by Tom Hoobyar
So imagine that someone said, “I can’t ‘X.’ ” To reframe their statement for them, you could say, “Oh, so you want to ‘X.’ ”
This may seem contrary, but here’s why it’s so effective. If they said, “I can’t ‘X,’ ” they must want to “X” or they wouldn’t be complaining about not being able to, right? By saying, “Oh, so you want to ‘X,’ ” you’ve agreed with them that they want to: you demonstrated understanding them. At the very same time, you’ve also moved their brain’s focus from something that was impossible to something they want.
Let me share an example of a simple reframe that my friend Tom Dotz did with an acquaintance at his favorite restaurant. While he was waiting for his friend, the hostess came over to say hello. When he asked her how things were going for her, she let out a big sigh and said, “Well, I just turned twenty-nine and I really don’t know what I want to do with my life.”
Because she sounded a bit depressed, Tom was hoping to help her shift to a more positive feeling, so he asked her, “Well, if you did know what you really wanted, what would that be?”
Without missing a beat, she said, “I’d go to the Parsons School of Design and get my art degree.” This desire seemed so clear to Tom that he was puzzled and asked, “Well, what stops you?”
She said, “It would take five years and I’ve be thirty-four.”
At that point, her expression was bordering on despair so Tom said, “So let me get this straight. You really want to go to art school, but you’re twenty-nine now, and you’d be thirty-four when you finished, right?”
“Yes” was the quick reply.
Then he said, “So what’s really true is that in five years you’ll be thirty-four. Your choice is simply that you’ll either be thirty-four with your art degree, or you’ll be thirty-four without it.”
A look of astonishment came over her face just as Tom’s friend arrived at the table. At this point, his conversation with the hostess was interrupted and she excused herself. Tom told me that he never thought much about this brief exchange until a few months later, when he went back to the restaurant. As soon as the hostess saw Tom, her face lit up and she rushed over to him. Before he could even say hello, she smiled and said, “You changed my life!”
Because this looked like good news to Tom, he asked, “How so?” At this point she described the brief conversation they’d had and proudly said, “Thanks to you, I applied to Parsons. I’ve been accepted, and I start school this fall! I’ve only got three more weeks here and I’ll be moving back east.” Then she gave Tom a big hug and led him and his friend to their table.
It was just a quick chat, right? How could it have such a powerful impact as to change a person’s life? Here’s how: when you make this tiny shift in someone’s attention, it engages a whole different part of that person’s brain. They move from being stuck to actually considering other possibilities. And to help them along, as you notice them beginning (within five or ten seconds) to consider possibilities, you could say, “I know you can’t but I’m curious, what would it be like if you could?” Then “That sounds great. What would be necessary? Would it take more planning or more time, or do you need more connections or money? What do you think? What would it take?”
As you know from earlier chapters, questions like “What would you like instead?” or “What’s important to you about that?” also open people’s minds—and open the door to other possibilities.
As someone starts thinking, more and more of the brain is engaged—their blood chemistry changes and their mood changes. Even if you just stopped after the first reframe and didn’t continue to explore possibilities, you will have left somebody in a more positive, hopeful, optimistic state of mind—when before they were negative, turned off, and limiting themselves.
Here’s why even a small reframe can make a big difference: When somebody’s angry or frustrated, they cannot be curious. People can’t have those two emotions at the same time—and curiosity is the natural course of creativity—not anger and frustration. You have a lot more neurons available when you’re curious about something.
Super-Glue Removal:
How to Loosen and “Unstick” Beliefs
Even though curiosity is a powerful tool for “unsticking” yourself or someone else, a firmly held belief can be even more powerful. Some beliefs have a really strong grip. So if I were going to help someone with a difficulty, the first thing I’d do is unpack the belief itself. How is the belief expressed? In other words, what is the reality that this person sees or hears or feels?
Is it a voice in their head, or an image, or a feeling—perhaps one they “just can’t shake”? For instance, when it’s an image, I’ve found that when they can really look at the image associated with the belief, it’s turned out to be a bogus mental movie that just loops around and around, playing over and over. It has an impact simply because it’s stuck in the unconscious. Since it’s usually unconscious, the client is usually only aware of the feelings the mental movie “loop” causes. And then those negative feelings tend to get associated with whatever happens to be going on in his present experience.
Their World: Understanding Someone’s Belief
Let’s explore an example of how this unpacking process might unfold. A person can say, “I have low self-confidence,” but I don’t know what that means to them. I can’t duplicate their experience in my brain based on that statement. Could you? Probably not. Then I might say, “Okay, I get that you have low self-confidence. Can you tell me a little more about how you experience that?” My ambition at this point is to get enough information, and specific enough information, so I can re-create that experience and that feeling myself.
