How can you change the way you see something? How can you have more ability to deal with difficult situations? How can you prevent yourself from feeling defeated by setbacks? How can you feel more contentment and appreciation for your life?
These questions are answered in the section: A Way of Looking. Read the first article in the series here.
In the book, Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea, Steven Callahan recounts his harrowing experience alone on a life raft. He lost 45 pounds during the trip and went through an amazing amount of deprivation and suffering. His description of what it was like to be back on land gives you a new appreciation for something we take for granted.
Why? Why did his deprivation make him appreciate something we all normally take for granted? Because taking something away for awhile allows you to compare your normal circumstances to something worse. And here’s the point: What you compare your life to determines how happy you are at the moment. This is a reframing principle you should make sure you never forget.
Sometimes people fast. That is, they don’t eat for a period of time. I’ve done it myself for three days. One of the reasons people fast is that food is so amazingly delicious afterwards. Eating is almost like a religious experience. Why? Because eating is wonderful compared to not eating.
If you eat all the time, you really have nothing to compare it to, but after fasting, you can compare eating with not eating, and it makes eating one of the best things you’ve ever experienced!
When Callahan was found offshore by three fisherman, they took him to their island in the Caribbean. Once ashore, they drove him in a Volkswagen bus to a hospital in another town. On the way there, Callahan was overwhelmed with color and sound and smell. While he was adrift on the ocean, he was surrounded for more than two months by nothing but blue sky and blue sea. He smelled nothing but the ocean and fish. Read his brief account of the car ride:
We pass long stretches of sugar cane fields. Ox carts are piled high with cut cane. I cannot believe how sensitive I am to the smells of the cut vegetation, of the flowers, of the bus. It is as if my nerve endings are plugged into an amplifier. The green fields, the pink and orange roadside flowers, practically vibrate with color. I am awash in stimuli.
The contrast between his previous situation and normal life on land was dramatic. He appreciated colors and smells we all take for granted every day. Why do we take them for granted? Because they’ve always been there. We haven’t compared their presence with their absence.
During his voyage on the life raft, Callahan was often soaked in salt water for long periods of time. So it was especially pleasurable to simply be dry. When he got to the hospital, they cleaned him up and put him to bed. His description is ecstatic. Why? Simply because of the comparison between a small, cold, wet, abrasive, salt-encrusted life raft and a simple, ordinary bed:
I lay back on the sheets, clean sheets, dry sheets. I can’t remember ever feeling like this before, though I imagine that I might have felt this way at birth. I am as helpless as a baby, and each sensation is so strong that it’s like seeing, smelling, and touching for the very first time.
Comparisons. Your mind makes them all the time. And whether you feel contentment or dissatisfaction largely depends on what you are comparing your life to.
The problem is, we live in a culture where advertisers are constantly giving us perfect images to compare ourselves with — people with perfect homes and cars and spouses and children — and they give us the illusion that this perfection is somehow possible.
And it’s not just an advertising problem. The advertisers are taking advantage of the way our minds work naturally. You automatically and naturally compare yourself and your life to others and with your own ideals and aspirations. In other words, you habitually compare your life with something better.
Although the process of comparison happens without your active effort, you can assume control of it. Like your own own breathing, it happens on its own, but you can make it do what you want at any time.
Why would you want to bother? Why change what you compare to what? Because it makes you feel better. And feeling better is good for you. As Robin Lloyd put it after looking at the research:
People who positively evaluate their well-being on average have stronger immune systems, are better citizens at work, earn more income, have better marriages, are more sociable, and cope better with difficulties.
It makes a difference to feel better. And luckily, it can be accomplished without too much trouble. It won’t last for a long time, but neither does sleeping or exercising. The fact that the effect doesn’t last is no reason to dismiss it. If you’re willing to put a little effort out, you can feel a lot happier.
Here’s one very simple and direct way to do it: When you feel discontented, ask yourself, “What could be worse?” And really try to think of something. You can always think of something, and it is usually pretty easy.
This is a reframe. Instead of looking at your life from the point of view of comparing it to what you would rather have, you’re looking through a different frame. You’re choosing a point of view just as legitimate: “What is this better than?” Or, “What would be worse?”
If you feel unhappy because you haven’t advanced in your job as fast as you’d hoped, for example, imagine how you’d feel if you lived in a country or a time when advancement wasn’t possible. Imagine being an “untouchable” in India, sentenced to generation after generation of poverty with no chance of escape for you or your children or your grandchildren. Imagine real situations other human beings have experienced (or are now experiencing) that are much worse than anything you’ve ever had to endure.
