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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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One form of reframing is making plausible interpretations that help. When you realize the first explanation you make of an event isn’t a good one, ask yourself, “What would explain this event equally well — but make me feel better or help me get more done?” We’re looking for a strong explanation of the event. Ideally you want your explanation to motivate you or energize you, or at least not bring you down.

For example, I found a great reframe in the book, Pain Free: A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain. Most people when they experience pain in their body think they need to rest. This is a natural response to an acute injury. But if the pain becomes chronic, people continue with this thinking, and the author says this is a mistake. When pain is chronic it is from what he calls “motion starvation.”

In other words, the human body needs to move in a variety of ways. Modern life doesn’t require that, so we often go days at a time moving very little (sitting at a desk, sitting in our car, sitting in front of the television, sitting in front of a computer), and what movements we do are in a narrow range. Over time, this motion deprivation causes pain.

The author reframed the cause of the pain. Rather than the usual explanation (if you’re in pain, you should rest), the pain is from motion starvation, and the solution is more movement or a greater variety of movement.

This reframe, this entirely different way of looking at the same thing (the pain) would cause the opposite kind of behavior.

The question is, of course, which frame is correct? We now have two different explanations for, say, a chronic back pain. Do you know which is the best explanation? If you’ve got back pain and you have just learned about this reframe, you really don’t know if it’s a better explanation or not, do you?

To find out which explanation is better, you’d need to find out which one has the better result. I’ve tried both explanations and the “motion starvation” explanation is the better one in my experience. Resting increases chronic pain; movement variety of the right kind decreases it.

A good reframe is a strong explanation of the situation — a way to re-interpret the situation so you are more effective, so you’re more likely to get the results you want.

For example, at one point in WWI, two million Allied soldiers were ordered to stop retreating and go on the offensive. This new battle raged for two days when Marshal Foch sent his general this message: “My center gives way. My right recedes. The situation is excellent. I shall attack.”

Foch had been in command of the center of the whole line, and his renewed offensive essentially saved Paris. He reinterpreted dire circumstances as a perfect opportunity, and we can now see, after the fact, that his interpretation was a stronger one (more effective, more likely to get the result Foch wanted) than the most natural one that would occur to most people in similar circumstances (namely, “we’re completely screwed”).

Military situations lend themselves to legendary moments such as these, when all seems lost and when demoralization means certain and final defeat. Morale is often the crucial deciding factor in military engagements (and in your own life).

In the 1950s Marines were completely surrounded by the Chinese in Korea (at Chosin). Someone asked Col. Lewis “Chesty” Puller if he realized they were outnumbered and encircled. “Those poor bastards!” he replied, “They’ve got us right where we want ‘em. We can shoot in every direction now.”

How’s that for a reframe? They could shoot in any direction and be sure of hitting the enemy because they were surrounded! Think about how that point of view would influence morale. If Col. Puller didn’t have a record of success behind him, of course, his men might have thought he’d lost his mind. But they knew he was an effective leader, and his attitude gave his men determination and fortitude. It was a strong interpretation of the situation. It made them more effective.

Contrast Col. Puller’s reframe with the natural and automatic reaction, “We’re completely surrounded and outnumbered. Oh my God! We’re gonna die!”

The soldiers didn’t know if they were going to die or not. It might have been likely, but that doesn’t make it certain. So this is a perfect situation for a reframe because you can’t determine the truth or falsity of any guess about the future. The only valid criteria for interpreting the event in those kinds of circumstances is to ask, “What will help?”

One point of view that would not help is, “We’re all going to die!” Col. Puller’s point of view worked a lot better.

Let’s look at another military example, this time from the Civil War. Unconditional Surrender Grant, as he became known during the war, often saw apparently bleak circumstances in a way totally different than his fellow officers. And this different way of looking was one of the most important keys to his amazing success on the battlefield.

Grant was once away from Fort Donelson when his officers and troops engaged in a brutal conflict, and when Grant returned, he found very low morale among his men.

When the Confederates attacked, they had been carrying full packs on their backs. Nobody had recognized the significance of that fact until Grant arrived on the scene. They were too demoralized to think straight.

Grant thought the only reason the Confederates would attack carrying packs is because they were trying to fight to get away rather than trying to win the battle.

In a dispatch, Grant pointed out that although his men were demoralized, “I think the enemy is more so.” He reframed the situation, in other words. He saw it from a different point of view than his officers. The Union troops were not merely demoralized and tired from the battle — they were fighting an enemy who was even more demoralized. And to Grant, that meant that whoever attacked now would probably win.

Grant had enough evidence for either point of view: Either they were defeated…or they could attack again and probably win. The question was, “Which was the most effective way to see this? Which way would bring the best results?”

Based on what he knew about morale, Grant made his decision. He rode his horse along the line of his disheartened troops, yelling out that the Confederates were trying to retreat, and he urged every man to refill his ammunition pouch and get ready to attack.

Fort Donelson fell. It was one of the most significant Union victories of the Civil War.

In war, as in many other challenging endeavors, morale makes the difference. And morale can be changed with a reframe. Demoralization can be transformed into steely determination and that is a powerful change to make on a battlefield (and in other difficult or challenging situations).

