How to

Reframe
How to look at life from
new perspectives that
encourage growth and
positivity.
This is a short PDF designed to teach you
how to reframe your perspective so that it
encourages growth and positivity in your
life. Feel free to share this document with
family and friends.

Steven Handel

What is Reframing?
Reframing is our ability to look at a situation (or
experience) from another perspective.
Often the goal is to reframe a situation or
experience so that we can view it in a more
positive light, such as viewing failures as learning
experiences.
By taking upon new perspectives, we can
virtually turn any negative feeling or thought into
something positive and useful.
This is because our perspective and attitude play
a massive role in how we feel, think, and interact
with our environment.
A negative perspective can have us wallowing in
self-pity for months on end, alone in our rooms,
apathetic to the world around us.
But a positive perspective can motivate us to get
out of bed, make transformational changes in our
life, and face our world with a new sense of
courage and boldness.

Reframing is what causes two people to have the

same exact experience but walk away from it
with completely different ideas about it.

An Example: Mr. Positive vs. Mr.

Negative
Lets say there are two different people, Mr.
Positive and Mr. Negative, who both share the
same goal: meeting a good looking girl at a bar.
They both go to the same exact bar and
approach the same exact girl.
They each walk up to her the same way,
introduce themselves the same way, compliment
her on her dress the same way, and then offer to
buy her drink in the same exact way.
And in both situations - the girl responds with a
really nasty look and says, Get away from me!
However, despite them both sharing the same
exact experience, they each walk away from the
experience with a completely different
perspective.
Mr. Negative interprets his experience as being
the worst thing in the world.

He thinks it is proof that he sucks with women

and will always suck with women.
He goes back home immediately and returns to
his normal routine of eating Doritos while
watching American Idol. He never dares to enter
a bar or approach a girl ever again.
On the other hand, Mr. Positive walks away from
the experience with a completely different
perspective.
Instead of seeing it as proof of his incompetence,
he views it as a learning experience.
He reflects on what he did wrong and finds things
he could do differently next time.
He even calls up his friends at the end of the
night and jokes about his mistakes. They all
share a good laugh, and Mr. Positive goes back
to the bar again the very next night eager to
learn more ways he can improve himself. Over
time, he learns more and more, and significantly
improves his relationships with women.
So as you can seewhat makes the big
difference in our lives isnt always what happens
to us - but how we react to it.

Common Types of Reframes

There are literally an endless number of ways we
can reframe a situation so that its more positive
and useful.
In fact, I dont think there has been one
experience in my life that I havent been able to
reframe more effectively.
Here are some of the most common reframes I
use in my life. Feel free to try them out:
Failure as learning experience.
This is the example I just used, but Ill say a few
more words on it before moving on to other types
of reframes.
Almost any time you try something new and fail
at it, you can see that experience as a resource
to learn from and improve upon.
It doesnt matter what the failed attempt is:
approaching a girl in a cafe, having a job
interview, starting a business, getting a poor
grade on an exam, striking out in
baseballanything!

There is almost always another chance to meet a

great girl, get another job, start another business,
do well on another test, or hit a homerun your
next at-bat.

So the next time you find yourself in the midst of

a negative experience, try asking yourself, Will I
really care about this 10, 20, or 30 year down the
line?

You just need to look at your previous failures in

a new way, and constantly be willing to learn and
progress.

Often, youll find the answer is No. This is

because most of the things that upset us on a
daily basis actually pale in comparison to the
bigger picture of our lives.

The bigger picture.

Another reframe I like to do is the bigger picture
reframe. Basically, when I notice there is
something in my life that is really frustrating me,
or bringing my mood down, I like to zoom out and
see the bigger picture.
In the heat of the moment, a bad experience can
feel like the end of the world. But when you look
back on it after a week, month, year, or even
decade, the event often loses a lot of its affect.
Have you ever looked back on an experience
you once thought was really terrible (maybe an
embarrassing experience at school or at a party),
but then you find out its not as bad as you
thought it was? Maybe now you can even look
back and laugh at yourself.

Solution-focused vs. problem-focused.

Many people who experience excessive
negativity in their lives often have a very
problem-focused mindset.
This means they are actively searching to find
things in their life that dissatisfy them - whether it
is something wrong with tonights dinner, or their
favorite sports team losing a game, or their
inability to make new friends at work.
From their perspective, theres always something
new to be upset about.
So instead of trying to find potential solutions,
they reflect on everything that has gone wrong in
their lives, then they use this as evidence to
justify their misery and unhappiness.

This problem-focused perspective needs to be

turned on its head toward more solutionfocused thinking.

This is because no matter how bad things are for

you, there is almost always an alternative
situation that could be much worse.

Instead of always searching for things in life that

dissatisfy us, we should search for solutions and
ways we can actually increase fulfillment in our
lives.

And by imagining how things can be worse in our

lives, we actually cultivate a sense of gratitude
and appreciation for the things we have in life,
not just focus on the things we dont have.

Only until we adopt this more solution-focused

perspective can we truly begin to improve the
conditions in our lives.

Maybe something really terrible happened in

your life like your house burned down and you
lost all your possessions.

