long and difficult, but they kept walking. They didn’t give up. Their decision to die walking to the West cast a new light on their suffering and kept their attitude determined even in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

If they had stuck to the first and most natural point of view that came to mind, they would have been demoralized themselves, they would not have struggled on, and they would have given up and died on the mountain. Behold the power of a reframe.

Read next: Time, Place, and People Reframes.

Tags: a way of looking by Adam Khan
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Thor Heyerdahl eventually became world famous, but when he was much younger, he made a hundred-mile trek on skis across a mountain wilderness in Norway in the winter. On this trek, he discovered a way to boost his own morale.

Thor was a young man, challenging himself with a difficult task. But his adventure turned into a dangerous ordeal. A horrendous storm struck the mountains, blowing into a blizzard. The wind blew so hard, Thor had to lean forward almost horizontally to stay upright. His skis became so covered with ice he could hardly move them.

But Thor kept moving forward. He said to himself over and over, “This is the thing to turn a boy into a man.” (He was using his reframe as a slotra.)

He was doing just what Nick should have been doing in The Game. Thor was reinterpreting what was obviously a miserable experience. He reframed it into a transforming test of manhood. He reframed it into a rite of passage. And because of his reframe, he was strong and determined. His reframe gave him strength. Your reframes can give you strength and determination in the face of your challenges.

“Wise people,” wrote M. Scott Peck, “learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems.” You know why that’s wise? Because you’re going to get problems. If you welcome them and embrace the challenge, you will be better at solving them. And you will be less upset or depressed by problems when they come along (which they will).

Al Siebert, a man who has spent 40 years studying the psychology of survivors, wrote, “One way guaranteed to increase your distressing experiences is to not want to be where you are. Your emotional distress decreases by deciding, like a flower seed, to bloom where you are planted.”

Some people may naturally welcome problems because they are freaks of nature. The rest of us can learn to welcome problems by getting in the habit of framing problems as “opportunities in disguise.” We can learn to welcome problems by deliberately trying to see what’s good about the problem — by deciding right up front, “This is good,” and then working to make it so.

I once lost a job because the company I worked for closed. At first I was shocked. But I decided right then I would make sure I would eventually be glad this happened. At that point, I didn’t know what the future held. So I chose a point of view that would help me.

And I took this seriously — I really tried to think about how I could get myself a better job, and what that might be. I wasn’t just thinking positively. I was determined about it, committed to it. I was going to make sure I was glad this happened.

And I was. I remember later realizing I had done what I set out to do: I was glad that old business closed. I found a much better job.

Any little trick you can use to help you think of problems as “good” will help. I remember reading about a business executive who would always respond to bad news with an enthusiastic “That’s good!” And then he would seek to find what was good about it, or to make what happened turn out for the best. It might sound crazy, but his was a practical response to something that had already happened. He was very successful. No doubt, an important part of his success was his response to problems. With an attitude like that, you don’t shy away from problems, and you keep your eyes open while you’re dealing with them.

The funny thing is, after doing this several times (saying “That’s good” and then making sure you’re glad the “bad thing” happened) you can actually say, “That’s good!” with some confidence. You have confidence in yourself that you really will make sure you’re eventually glad it happened.

Sales trainers often give their salespeople mental tricks to help them see rejections as not so bad, or even as a good thing. Do you think you’d have to be a nutcase to think that way? Let’s say you are selling something door-to-door, and someone slams a door in your face. How could you possibly see that as a good thing?

That’s a great question. And if you thought about it, I’m sure you could come up with a few ideas. And although at first those ideas might not make a salesperson feel any better, and the thoughts themselves would seem unnatural and unfamiliar, salespeople who succeed eventually learn to think that way, and it becomes as natural and familiar as the old way of thinking used to, and they no longer feel bad when people say no. They might even feel good!

One of the classic reframes of rejection used by salespeople the world over is, “This is a numbers game. If my sales record shows that one out of every ten people say yes, then that means the person who said no brought me closer to the one who will say yes!”

Instead of seeing the rejection as a bad thing, a salesperson can actually (and legitimately) see it as a good thing. That rejection moved them one step closer to victory.

It’s all in how you look at it. Reframing seems like a magician’s trick or something superficial, but it is tremendously powerful and people who get things accomplished in this world all learn to do it, consciously or not.

Richard Bandler, one of the co-founders of NLP, says when he was teaching college, he once had a student who complained his house was being bugged. Bandler’s reply was, “What a chance to talk to these people.”

Bandler gave the student other ideas. The student could play Milton Erickson tapes over and over. Erickson is a legendary hypnotherapist. Why not practice deep trance inductions and put the people bugging you into trance and give them hypnotic suggestions?

Bandler didn’t look for what was wrong with being bugged. He looked for a way to take advantage of it. You can learn to have the same mental habit. Find the advantage and think of the “adversity” in terms of the advantage.

Milton Erickson himself was a master reframer. For example, when he was a therapist, a distressed young couple came to see him. Erickson talked to the young wife alone first and she told him the whole, sad story.

The man she married had been somewhat of a playboy, but on their wedding night, he couldn’t get an erection for her. They had tried and tried for two weeks now and he still wasn’t able to do it. She was deeply hurt by this and she wanted an annulment.

But Erickson said, in essence, “But don’t you see what a compliment this is to you? He is so overwhelmed by you, he isn’t able to do what he was able to do with other women. You are the overwhelming girl. You go into the next room and think about that, and send him in.”

The young man came in and told the whole sad story. He was at the end of his rope. He didn’t know what to do, or what was wrong with him. The young man said he finally found the woman of his dreams. She was beautiful. He said he’d been somewhat of a playboy, having sex with many women. But he finally found his “one and only” and he was so happy.
On their wedding night, however, he couldn’t get it up.

The young man was very upset by this. Erickson said to him, in essence, “Now you know she is truly the one — the one who has finally overwhelmed you. Don’t you see? Nobody else has ever had this effect on you. You have found and married the overwhelming girl.”

Erickson then sent them home. By the time they got home, they were bursting to get into bed, and they successfully had sex, and never had a problem with sex again.

Why? It was a classic Ericksonian reframe. Instead of an insult, which was a legitimate way to interpret his flaccid state, Erickson gave another and much more positive interpretation, which took away her hurt feelings and took away the pressure on him, and then everything could work naturally without being impeded by her hurt feelings or his distressing (and therefore non-arousing) feelings.

Erickson’s new interpretation wasn’t more true than the old one, but it had more satisfying results.

Think of something right now that is interfering with the achievement of your most important goal. What is in your way? What is slowing you down? What do you think of as a problem?

Now sit down with a paper and pen and try to come up with ten reframes for that problem. If this exercise seems like “work,” reframe it into a fun game.

Read next: Persistence and Determination Can Be Created With Good Reframes.

Tags: a way of looking by Adam Khan
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