I’m reading a great book now, Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life by Eugene O’Kelly, the former CEO and Chairman of KPMG. one of the top accounting firms in the world.
Mr. O’Kelly tells the story of years ago when he ran the famous San Francisco Bay-to-Breakers race with his nine-year-old daughter.
The next day when she was talking proudly about their accomplishment and said, “My dad and I ran the race in an hour and forty-five minutes.” A boy in her class wasn’t about to be upstaged and bragged, “Well, my dad and I ran it too, and it took us two hours, so we ran for longer than you.”
As a nine-year-old, he was a master at what is called “reframing.” Reframing is a technique that allows us to look at a situation differently and it’s a powerful tool.
It’s a tool that we can use for our benefit or use in a way that holds us back and hurts us.
Yet, used well, it’s an incredible tool.
How can you use reframing in a way to look at your situations, opportunities, and challenges in a way that empowers you and creates positive energy to take effective action?
How can I do that?
For instance, I believe people tend to do the best they can at the moment, all things considered.
That doesn’t mean we always do our best in terms of our potential.
It means we are human and we struggle at times and we fail at times.
We can beat ourselves up over a failure or we can own it, learn from it and skip the self-flagellation altogether.
Instead of, “I’m not good enough and this proves it,” we can reframe it and say, “I failed here. There’s something rich to learn here and I’m going to learn it and move forward.”
The nine-year-old boy might not have used reframing in the best way, but at least he got some practice at it!
A little refining and he’ll have a powerful skill.
One that’s available to all of us.
Leave a comment and share an example of how you’ve used reframing to help you move forward or to help someone else who was stuck in their view and thinking of a situation.
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