Then I try on what they tell me, and see what that’s like. For example, it might be an inner dialogue that sounds like this: “Okay, so if I hear the voice of my college teacher, my mom, or whoever it was, telling me I’ll never amount to anything, and I hear it coming from behind and above my head, and I hear it just as I’m about to step out onstage, yeah, that would probably bug the hell out of me. That would definitely limit me.”
So now I can say to that person, “Okay, I can understand that. I can re-create that experience for myself, using my body and my own senses as an instrument. Now I can understand and appreciate how you must feel.”
The key is to realize that people give us very high-level condensed reports on their inner process because they don’t know what their inner process is. But when we help them slow the process down, they can give some key details and we can ask enough questions to understand how they create this internal experience for themselves. Then we do two things.
First, we try to replicate that process in ourselves. We try it on and continue to gather information until we can re-create their experience. Second, we look for the positive intention behind this experience, because nobody has an inner enemy. People have a lot of habits that in the present are completely unwelcome and inappropriate, yet when you find the part that is maintaining that pattern, you’ll find a positive intention.
Two Cases in Point: Exploring, Finding, and Shifting a Belief
I had a thirty-four-year-old client who didn’t want to talk in public. Because he was a teacher, he had to. Fortunately, he managed to find himself a niche where he could do almost all of his work in writing and when he was in class, he basically read from his notes. He didn’t really give a presentation at all.
In talking with him, I found out that he’d once, as a little kid, given a presentation at his church. Afterward, although he thought he’d done well, he discovered that his mother was very embarrassed for him. Now, I don’t know how he really did (probably nobody knows), but he initially thought he did well. People applauded after his presentation, but his mother was embarrassed because he mispronounced or forgot something—and she made a point of bringing this to his attention.
Even though his mother’s intention was probably to help him do better on his next presentation, the shock of her embarrassment w
ent into his experience—and part of his brain said, “Boy, I’m never going to do this again.” So for decades he carried this inhibition about talking out loud in front of a group.
As he and I worked together, we found that piece of inner dialogue and came to understand that its positive intention was to keep him from disappointing his mother. His mother had been present at all of his graduations, had been applauding him when he got his doctorate degree, and was now living in a house that he’d purchased for her from his earnings as a college professor.
Although his adult mind knew that she was proud of him, this other part had still been operating. Once he could understand that this childhood belief was just linked to trying to protect him as a little boy—a protection he no longer needed—it went away and so did the inhibition. From that point on, he was able to make an effective presentation, not just read his notes and avoid the audience.
In contrast, I worked with a thirty-eight-year-old attorney who had stage fright about having to talk in front of a board of directors. It turns out what inhibited him was not a voice, but an image. In our discussions, we explored the last time he made an important group presentation. The way he had this filed in his mind was as a picture of him in the well of one of those Victorian-era operating rooms. He was at the bottom, and the seats in the amphitheater around him were raised—so the audience was looking down on him from twenty feet above.
He was down at the bottom and he was about three feet tall. And when he looked up at the seats around him, there weren’t people in these seats. They were all like Easter Island figures—these imposing stone statues of odd-shaped heads—and the eyes were all blank.
When I reproduced that image, I could tell him with sincerity and compassion that seeing this in my mind’s eye made me feel very unsettled, too. When we examined this unconscious image, we were able to identify the initial positive intention and update his self-image and the way he thinks and feels about speaking to the board of directors or anyone with authority.
When we’re trying to help ourselves (or someone else) process differently, it’s a trap to think that there’s a cut-and-dried fix for every condition. There’s not.
However, because so many of these conditions can be traced back to similar causes, you only need a small set of tools to help make these shifts. We’re all just flavoring our memories and our conversations and our conclusions from past experience. We’re generalizing them so that we can operate on them in the future using those principles that we define for ourselves. “That’s the way the world is, or that’s how the world’s always going to treat me.”
In an attempt to automate that behavior—like we automate tying our shoes—we make assumptions that can sometimes be limiting to us. So it’s always wise to say, “Tell me more,” rather than focus on a technique or solution. You’ll discover that your voracious curiosity for understanding how another human being works is such a gift.
Understanding is always about someone’s process. Because it’s easy to be seduced by words and content, we might sincerely relate to someone’s experience and be excited to move directly to a solution. Replicating another person’s process in sensory terms is always the key to really getting their reality.
Because you now understand how your own mind works, you’ll remember as they tell you about their process that it, too, can be broken down into feelings, sounds, pictures, tastes, and smells. So when a person gives a really general complaint, like “Well, you know, I don’t get this job, I can’t do it,” you recognize that this is way too limited; you can’t do anything with it.
After all, when people generalize about their limits, they’ve taken themselves out of human experience. What you want to do is take a person to the last time they actually felt the feelings they’re describing to you, so they can feel it again. At this point, they can tell you what’s going on. They can’t tell you at the outset, so you have to guide them back there.
