Yesterday marked the first day of winter here in Australia. The morning was very cold and it was raining too. As we were driving to school, my daughter was complaining about her birthday being in winter. She kept going on, and on about it, giving all the possible reasons why it isn’t so good to have your birthday during winter. As we were driving, we saw this beautiful rainbow in the sky. She loves rainbows and all the magical stories surrounding rainbows. Suddenly, something in her mind shifted. Unconsciously she changed her thinking pattern and said: “I actually like winter. In winter it rains more so I have more chances of seeing rainbows in the sky and I love rainbows!!”
Children are great at reframing. Reframing in it’s simplest form is changing a negative statement into a positive one by changing the frame of reference used to perceive the experience. There are two types of reframes: context and content reframing.
Context reframing involves taking an experience that seems to be bad, upsetting, or undesirable and showing how the same experience or behaviour is actually a great advantage in another context. Content reframing involves taking the exact same situation and changing what it means.
Reframing is crucial to learning how to communicate with ourselves and with others. It relates to how we choose to put meaning in events. Reframing is an effective tool used in business and advertising. The way they do it is by changing our perceptions so that their new representations about something put us in a state that makes us feel or act differently.
In order to reframe a situation, we have to be able to dissociate from that experience and see it from a new angle, a new perspective.
Take a minute and think of a situation in your life that is challenging you at the moment. From how many different ways can you see this situation? What do you learn by seeing it differently? Could you act differently?
If you don’t like something, change it! If you can’t physically change it, reframe it in your mind. By utilising this tool, we can explore new possibilities, new behaviours.