Or you could remember when things were worse for you, and this will change your frame. Instead of comparing your circumstances to your high expectations of yourself you haven’t fulfilled, you can compare your circumstances to your memory of how things were when things were worse for you.
Try this technique and you’ll recognize that in many ways you’re lucky to be where you are and who you are. And this is not an illusion. It is a fact, and recognizing and acknowledging this fact gives you a good feeling. It’s relaxing and peaceful. It won’t last very long, but it doesn’t take much time or effort, and you can always do it again. The technique works every time, and you are rewarded every time.
In a way, it is a good thing the feeling doesn’t last because as wonderful as contentment is, motivation is also wonderful. Striving for a goal — physical fitness, self-improvement, financial success, whatever — is practical and worthwhile. But when you want to feel some contentment, take a little time and think about how your situation could be worse, or think about what others have gone through, or think about how your situation used to be worse.
To help you find some real situations you can compare your own life with, read books like Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
REFRAME EXPERIMENT
In one of the most simple and elegant experiments I’ve ever read about, people were asked to complete the sentence, “I’m glad I’m not a…” They completed the sentence five times.
After doing this simple exercise, they were happier with their lives. Their “life satisfaction” was improved after the exercise.
Another group of volunteers were asked to complete a different sentence: “I wish I were a…” After this exercise, they were less satisfied with their own lives.
You have a lot of control over what you compare your life to, and if you would like to feel contentment, it behooves you to consciously exercise your control.
Another experiment looked at comparisons in a different way. A group of women were shown pictures of difficult living conditions from a hundred years ago. Another group were told to imagine and then write about what it would be like to experience a horrible tragedy like getting disfigured or terribly burned.
Afterwards the women filled out a rating scale to measure their satisfaction with the quality of their own lives.
Both groups were more satisfied with their own lives after the exercise. Why? Because it gave them something worse to think about and they naturally and automatically compared their own lives to it, and felt fortunate.
You can do a comparison experiment at home. Fill one bucket with ice cold water and another bucket with very warm water. Fill a third bucket with room temperature water. Now soak one hand in the hot water and one in the cold water for a couple minutes. Then pull them both out and plunge them into the room temperature water. You’ll get the strange sensation of the same bucket of water feeling both hot and cold at the same time.
Compared to the hot water, the room temperature water feels cold. Compared to the ice cold water, it feels hot. Comparison makes the difference. It influences your direct perception of reality.
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Mandela describes his time in prison, and it was bad. Sometimes he was put in isolation where the only food he got was rice water three times a day. Rice water is the water rice has been boiled in. That’s it. That’s all he was given to “eat.”
When isolation was over and Mandela was back in the normal prison, the tiny amount of horrible food they usually ate seemed like a feast.
I like to read true-life survival or adventure stories, as you can probably tell. One of the reasons I like to read them is that I feel so fortunate when I’m done reading. I get up and go about my day, freshly aware that I am not starving or freezing or dying of thirst, and it makes me feel rich and lucky and happy.
I like it when authors use examples to illustrate a point, and I hope you do too, because I have another one for you: After returning to base camp from an arduous, intense brush with death in another true survival story, K2, The Savage Mountain, the authors wrote about how relaxing and wonderful it was to be back in base camp:
At that moment we craved no delicacies, no entertainment, no luxuries. We felt like swimmers from a capsized boat who had just completed the long swim to shore. Merely being there was unspeakable luxury.
I really like that last sentence. Merely being there was unspeakable luxury. What is luxury? It is something wonderful you’re not used to. What a rich person in New York is used to would seem an “unspeakable luxury” to a poor person in a prison in Mexico.
In studies on happiness, this issue of luxury is thrown into sharp relief. The researchers find that after having enough money to supply yourself with the basic necessities, money doesn’t have much of an impact on your happiness level. People who are very wealthy are only slightly happier than people living modestly.
But there is an exception to this rule: If someone with a low income comes in frequent contact with people with higher incomes, it can make the lower-income person unhappier with his circumstances.
People who are very poor in, say, a remote village in India, can be pretty happy when everyone else in their village is also very poor. But a poor person in Beverly Hills (who actually would be rich compared to the person in the poor Indian village) might be miserable because he is comparing himself to all the people around him who have so much money.
When Sichan Siv escaped Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge bloodbath, his escape was very difficult and took a long time. He eventually made it to the United States and got a job at the Friendly Ice Cream restaurant, washing dishes, mopping floors, and taking out the trash for 16 hours a day — and he was very happy. He felt like the luckiest man in the world. “I’m free!” he thought, “Nobody’s trying to kill me!”