“When was a time this happened for you?”
“Oh, it happened to me last week.”
“Oh? Tell me about it.” Then you watch and listen. You hear the words, you hear how they’re chosen, and you hear the assumptions in their language. You do this because you’re trying to become them—to understand how they create this feeling themselves.
My experience of unpacking beliefs and exploring difficulties is that the first, second, and third steps usually involve getting a complaint that’s expressed in high-level terms like “I’m detached. I’m uninvolved.” You’ll get these abstract conclusions that you must pare down into specific pictures, sounds, and feelings that you can reproduce in your own mind and body. Once you can do that, you have the information you need to help yourself—or someone else—make a positive shift.
It’s Kind of Like That:
How Metaphors and Stories Support Shifts
Metaphor is another powerful and fun way to help people shift or change their attitudes and attention. It’s no accident that we’ve been telling each other stories since the days that tribes sat around campfires. They’d stare into the flames and tell each other what happened on the hunt, what happened with the baby back at home while you were out on the hunt, and what so-and-so said or did.
If you think about it, there are thousands and thousands of stories in your life—family stories, work stories, community stories, world stories. Let’s take a simple story like Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack’s mom tells him to go sell the cow because they need money, they need to get firewood, and he gets talked into trading the cow for three magic beans.
So she spanks him with a wooden spoon and puts him to bed without supper, and she’s brokenhearted because she lost the cow and this idiot boy came back with beans. She throws them out the window—and the next morning there’s a huge beanstalk.
Jack, who’s not going to be real welcome at the breakfast table anyway, gets curious so he climbs the beanstalk. He climbs it and climbs it, and gets up above the clouds, and he’s in this magical realm where everything is much larger than it is down where he lives. The chairs are bigger and everything’s bigger—and, of course, this is a place that’s lived in by a giant.
The harp, who is the giant’s captive, tells him where the giant keeps his gold and then helps Jack escape. So, as they go back down the beanstalk, they’re being chased by the giant, who’s roaring that he’s going to kill them, and then Jack chops down the beanstalk and the giant falls and is destroyed.
When hearing this, did you at any time think you were the giant? Probably not. You took on the identity of Jack. You went and got conned out of your mom’s cow for the beans. You came back home and you went to bed without supper, and the next morning you climbed the beanstalk.
Here’s why that happens. The human brain usually identifies with the hero. Each of us is the star of our own lives, right? We all know that. This is more than just a platitude. This is an operating psychological reality: We each live in the center of a world that’s created in our own minds. We’re pulled out of that world sometimes—if we’re at the movies, watching TV, immersed in a book, or sometimes if we’re with someone else—but generally, we’re in the center of a world of our own making.
So why is this important now? The way we bridge the gap from one soul, from one mind to another, from one heart to another, is with our senses and with the skills that we’ve talked about so far. We reach out and touch one another. We look into each other’s eyes. We get into rapport. We share our experiences with each other.
One of the nicest and most neutral ways to exchange information is to tell a story. Most stories are interesting, right? However, if the story is told by a narcissist, then the story is all about “me, me, me”—and that’s probably not going to be very interesting.
It can be a story that happened to you and yet it’s not all about you, you, you. It’s just about something that happened. If you’re simply a normal mortal in the story, you can be astonished, surprised, embarrassed, afraid, frustrated, and the other person will g
o right along with that because they’ll feel the same way.
Stories can entertain, inform, educate, and unite people. You can use stories to help someone make a shift. As you know, when we try to persuade someone, they often experience us as pushy—then they push back. You, in turn, might want to try harder. This pushing can become a vicious cycle where nobody can win. What you need to do is step back a little and maybe even zoom out to third position to objectively check things out. But at some point, should you want to make a point, you can simply tell a story.
Once Upon a Time: A Case in Point
With my grown daughter, I used to try to strongly suggest that she do certain things. After all, I’m a generation older. I know how a lot of this stuff turns out, but that doesn’t get me anything because (surprise, surprise) she wants to lead her own life. She’s not interested in letting me lead her life, or letting me get a second shot at leading my own, and she’s right.
So what I’ve learned to do is listen and then—kind of as an afterthought—say, “Look, I don’t know if this will work for you, but this worked for me once. It’s something you might think about, or not. It’s up to you,” and I just leave it at that.
Sometimes a story about someone else’s challenge and success is even more effective than a story about your own experience. If I had a relevant example, I could say, “You know, I had a client who had a similar challenge in her work. She’s not you, and your situation is different, but this is what happened . . .”
Then I’d tell her the story of this woman who was being hit on by her boss, or someone who’d gotten credit for work she’d done stolen from her, or a guy whose customer had unreasonable expectations. I’d tell her some story that related to the work situation that we were discussing.