Reframing: The Ultimate Magic Trick


A man is slowly walking down the street, his head is facing down, his back is bent forward and he is seemingly unaware of anything but the sidewalk beneath his feet. There are people walking toward him and behind him but he plods along neither greeting nor stopping for anyone. If I were to ask you how this man is likely to be feeling, what would your response be?

I have used this scenario over and over again and nine times out of ten, people tell me that the man is depressed or sad. “What is the evidence for this?” I ask. People answer, “His head is facing down and he’s not looking at anyone. Plus he’s walking very slowly and not particularly aware of his surroundings.”

“On the contrary,” I reply. He’s actually very excited. His head is down and his back is bent forward because last month as he was walking down the same busy street he found a lottery ticket. Nobody claimed the ticket and he won a million dollars. He thinks that if he was lucky once, he could get lucky again. He may be greedy but he’s certainly neither sad nor depressed, merely dedicated to his task.

The circumstances in both cases are exactly the same but I made up a very different story in the second scenario. Therein lies the secret of the ultimate magic trick, your ability to reframe a given set of circumstances so that they yield an opportunity for you rather than a dead end. The lens through which you view the world is a frame. Changing that frame can elicit different results.

Just so you don’t think that reframing only works in made up examples, I will tell you of a very powerful use of reframing in my own life. Over ten years ago, I was diagnosed with a very lethal form of cancer. Because its symptoms are so insidious, women are often not diagnosed until its final stages. I was fortunate to have an excruciating pain in my side that allowed me to get diagnosed at a relatively early stage of the disease. This is one of the reasons that I am still alive today. Reframe 1: Pain is bad. In this case pain saved my life so “Hallelujah! And praise the pain!”

I went through a year of grueling and debilitating treatments that so far have allowed me to survive. I knew that my treatment was going to take a year and I told everyone that I was going into “the cancer monastery” for a year and that when I came out, I would be transformed. When I got out, I would teach people what I had learned. Yes, I was transformed. I was scarred and hard of hearing. That’s the bad news. However, the good news was that I came to love my body for the first time in my adult life and I came to love myself even more. I learned that I was generous, resilient and courageous; qualities I had previously never noticed in myself before. My cancer experience caused people to see me in a newly empowered light. I became an inspiration to others and myself due to how I interacted with my cancer experience. Reframe 2: Cancer is scary and lethal. Cancer is an opportunity for learning and growth. Cancer is a gift, even if I hate the wrapping in which it is packaged.

I have several more examples that I can share with you from my own life. However, Kurt Kuenne’s short film is a marvelous example of reframing one’s situation. Watch it and notice the reframing that Zed practiced when he saw his own situation from a very different perspective.

How do you use reframing in your life?

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This entry was written by Judith Cohen, MCC, CPCC and posted on April 20, 2009 at 11:35 am and filed under Psychology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

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