Those of us who grew up in the United States would find his situation — working at such a hard job 16 hours a day and making so little money — almost intolerable because we are comparing it to our own lives.
But we are not stuck only making comparisons that come naturally. You can deliberately make any kind of comparison you want, and the comparisons you choose really make a difference.
COMPARISONS FOR NEGATIVITY’S SAKE
An interesting study at Wake Forest University, where they seem to specialize in interesting studies, casts a new light on the whole subject of “positive thinking.” Here’s what they did: They gave volunteers “motion sickness” tablets. At least, that’s what they told the vounteers. Actually, the pill did nothing.
Then the volunteers had to ride a rotating drum, something that tends to produce nausea in at least some people. Before the ride, the researchers told a third of the volunteers the pill will prevent them from getting nauseated. They told another third the truth: the pill was fake and wouldn’t do anything. And they told another third the pill would actually make them feel extra nauseated.
They got on the ride. What do you think happened? Who do you think was the least nauseated? You may be surprised to learn it was the third group. They were expecting it to be bad, but it wasn’t as bad as they thought. After the ride they were far less nauseated than the other two groups.
This is a comparison reframe again, and it reminds me of something I read about setting up a joke or telling a funny story. Experts on comedy say if you tell someone the joke is really funny before you tell it, that joke better be extraordinarily funny. But if you want people to laugh, you’re better off saying, “here’s a dumb joke.” You set the expectations lower so the joke seems funnier than it is by comparison.
Same thing holds true when you recommend a good movie. If you tell your friend it’s the best movie you’ve ever seen, your friend’s expectations are set really high. Your friend is more likely to enjoy the movie if you keep the expectations low.
The principle is very basic but it has broad applications. The thing to remember is: You can influence the frame — the way something is perceived — by comparing it to something better or worse. And rather than making comparisons haphazardly and without awareness, you would be wise to choose your comparsions carefully so you frame things in a way that helps you rather than impedes you.
LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE
My wife, Klassy, used to lead workshops for couples. She put couples through communication exercises. One of the most powerful exercises she put them through used this principle of comparison.
Klassy would have each couple sit facing each other, gazing into each others’ eyes, and she talked to them while wordless, beautiful, moving music was playing.
“Imagine,” Klassy would say, “that at midnight tonight, your partner will die. Your mate’s life will be over soon. Imagine how that would feel to you. The two of you have been through so much together…”
Of course, this was a very moving experience for almost everybody. Klassy gave them plenty of time to fully imagine this scenario and to feel how sad it would be.
“What would you miss the most about your partner?” Klassy asked, giving them long pauses so they could think about this while the music played in the background. Each pair silently continued looking at each other, pondering these questions, feeling the emotions, feeling what this person means to them.
“What special memories would you cherish?”
“What would you want to say to your partner before midnight?”
When they really couldn’t take any more and the room was about two feet deep in tears, Klassy would say something like this:
“Now imagine it is after midnight and your partner is gone. And realize how much you would wish your partner had not died and how badly you would want to be right here with your partner…to have your future still ahead of you…”
Long pause. “And realize what you wished for is here. The two of you are here, together, alive, your future ahead of you.”
You’ve never seen so many people gaze at each other totally in love before. “Now,” said Klassy, “take some time and talk about your experience with each other.”
The couples were extremely moved by this experience. Here they were — like most couples — to some degree taking each other for granted, comparing yesterday with today, or whatever. Not really appreciating each other.
“You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Really? What if you imagined what it would be like if it was gone? Then realized it isn’t gone? Guess what? You can know what you’ve got while you’ve got it! You can do it by the way you make comparisons. You can use comparisons deliberately.
This is a way to make positive events more memorable than negative ones. It directly counters the negative bias which makes you compare things in a negative way.
When people say, “count your blessings,” they really mean compare your life to something worse, and feel grateful your life is the way it is. And it works. In one study, people who wrote in a diary about what they were grateful for only five minutes a day were measurably happier.
Five minutes! If you want to feel measurably happier, compare your present circumstances to something worse, or simply think about things you are grateful for. It is a simple reframe, it works, you can do it over and over, and it’ll never wear out.
No reframes will make you permanently happy. But you can reframe in many different ways, and you can do it as often as you like and it will almost always make you feel noticeably better. Of all the mental tools I know about, reframes are the most fun to use. Use them often.
The principle: Reframe setbacks and disadvantages.
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.
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.