USING FRAMING TO PERMANENTLY CHANGE MINDSET
What you are thinking determines many things, from how you feel, to the actions you take in life. If you want to make changes in your life (which NLP is great for), you need to look at how you are thinking. Changing how you frame things in your mind can change your entire outlook on life.
If you want to change your mindset in the moment, start by changing the questions you ask yourself from ones of negativity to ones of empowerment.
If you want to permanently change your mindset so that you don’t have to repeatedly ask yourself new questions in the same scenario time after time, you’re going to have to change your frames. This involves changing what the scenario means to you.
QUESTIONS TO CHANGE YOUR MINDSET
James Hayes, an experienced Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) practitioner and trainer, offers up the following questions you can ask yourself to change your focus and put yourself in a more effective state of mind:
1. For people who lose sleep trying to solve problems:
- Is this really a problem that I need to think my way out of or is it possible I just need to change my state?
2. When something goes wrong:
- What’s great about this?
- What is the opportunity in this?
- How might this obstacle be a blessing in disguise?
- What can I learn from this?
- What am I willing to do to make it what I want and how can I enjoy that process?
3. When facing a conflict or struggle:
- How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?
4. When feeling overwhelmed:
- If you took the emotions out of the picture what would you do?
Whenever you are facing a challenge, whether it’s emotional, intellectual, or otherwise, the first step in changing your frame of mind is leading with questions like this that create a new way of framing your particular challenge. It is important to understand that although you might ask yourself powerful questions, you may not get an immediate answer. If you hold the question without expectation the mind will go to task and an answer will surface when the mind is ready.
PRACTICAL APPLICATION
In order to make this idea of framing real and tangible, we will end with an activity. Information by itself is not enough. You need to put into practice what you have learned in order for change to take effect.
Think about the questions James has recommended for different scenarios. What question are you going to take away and start trying out in your life right now? Pick one that you are going to adopt and start using today. This will make what you have learned here more practical, imminent, and tangible.
But it doesn’t end there, changing how you frame your life is something that requires practice every day. It doesn’t need to be complicated. Save the framing questions someplace where you can review them on a regular basis. Pick a question and make it a practice to use the question each day until it becomes a natural way for you to think about your reality. Once this question becomes a habit, experiment with adding a new question.
For a more in-depth review of framing, James recommends the book “Mind-lines: Lines For Changing Minds” by L. Michael Hall. Framing is also taught in the online NLP course offered by The Coaching Room.
The fastest way to learn how to practically apply framing techniques is face to face with the coaches at The Coaching Room. It’s one thing to read about a concept, it’s a very different thing to learn it and live it.
The Coaching Room trainers provide real world examples and demonstrations to walk you through, step by step, how you can live your best life by changing how you frame your reality.