It was a particular talent of Grant’s to see things from the enemy’s point of view. War tends to generate fear, of course, and fear narrows your focus. Fear gives you tunnel vision. Soldiers tended to focus on their own dire situation and not see the big picture. Have you ever had that problem? Next time, try reframing your “dire” situation and see what happens.

Grant was often able to reframe circumstances by widening his point of view, by bringing in more of the scene, and many times this broader point of view made it obvious that the circumstances were less dire than they seemed (to a person with tunnel vision).

Once it was pouring rain, and when Grant rode up, Major Belknap anxiously told Grant their troops were in trouble because of the rain. The roads were hopelessly muddy, they could hardly move, and Confederates were close.

Grant replied, “Young man, don’t you know that the enemy is stuck in the mud too?”

Major Belknap hadn’t even thought of that. He had been so focused on the fearful and frustrating situation of his own troops, he’d forgotten that it was raining on the enemy too! His morale was immediately improved by this new reframe.

Try that next time you face an obstacle to your goal. Widen your point of view, and try to reframe the circumstances in a way that increases your determination.

Read next: Behold the Power of Reframing

Tags: a way of looking by Adam Khan
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In the movie, The Game, Michael Douglas plays Nick Van Orton, the wealthy son of a wealthy man. The story begins when Nick’s brother (Sean Penn) gives Nick a birthday present: A life-changing experience, sort of like a personal-growth workshop, except it doesn’t take place in a classroom — it takes place in your life, and you never know who is an actor and what is real. The game is especially tailored to you and you never know what is staged and what isn’t.

The creators of the game make Nick’s well-ordered life completely fall apart. All the things he identifies with — his money, his calmness, his place in society — are taken away from him. His life is destroyed one piece at a time.

When Nick tries to find out if this is all part of the game, it appears the company was a big scam, stole all his money, and left town. They very realistically give Nick the impression they took him for everything he’s worth. He lost his mansion, his credit cards, his Swiss bank accounts. He was penniless.

While all this is going on, we (the people watching the movie) really don’t know what the truth is, and we see Nick going through all these miserable experiences and on the one hand we’re seeing it as anybody would — just miserable experiences and nothing more — and at the same time we are half-viewing it with the question, “I wonder if this is the perfect experience to teach him to be happier?” Because we realize these experiences are teaching him against his will to care more about people, to appreciate what he had, and for the first time in the movie, we feel he is actually engaged in his life. He looked deeply bored with his predictable life before the game started.

He was a snob who lived in a bubble and didn’t really experience real life or real connections with regular people. He needed nobody. But now he has no money, and he has to rely on the kindness of a waitress in order to get something to eat.

Is this a humbling experience, a potentially life-changing experience for Nick? Or is it merely misfortune? We, the viewers, really don’t know until the end of the movie.

Watching the movie was a great demonstration of a profound fact: That the same experience can be seen in at least two different ways, both of them equally valid. One way of looking at it only makes you miserable without any benefit. The other one helps you learn to be a better person, to have better values, and to be happier.

And of course, the thinking viewer will also eventually realize while watching the movie, that all of life is like this.

Someone might get an ulcer, and that is clearly just a hassle and he has to take medication that gives him dry mouth or whatever…or… this is an indicator-beacon that says change your life — the way you live your life produces too much stress.

With the first viewpoint, he just feels frustrated and that probably just makes his ulcer worse. The ulcer itself becomes another stressful thing to add to all the other stressful stuff in his life.

With the second viewpoint, he may feel motivated to change his life in ways that’ll make him feel better. The second viewpoint, the better one, the one that doesn’t come naturally to anybody but the most buoyant optimists, is a reframe.

The point of view you have about something is like a frame around a painting. You can take a painting and put it in an old beat-up frame and it looks like trash. Or you could put it in a fancy, museum-style frame, and it would have an entirely different feel.

Reframing means seeing the same situation in a different way. It means to see the same picture through a different lens. It means to see the same event in a different context. It means interpreting a situation a different way — in a way that makes things better. It means reinterpreting an event in a way that helps you feel better and get more done.

We automatically see (interpret, understand) the events in our lives in a certain way. You found out in Antivirus For Your Mind that it really helps to scrutinize the way you naturally explain setbacks and find mistakes in your explanations. You look at your explanations and ask, “Is it true?”

But sometimes you can’t answer that question. Either you don’t know or the answer cannot be known at all. That’s a good place to use reframing.

You must explain events. If you don’t do it deliberately, your brain will do it automatically. What explanation should you use? When you don’t know whether an explanation is true or false, what criteria should you use?

The only intelligent criteria to use in that case is, “How helpful is it?” Does your explanation help you feel better and get more done, or does it hinder you?

If you find your interpretation isn’t either true or false (either you can’t find out or there is no objective way to decide), and you find out it is definitely not helpful, unfortunately, you can’t just leave it at that. You have to come up with another interpretation. Your mind will not allow “no explanation.”

Your explanation can certainly be provisional — good until something better comes along, like a scientific theory — but you’d better choose your best explanation or your brain will do it for you.

In the next article we’ll explore how this can best be done: Grow Stronger With a Good Reframe.

Tags: a way of looking by Adam Khan
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