Reframing For Personal Power – Part II

Welcome back!

I know I jumped around a bit in these last two posts….it’s to keep you on your toes 🙂

In Reframing For Personal Power – Part I we looked at how your perspective determines your experience in life, not your circumstances.  And that your understanding of perspective gives you personal power.

We also took a look at some disempowering perspectives.  I hope you have taken time to reflect upon them.

Today we’ll take a look at empowering perspectives and how by taking a more empowering point of view is actually exercising your personal power.

Empowering Perspectives

There is any number of perspectives on a particular situation, but only some which are empowering and allow us to move forward towards our personal goals and personal success.

Below are some alternative perspectives to the disempowering perspectives listed the Part I. Take time to reading each of the disempowering perspectives followed by an alternative empowering perspective below and reflect on how you can start to use these and exercise your personal power.

1. Most experiences in life have a mixture of good and bad in them and I choose to focus on the good.
2. Even the worst situations offer opportunities to learn and grow.
3. Every new situation is a new opportunity.
4. My past doesn’t have to determine my present or future.
5. Living in alignment with my values is the most important thing.
6. Relationships with others flow out of this.
7. Today is going to be a good day if I choose to make it one.
8. I have my journey. Other people have theirs.
9. There are many opportunities in every day for me to shape my future.
10. I can live with life’s disappointments and not be overwhelmed by them.
11. I am a unique and magnificent human being.
12. My life is the most important project I will ever work on.
13. Most people are good at heart.
14. I am the only one who can change my mind and my heart.
15. We are all different and that’s one of the things that make life interesting.
16. We all make mistakes. It’s how you learn from them that matters.
17. Virtue is its own reward.

Note that there are many alternative perspectives to those covered in Mckay, Davis and Fannings 15 groups. And I bet you can think of some different ones to those listed here, can’t you?

Perspectives are not all right or all wrong. The important question is whether a perspective works for you or not. Any perspective that supports you to grow and develop and overcome the challenges and reach your personal goals is a good perspective.

Why and How

There is a simple and powerful question that can help someone to reframe an unhelpful perspective. You may be familiar with it from childhood. It is “why?” Often in life we accept particular perspectives as “reality”. People pick up all sorts of limiting beliefs and internalize them as the “truth”. As children we are much less willing to accept other people’s “truths” easily. Have you ever tried telling a three-year old a “truth”? Immediately they will ask “why” and then “why” and then “why” until they finally get to some information that aligns with their sense of the world.

As adults, when we find ourselves accepting a perspective that is unhelpful, we need to remember what it felt like to be a three-year old and ask “why”. When we discern a particular perspective, it can be incredibly illuminating to simply ask “why?”, or even “how does this support me?”

Often you will find that there is no real reason for the limiting perspective, you have simply picked it up on your life journey and never found the time or distance to question it.

Let me give you an example. A coach was coaching a senior manager (Brandon) of a large organization. Brandon asked for coaching to help him with a major challenge that he was working on: finding revenue for the expansion of the customer service area.

This challenge was taking up huge amounts of his time and making him lose sleep due to stress. There appeared to be no easy solution. The coaching conversation went something like this:

Coach: Why do you need to expand the customer service area?

Brandon: Because there’s not enough space to have everyone in.

Coach: Why isn’t there enough space?

Brandon: Because the building was made to house 28 customer service staff and we now have 50.

Coach: Why does the building need to house them?

Brandon: Because they need to work there.

Coach: Why do they need to work there?

Brandon: Because that’s where they work.

At this point, Brandon began to laugh because he realized how silly his answer sounded. Simply by asking Brandon “why?” his coach can help Brandon to discern a perspective he was holding, i.e. that his staff all had to work in the same building.

Once Brandon had discerned this perspective, he was able to see some alternative perspectives that had been hidden to him up until that point, i.e. that much of the work the staff did was computer and internet based and could be done from anywhere.

Rather than coming into the building, staff could avoid commutes and work from home. Simply by asking “why”, his coach was able to help him to discern an unhelpful perspective that was causing her a great deal of difficulty in her work and to re-frame it to come up with solutions.

Now normally I’m not a big fan of “why” and in certain situations is can be very helpful to loosen the view a person has.

Contemplation

• When have you experienced a change in your perspective?
• What did it take for you to change your point of view?
• What would be possible if you became a master at re-framing?
• What do you think mastering reframing means?
• How would you do this?
• What is the difference between perspective and re-framing?

