Why Be a Re-Framer?

​Dear Why Team member,
I hope this week’s message finds you well and encouraged. This week we ask:

Why Be a Re-Framer?

Because, I’m sure you will agree, the frame can improve the picture.

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​Recently, I wrote on response-ability and the fact that our entire life experience comes down to our own ability to respond. When we awaken to our ability to frame and re-frame what life brings us, we gain an important skill that can significantly improve our ability to respond to live life more freely. If you don’t like the picture, consider how you may reframe it. Consider getting help to reframe it. Maybe the most effective frame of all, is the frame called “meaning.”

Viktor Frankl said the moment we can find/create meaning for our suffering, our suffering ends. After surviving the Holocaust by doing just that, Viktor was given the enormous job of caring for 30,000 women on suicide watch - and, while under his care, there was not a single suicide. Could his success have been the result of his ability to help those women reframe whatever they were seeing?

How may you improve your view if you’re not satisfied with the picture?
What do you do to improve your view?

How dependent are you on circumstances and/or others to change for your view to change?
Since it’s your picture, own it. You choose the theme; you choose the colors. Is your picture too blue or is it vibrant, bursting with bright, warm colors? How are you framing it?
Owning the picture empowers you to reframe it should you not be happy with it.

Is your current ability to respond independent or co-dependent?

How may you more fully own and therefore more fully have the power to improve your experience of life?

When we work more intentionally to reframe our view of what arises in life, we are developing our response-ability to life.

Consider your current view of the past. Nothing limits our future more than how we think about our past, how we view our past. Is your past a picture that could use a new frame? Consider framing your past as it having happened for you rather than happened to you. This re-framing mindset alone will invite you to look for the good that has come from the perceived bad. Consider some of the human qualities we admire most: humility, compassion and empathy - how are these character traits developed, if not through pain and suffering? Consider re-framing all your past pain and suffering as the necessary breakdown for a remodel. Analogies and metaphors are particularly powerful tools for reframing.  In the midst of a kitchen remodel - say early in the demolition phase - are you focused on the dirt and destruction or are you focused on what will come from this so-called disaster?

Most build-ups come after break-downs.

Consider the classic reminder that you have to break a few eggs to make a cake. And to extend this metaphor farther, there are ingredients in a cake that when tasted alone wouldn’t be very good, but in their right combination is a joy to taste. What life ingredients may you be experiencing that alone do not taste very good? How may life be bringing those ingredients together, baking them in you, to create a cake that will uniquely serve others?!

There are of course countless ways to reframe your experience of life - why not apply your framing and reframing skills all the more. Yes, the glass is often half-empty, reframing is not denying the half-empty, it’s recognizing that a half-full focus on life is how we best address the half-empty. The people who best get-up and get-on in this world, more fully own their pictures and are thus more empowered to reframe them.

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

This week, more than ever, notice any view that disturbs you and ask how may I reframe what I see so as to be the change I want to see in the world.

Be the change, be a re-framer, and you’ll be all the more a game-changer; for yourself and for others.

Make it a picture-perfect week!

Steve Luckenbach