You have probably heard these clichés before:
These statements are reflections of how your perception influences your reality. At first, someone who is pessimistic or facing a problem won’t be very receptive to these kinds of points; it’s like telling someone to calm down—they probably won’t want to hear that, and they’re not going to be receptive to your point.
But, emotions and worldviews aside, what are these points trying to convey in the deepest sense? Two points:
The general term for how you choose to look at a situation is known as “framing”. Framing includes the lens through which you look, what you choose to include or exclude, and the story you tell with the picture you’ve put in your mind. Let’s break these down in greater detail.
The Lens Through Which You Look
Let’s say, for example, that you are hungry. Do you have food that you want to eat in the fridge? If you don’t, do you have the ability to buy it from a store? If not, could someone help you or bring you something? If not, could you go hunt in the wilderness or gather it? This is an example of the lens of capability. The more capable you are, the less daunting problems seem. Getting up in the morning might seem like a daunting task if you have trouble getting out of bed, but it might be the easiest thing in the world for someone who has the ability and desire to spring out of bed to start the day. The more capable you are or the more capable you see yourself, the more events in life seem less overwhelming.
Now, let’s say that you are going on a vacation. Do you expect it to be a wonderful experience, or do you expect it to be filled with problems? This is an example of the lens of possibility. Yes, good or bad things can happen in any situation, but this is mostly an example of your emotional state versus your behavior. Yes, your positive outlook can create a self-fulfilling prophecy where you have positive interactions as a result, but I am referring to events outside of your control as well. For example, the flight can be delayed for 30 minutes and you choose to read a book gleefully or choose to sit and wait while you check your watch every few minutes. Where you choose to focus affects your well-being a lot. So, instead of worrying about sunburn on that vacation, put some sunscreen on, wear a hat, and choose to be happy versus not doing anything and choosing to worry about it incessantly.
Now, let’s say that a random event occurs like traffic or waiting in line. You could be frustrated and angry by the events, or you could see it as having avoided a car accident that might’ve occurred otherwise. This is a lens of interpretation. You get to choose the meaning of things with how you see events. People use this all the time to feel better about their lives, from choosing to see a job loss or injury as a blessing in disguise if it takes them on a life path that makes them better off than they would be otherwise.
Finally, let’s say that you see a fire 100 yards away. That could be a sign of danger if a house is burning down, or it could be a sign of life and thriving if you are lost in the woods and need food when you come upon a group of people sitting around a campfire eating and socializing. This is a lens of value. Something can be an asset or a liability, a positive or negative thing, or growth-enabling or harm-enduring depending on the situation. You see this problem all the time when you see two people wrestling and it turns out that they are practicing—i.e., improving, not trying to harm each other. The fact that the wrestling has value in improving the participants’ physical abilities overrides the general perception that physical violence is negative.
I am sure that you can think of more, but you get the idea: your lens affects your emotions and actions.
What You Choose to Include or Exclude
This framing is used all the time to convince yourself or someone else as to the superiority of your decision or conclusion. Let’s say that you want to paint a room orange and someone says, “That might be distracting and make it difficult for children to stay calm.” You might reply, “Yeah, but it’s a play room and so I want it to be full of energy.” All things in life have strengths and weaknesses or pros and cons, and, in this case, the strength of an orange color being associated with energy is more important than the fact that it’s loud and more difficult to be calm in. So you focus on the benefits, and you discount the negatives.
People do this all the time to feel better about decisions or their choices. With a decision about a product they buy, one might be faster while the other is safer. Once they buy the safer one, they discount the speed and reinforce their appreciation for the safety. Unfortunately, they do this for decisions involving other people, too, like in politics where someone might vote to prohibit a certain behavior that another person finds valuable to their life. “Oh, you don’t need to do that…” the person will say. So you dismiss or exclude that perspective while the other person includes it and points out its importance in his or her mind.
This happens all the time to frame things in a way that gets you to the outcome you want (or, hopefully, the best one). Some people discount their behavior’s impact on other people, thus making decisions that might bother or harm others. Some people exclude or discount data that contradicts their beliefs (you’ve done this if you are in an argument and do an internet search for data that proves you to be correct rather than trying to prove yourself wrong). But, for your benefit, you want to include anything that helps you attain the optimal outcome for you and exclude anything that might cause you to worry about uncontrollable factors or cause you to feel an unproductive emotion or act in a destructive way.
The Story You Tell with the Picture in Your Mind
Someone doesn’t return your text message. It’s been two hours. Are they busy, or do they hate you? This is possibly the most difficult part of framing and causes the most negative emotions and behaviors. If someone cuts you off in traffic, for example, they might be in a hurry to make their exit or might have just not seen you when they changed lanes. Unfortunately, Attribution Bias (in my opinion, the cause of most of the world’s social problems) defaults you to thinking that anything you do has a good reason and anything someone else does is due to them being bad people. This framing has a huge influence over your life. Someone doesn’t “like” your post on social media? You must be worthless. Someone doesn’t get back to you? It must be that they don’t care. Did something bad happen on vacation? It must be because you’re unlucky and doomed to be miserable forever. This storytelling element of framing has you fill in the picture with a huge set of assumptions, leading you to a conclusion that clouds your judgment if those assumptions are wrong.
So, what can you do with this information? First, you can use your knowledge of how to frame things to hold perceptions that optimize your emotional state and behaviors. For example, if waiting through a flight delay will cause you to sit there and waste time, you can choose to see it instead as a chance to read that article you saved the other day and set an alarm to check back in to the state of your flight to make sure nothing has changed. In this situation, there were two approaches: impatiently wait, or set an alarm and read your article in peace. Which outcome is better? Clearly, the one where you are better off due to your actions versus letting an uncontrollable factor dictate your behavior and emotional state.
Second, you can use this information to reframe other people to one that is more constructive to their lives. This is more difficult, as I mentioned earlier where you can’t just tell a frazzled person to calm down and expect it to have its intended effect. Instead, you need to take them on the journey that would get them to come to the same conclusion you would given the situation and your information and perspective. For example, let’s say that you are with another person waiting for that delayed flight. You have already done the framing for yourself and begin reading the article. But the other person is stressed and fidgeting incessantly. This not only doesn’t help the situation but also annoys you since you’re trying to relax and concentrate. You could tell them to let it go, but that might not get them on your side. Instead, you reframe the situation: “Hey, that’s why we booked the flight to get in two hours early. We’ll be fine.” “You know, I set an alarm because they said they wouldn’t have any updates for 20 minutes. So let’s go grab a drink and check in when the alarm goes off.” “Hey, you have more time to prepare for that presentation you were working on. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know when there’s an update.”
In each of these scenarios, you are getting someone to look at the problem through a different lens, include or exclude information, and/or telling a different story in their mind about the situation instead of the one they had before (e.g., that the flight delay is going to ruin their plans).
Framing is a powerful tool in your quest to optimize your emotional state and behavior. We rely on how we see the world to inform our decisions and actions, so a perspective that is too negative about our capabilities, the possibilities, or the value of things in any given situation will cloud that judgment and cause us to feel or act sub-optimally. All you can do to counteract this is know how to use framing to get yourself to see the situation as constructively as possible so you can make the most of it. When you are able to do this consistently, you will be seen as the person who is either always cool under pressure or who is always able to make the most out of a bad situation. That’s not a bad perception for people to have of you—and, of course, it just might make your life a little better in any given difficult situation.