Reframing For Personal Power – Part I

Perspective is a point of view; a way of looking at or interpreting a particular set of events. We all have perspectives about our world and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Are you ready for one of the most important secrets of life? Your perspective determines your experience in life, not your circumstances.  Your understanding of perspective gives you personal power.

One aspect of personal power is knowing that you can you can change your perspective at any time, thus changing your experience. Perspective is a little like wearing glasses. Your glasses are silver and have yellow lenses. Everyday you put your glasses on and see the world with a yellow tint. Overtime you forget that your glasses are tinted yellow and you start to believe that the world, through your eyes, has a yellow glaze to it. The trees are not quite green, more autumn in color; the sky is not quite blue but more greenish. You may even think this is due to an increase in pollution or many other possibilities.

Two years later you go back to your optometrist and get a new pair of glasses. They ask you if you still want a yellow tint and it is now that you realize you had forgotten that they had a yellow tint. In a moment you decide it is time for something different and so you decide not to have any tint. You pick up your glasses and put them on and as you turn around to see the world you are suddenly taken a back by the richness of color everywhere. Green is so green, blue so blue, the world looks vibrant and alive. The sky is really blue.

Your perspective has suddenly changed. The glasses give us a clear understanding of how easy it is to see something in a particular way – your perspective. By exercising your personal power and change the way you see something…reframing your perspective, everything can look vastly different.

Knowing what our perspective is, allows us to have a greater awareness of how we make decisions and how our perspective determines the way that we see things. What we see is based on what we believe. However with new information we can change what we believe.

As an example, Heather was jumping from rock to rock along the shore. She was jumping very timidly, scared of falling into the water and getting wet. Suddenly, she slipped and got soaked. Once again, jumping from rock to rock, she found that since she was already wet, she had nothing to fear. She started taking great leaps and having twice as much fun as before! We could say that Heather’s point of view before getting wet was one of fear: fear of losing her “dry status” and getting wet. But once she got wet, her perspective automatically shifted to “adventure” and “freedom.”

In this example – as it also happens to so many of us – it took an event to shift the perspective. But what if, still dry, she had lightened the situation by realizing that getting wet wasn’t the end of the world, but rather could be fun? She could have shifted her perspective herself without waiting for a particular circumstance to do it for her. The problem with relying on circumstances or events to shift our perspectives is that many circumstances are outside our control.

In the example above, Heather may not have fallen into the water and may have spent the whole day jumping timidly from rock to rock, limiting her behavior and limiting her enjoyment.

We can, however, choose to shift our perspective at any time without waiting for it to be shifted for us. We call this process of shifting perspective “re-framing”. Consider how powerful a person you will be when you can change your perspective by reframing your perspective.

Reframing isn’t about changing your mind. Instead, it is about creating personal power and a shift in consciousness to help see things in a whole new way. This shift requires that you be willing to understand that there is more than one way to look at a given situation.

It’s about opening thought and showing a fuller range of possibilities. It can also be about finding “the silver lining” to a cloud.

“We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” – Talmud

When we use our personal power to shift perspective we are changing the experience itself and this changes us.

Disempowering Perspectives

Many of our perspectives are helpful and support positive life choices. However, occasionally we feel “stuck” or “unhappy” with a situation in our life and can’t see a way forward.

At times like this, a disempowering perspective, which doesn’t allow us to see the full range of possible options or opportunities, may be standing in our way. This is where looking at the perspective that is creating the situation and then reframing it can be extremely powerful.

Unfortunately, disempowering perspectives are all too common. In fact, they are so common that writers McKay, Davis, and Fanning, have tried to analyze the most common disempowering perspectives by putting them into 15 key groups. See if any seem familiar to you:

• Filtering: Focusing on the negative details of a situation and filtering out all positive aspects.
• Polarized Thinking: Seeing a situation as either, good or bad; right or wrong, perfect or a complete failure.
• Overgeneralization: Making a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence, for example someone disappoints you once, so you can never trust them again. Mind Reading: Making assumptions about what people are feeling, why they are acting as they are, and how they feel about you
• Catastrophizing: Assuming that the worst possible outcome will happen.
• Personalization: Thinking that everything people do or say is a reaction to you.
• Control Fallacy: Thinking that you are responsible for everyone or everything around you or, alternatively, thinking that you are a victim of fate and have no control over anything. Fallacy of Fairness: Being resentful because you believe that everything in life should be fair.
• Emotional Reasoning: Believing that what you feel is the truth. For example, if you feel stupid, it means that you are stupid. If you feel guilty then you must have done something wrong.
• Fallacy of Change: Believing that you can’t be happy unless you can change those around you to behave the way you want them to.
• Global Labeling: Generalizing one or two qualities into the negative global judgment. For example, one doctor is rude to you so all doctors are arrogant and self- important. Blaming: Thinking that someone else causes everything negative in your life.
• Should’s: You keep a list of rules about the way the world “should” operate and become angry or disappointed if others don’t follow your rules.
• Being Right: Going to any length to demonstrate your rightness because being wrong is terrible.
• Heaven’s Reward Fallacy: Feeling bitter when the rewards do not come that you think you deserve after working hard.

When you feel as though you can’t make a breakthrough, or achieve a goal, or solve a challenging problem, it is worth spending some time exploring your perspective on the issue. Sometimes you will find that your perspective on the issue is a disempowering one.

Perhaps you are thinking in one of the ways outlined above, or you have internalized other unhelpful perspectives from your past or from the environment around you. If you can discern the perspective and reframe it, then you can free yourself up to find new solutions and move on.

Next week I’ll pick up with empowering perspectives to give you a chance to contemplate the disempowering list a bit further

References

McKay, Mathew, Davis, Martha. & Fanning, Patrick. (1981). Thoughts & Feelings, New Harbinger

For now if you’d like to begin to explore how to reframing can release your personal power go ahead and ask for an Introductory Consultation today.

Also, the e-book “Develop the Mental Strength of a Warrior” (also available in a Kindle version) is packed with teachings, questions and exercises to help you engage and develop your personal power.

I’d like to thank ICA for their support and inspiration for this topic.

Related articles

• Mental Strength Tip #45 – Love What You Do For Personal Success (warriormindcoach.com)
• Personal Empowerment and Responsibility – Part I (warriormindcoach.com)