Application

It is possible to discern and reframe perspectives ourselves. However, as an objective observer, a coach is in a unique position to help you identify unhelpful perspectives and to support you to reframe them.

Have you ever been on a holiday, or taken a day out to do something totally different, and found that answers to some of your life’s most challenging problems seem to pop into your head without effort.

Problems that seemed impossible suddenly seem possible. Issues that seemed incredibly complicated suddenly have simple and obvious solutions. It almost feels as if new perspectives float down from the sky. The key factors here are distance and emotional stillness.

A coaching conversation can provide both of these key ingredients to allow your mind to discern perspectives and reframe them, so that new empowering perspectives simply “click” into place.

Re-framing is an art and when done powerfully, it can change a one’s life in an instant. Sometimes it can be as simple as asking to pause for a moment to reflect on what you’ve said, and what perspective it might indicate. Sometimes the perspective that will work the best is radically different to your current disempowering perspective, but sometimes you only need to shift perspective slightly to make a breakthrough.

Sometimes if a client indicates that they are going through a difficult situation, I’ll ask them: “What is your perspective on this that is giving you this result?” Followed by: “How could you look at this differently (reframe this)?” In other words, “Let’s look at this in an another light to better understand this situation.”

Here are some powerful questions that can be used to help someone discern and reframe their perspective:

• “What is the most enjoyable aspect about this?”
• “If you were feeling resourceful and generous, how might you look at this situation?”
• “What’s missing here, that once it is included will make this situation flow?”
• “What do you think is the other person’s perspective?”
• “How does that perspective work for you?”

Play Time

One way to empower a person is through the coaching technique of play, to creatively open one’s mind to consider other possibilities.

In our example of Heather in Part I, removing the significance of falling into the water was enough to shift her perspective. Some questions you could ask to discern perspective by introducing an element of play could be:

• “How could this situation be fun?”
• “Let’s just assume for a moment that the worst thing that could possibly happen has already happened. What will you do now?”
• “If you were twenty feet tall and had super powers, what would you think about this situation?”
• “If you look back in a year, is this problem so significant that you will even remember it?”

Often when people focus hard on a problem, they become stressed about it. If you think of the mind as a pool of water, this stress is like a churn, muddying the waters and making everything less clear. By introducing an element of play and lightness, you can stop, momentarily, the churning up the water.

Once the mind is clear, new perspectives can appear, like small bubbles making their way naturally to the surface.

Extreme Perspective

This is a great strategy for reframing. Describe how you are not the tiniest bit responsible for a situation. How it was all someone else’s fault. Then describe how you are 100 percent responsible. How you have – on some level – caused or attracted everything to occur.

Notice and feel the difference between both extreme points of views.

• What opportunities open up out of the latter?
• What alternative perspectives lie in between?
• What’s the best perspective to hold in order to move forward towards achieving your personal goals?

Listening

One of the best strategies for helping a person discern a particular perspective and to reframe it is one of the simplest: listening.

The simple act of providing a space where a person can be really listened to is often enough for them to explore the perspectives that lie underneath their actions. If a person comes up with a problem, just listen. If they start to explore the perspective that underlies that problem, just listen.

As a coach I believe that my client’s are the expert their lives. By providing a trusting space and really listening, we can free up individuals to explore the many perspectives that inform the way they experience life.

Simply by speaking something aloud, a person can listen to himself themselves. A disempowering perspective will jar. It will feel wrong even as it is coming out of their mouths. Understanding will occur and, with it, the opportunity to reframe the unhelpful perspective.

Supporting my clients to discern perspectives and reframe them is powerful coaching. This process alone will allow clients to grow and achieve their personal goals.

Reflection

• How will helping a friend change their perspective make a difference in their lives?
• How would you get your friends to do this?
• How can you support a friend to discern their own perspectives and then reframe them?

References

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

If you’d like to begin to explore how to reframing can expand 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

• Unconsciousness Beliefs and Personal Success – Part III (warriormindcoach.com)
• Mental Strength Tip #45 – Love What You Do For Personal Success (warriormindcoach.com)
• The Power of Questions for Personal Growth – Part II (warriormindcoach.com)
• Mental Strength Tip #46 – Environment And Personal Success (warriormindcoach.com)
• Personal Empowerment and Responsibility – Part I (warriormindcoach.com)
• Mental Strength Tip #11 – Gratitude and Personal Success (warriormindcoach.com)
• Personal Empowerment and Responsibility – Part II (warriormindcoach.com)
• Reframing For Personal Power – Part I (warriormindcoach.com)