Things could be worse.

This is truly an awful situation to be in, there is no

doubt about it, but you can reframe it by thinking
things like, At least I didnt lose my friends and
family.

Even the most positive of thinkers must

acknowledge that there will always be some
aspects of our lives that dont fully meet our
desires and expectations.
However, even in spite of these occasional
shortcomings, there are still positive perspectives
to take that can increase our gratitude for what
we do have in life.
One of these perspectives is the things could be
worse reframe. This perspective is especially
useful for negative situations about our life that
we have no control over.

Maybe you are also going through some financial

troubles, but does it really compare to the
conditions experienced in third world countries
(who dont even have the computers or
technology to read this document).
We can almost always take a bad situation and
imagine how it could be much worse.
In fact, no matter how bad things may get, as
long as we are still alive and conscious, then I

believe we have something to still be grateful for.

That makes the things could be worse reframe
applicable to any situation.
Anxiety as motivation.
In many cases, we can reframe our feelings and
emotions to better serve us in the same way we
can reframe our thoughts and beliefs.
There was a recent study done at the Emotion,
Health, and Psychophysiology Laboratory at
Harvard University that illustrates this
phenomenon really well.
They separated students into several groups
before taking an exam, and in one of the groups
they told students that nervousness was a good
thing that can improve motivation and
performance. The group that was told this ended
up scoring better on their Graduate Record Exam
(GRE) than the other groups.
This study suggests that if we reframe certain
negative feelings as positive we can actually
channel that psychological energy in more
productive ways.

The reason this reframe works so effectively is

because stress/anxiety and motivation are very
biochemically similar. They both make use of the
same hormones in our body, like cortisol and
adrenaline.
For example, riding a rollercoaster produces
much of the same biological effects as being
anxious before giving a public speech (it
activates the fight or flight part of our nervous
system).
The major difference is that in one situation you
interpret it as an adrenaline rush, while in the
other you interpret it as stress and anxiety.
This suggests that if we can actively reframe our
anxiety in certain situations, we can actually use
it as a motivating force, rather than something
that inhibits us.
This is a popular reframe in CognitiveBehavioral Therapy, especially as described in
Sean Coopers The Shyness and Social Anxiety
System, which teaches us how to accept our
fears, but act on them as if they were a
motivator.

The eyes of a role model (or another person).

There are many influential and inspirational
figures to find throughout our lives, and by
temporarily adopting their perspective we can
sometimes learn new insights into their thoughts
and behaviors that we can later apply to our own
lives.
One of the most popular examples of this is
Christians using the phrase, What would Jesus
do? in order to look at their life from a more
Christian perspective.
But in the same way, we can use this technique
in a variety of other areas in our life:
When we are on the basketball court, we
can ask ourselves What would Michael
Jordan do?
When we are on a date, we can ask
ourselves, What would George Clooney
do?
And when we are trying to improve a
business, we can ask ourselves, What
would Steven Jobs do?

The point is that by using other peoples

perspective as a resource to borrow and learn
from, we can actually gain a wider range of
insight into possible ways to improve different
area of our lives.
Please keep in mind, however, that Im not
suggesting we mimic someones perspective,
thoughts, and actions. I am only suggesting that
we can temporarily place ourselves in someone
elses shoes so that we can gain a new
perspective of a situation.
This kind of reframe can also be very effective for
relationships and disputes. Often the core of
most problems in relationships is a lack of
empathy and understanding of our partner. But
by trying to see the world from their perspective,
we often discover better ways to interact and
communicate with that person.
When someone says something that disturbs us
or offends us, we can try to look at the situation
from their perspective, and perhaps walk away
from the situation with a better understanding of
why it turned out the way it did.

The Benefits of Reframing

I hope you can tell by now that there are many
benefits to being able to reframe our perspective
in a variety of different ways.
The way we think doesnt have to be narrowly
defined to only a single viewpoint, and in fact by
being able to temporarily adopt different
viewpoints, we can actually learn how to navigate
through our lives (and interact with others) in
much more effective ways.
Reframing (also sometimes called cognitive
restructuring) is one of main tools in CognitiveBehavioral Therapy. This is one of the most
effective psychotherapies today in the treatment
of depression, anxiety, OCD/addiction, and
PTSD.
But the applications of reframing stretch way
beyond just treating mental illnesses.
They also play a crucial role in any kind of
personal development and goal achieving.
I personally believe it would be incredibly difficult
for any individual to achieve happiness or
success without these mental tools available to

them (whether they realize they have these tools

or not).
This is because reframing is a constant work-inprogress, a tool of personal development that we
need to constantly reapply to our lives especially in the face of new experiences and
new situations.
Our ability to look at situations from a variety of
perspectives is a fundamental element in building
relationships, solving problems, improving
creativity, becoming a better learner, and finding
happiness.
Earlier in this post I mentioned The Shyness and
Social Anxiety System, an excellent product
designed to teach individuals how to overcome
their social anxiety by using scientifically proven
techniques in CognitiveBehavioral Therapy and
Social Psychology. If
you would like to learn
more about this product
please click here.

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