Not what it seems? How to reframe thoughts, turn negatives into positives and change your beliefs through NLP
“I started dating a zookeeper – but it turned out he was a cheetah[1].”
This quip from comedian Lorna Rose Treen was voted Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe 2023 in Edinburgh earlier this year. Funny and ever-so-slightly cheesy, it captured people’s imaginations due to the wordplay and unusual take on what is normally quite a difficult thing to think about – infidelity.
Have you ever been to the Edinburgh Festival or seen stand-up comedy live? If not, you have no doubt come across some enjoyable stand-up comedy on TV, radio or a podcast. As well as light relief and laughter, jokes like the one above provide us with a different view of life. They take the things that can really annoy, confuse or upset us and turn them on their heads. We suddenly see the ridiculous in amongst the banal, the frustrating or the downright difficult.
Laughing at difficult things can be hugely beneficial, not only for our well-being but to help us gain a fresh perspective on negative experiences. A single joke may not manage to deflect all our negative emotions and connotations to the topic at hand, but it can certainly help us realise that sometimes, learning how to laugh about problems can be the first step in overcoming them and moving on.
Reframing
NLP has a similar technique at its core. Reframing works by changing the meaning of an event or feeling by putting it into an entirely different context.[2] By altering the context, we get to see the event in a new light that also changes our response to it. As our response changes, so does our behaviour and we can suddenly find ourselves reacting and feeling something entirely different. This is incredibly helpful when we are working on improving our resilience, building our confidence and working on seeing our life experiences as something we can learn from, not be beaten down by.
Reframing has been a popular topic for stories and legends down the years, from the fairy tale of the Ugly Duckling transforming into a beautiful swan to the popular 1913 book about an ever-cheerful orphan, Pollyanna, by American author, Eleanor H Porter. Both stories present a situation that is turned upside down in the readers’ perceptions, simply by how unexpectedly the protagonist responds to what is going on. The duckling is perceived as ugly until he grows into an adult swan and gains confidence in his beautiful new appearance. Pollyanna should by all accounts feel miserable with her difficult lot in life, but she chooses to see the good in everything and everyone, changing those around her with her optimistic outlook.
Reframing in NLP terms is all about empowerment. Beliefs are powerful, and we can either let negative ones control our lives, or we can take back control and turn them into positives. As Ray Dodd, money and business coach, put it:
“Belief is power. The power to create. We create our reality simply by what we agree to believe. [3]”
How many times have we told our children, “I believe in you,” or “You can do it!” We say these things to and turn their negative, limiting beliefs into more positive feelings that build their confidence and help them succeed. Now reflect on how many times we tell ourselves the same thing before facing something challenging. I bet it’s nowhere near as many. Yet creating positive beliefs is such a powerful tool for anyone to use to help them achieve their goals. Plus, it costs nothing to do and can have a long-lasting effect on our lives.
There are two approaches to reframing in the world of NLP [4].
- Context reframing takes the situation under analysis and looks at it in a different context, such as a different time frame or location. For example, if you believe that your colleague is being too fussy about small details in a project, think about when that behaviour would actually be helpful. Next, think about when you might find yourself in that situation in the future and how their behaviour would make you feel then. What positive feelings could you bring back to the present and use to help you handle the situation you are currently in – is the person simply trying to help the team capture all their mistakes before it is too late to correct them? Could this actually be beneficial to the project you are working on now? How might you redirect your colleague – and your feelings and thoughts about them – to benefit the greater good?
- The second approach is called content reframing. It talks a similar path, only you are encouraged to look at the behaviour itself and ask, what else could this behaviour mean and how can I perceive it in a more positive fashion? An example here is a seemingly pushy boss constantly seeking to drive work and shorten deadlines on a complex project. While this could be seen as annoying and anxiety-inducing at face value, it could actually come from a place of passion and motivation on the part of the boss to get the job done on time. This amount of passion could really motivate the team if they are able to change what they believe about what is going on in the mind of their boss.
Negative to positive
Beliefs are the mechanism by which your brain tries to set up rules about your life and how you react to what happens to you. As humans, we tend to take patterns, or repeated experiences, and use them to create rules and labels to help us make sense of the future. So, if we experience a negative emotion, such as fear or anger, three times (or more), our brain turns this into a generalisation and tells us that we will always react in the same way when a similar situation crops up again. If we hear someone tell us repeatedly that we cannot do something, we tend to believe them without questioning our actual abilities. This is not always helpful and can lead to a lot of self-limiting thoughts and behaviour.
Reframing helps us challenge these types of generalisations and labels and push past self-imposed limits to achieve more than we previously thought possible. The technique helps remove much of the fear, anger, sadness or anxiety we feel over difficult situations, clearing the way for change and new, positive behaviour. Just like the Edinburgh Fringe joke, it removes the power from a negative concept (infidelity) and reframes it to look unimportant and easier to overcome (turns it into an incongruous zoo animal through a fun play on words).
A good example of reframing is turning pessimistic thoughts into optimistic ones. Some studies have shown that pessimistic people tend to be slightly more accurate in how they perceive the world around them than their optimistic counterparts [5]. However, the same study revealed that optimists tend to experience a higher level of self-esteem, resilience, better work performance and even physical health.
Hope really is a wonderful thing!
[1] Source: https://news.sky.com/story/best-joke-at-edinburgh-fringe-2023-revealed-as-zookeeper-one-liner-12944903. Accessed 29 August 2023
[2] Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-reframing-examples-techniques-john-soriano-ms-ch/. Accessed 29 August 2023
[3] Source: Avoiding the Enemies to Happiness, Grant Soosalu, published 2014, p 95
[4] Source: NLP for Business Success, Jeremy Lazarus, published 2013, p 164-165
[5] [5] Source: Avoiding the Enemies to Happiness, Grant Soosalu, published 2014, p 119-120
