Choose a Better Life

We are officially a week into the New Year. I hope yours is starting out wonderfully well and that you are excited about what lies ahead in the next 358 days! I know I am.

If I could give you one gift to start out the year strongly it would be the gift of reframing. No, I’m not talking about putting new mattes and frames around the pictures on your walls, I’m talking about putting new frames around your experiences … reframing your experiences.

To reframe a situation or experience you simply choose to look at it differently. The key word here is choose. As I’ve said before, you can’t always choose what happens to you, but you can always choose how you respond to it.

Here’s an example… This happened to a friend not too long ago. In fact, it seems to happen to her quite a bit. My friend, I’ll call her Janet, doesn’t make a lot of money. She makes enough to pay her bills and if she’s lucky she can save a few dollars each month. Over the past year she has gotten a few small bonuses at work and was thrilled with the opportunity to put some money in savings.

A few days after she told me she had been able to save several hundred dollars her car broke down. Janet called me from the lobby of the mechanic’s shop as she was waiting for her car to be repaired and she was audibly upset. “How could this happen again? I was just able to put some money in my savings account and now I’m going to have to take it all back out to pay for my car.”

As I said, this seems to happen to Janet quite a bit and so I totally understood her frustration. After several minutes of listening to Janet I gently suggested she change the way she was looking at the experience. Instead of seeing this as a frustration (she just saved money and now it’s gone,) I pointed out that she could choose to see it as a blessed experience (she was able to save the money to get her car repaired before she even knew the car needed repair. And now she can pay for it without going further into debt by using credit cards.)

By simply changing the way she looked at the car repair she reframed her experience from something negative and frustrating to something positive and reassuring.

I’ll give you another example. This is something I am dealing with right now… For Christmas my husband gave me the magnificent gift of a cruise to Mexico. I’ve never been on a cruise and I love Mexico so I’m very excited. We leave on January 20th.

As excited as I am about the cruise, I am equally excited about the 2 ½ weeks of work before the cruise because I have a lot of great projects in the works. I have also packed my 2 ½ weeks full of great meetings and appointments. I set up my schedule so I could leave the country feeling productive and rewarded.

Here it comes … can you sense the twist that is about to happen? I woke up on January 3rd sick. And unfortunately sick for me is not usually a cold or 24-hour flu bug. Typically when I’m sick I’m down for several days with little energy, no voice, and several other not-so-fun symptoms.

Thankfully I always start my week with a doctor appt so I only had a little over 24 hours before I would be able to go in for a treatment. By the time I got to my appointment on Monday I was pretty miserable. In addition to suggesting I increase my 2 visits/week to 3-4 visits this week my doctor said since I was heading out of the country in a few weeks I really needed to take extra precautions with my health. This means not going out in public until I leave for the trip.

“What?!” She explained that because my immune system is currently so compromised that I would more than likely pick up every bug I came in contact with and if I did there may not be time to get me well before I left for my cruise.

So, aside from the fact that I wasn’t feeling well, I came home a bit frustrated. I had such great plans for work and all the things I was going to get accomplished. But, as I sat down to journal I decided that I needed to reframe this experience. Being frustrated was not going to help me get well or stay well. So, I began reframing and I actually came up with quite a list as to why the 2 1/2 weeks was going to be good.

On my list were things like:

• Because I have time to get well and stay well, I’ll start my trip feeling strong and healthy.
• Because I am avoiding re-exposure to illnesses my immune system will be that much stronger.
• I can use this time to get some of the projects done in my home office that have been “on hold.”
• I can organize my 2009 financial records so they are ready for taxes.
• I can do some foundational work on the new workshops I am developing.

Now, instead of being frustrated that I’ve had to cancel my meetings and appointments, I am again excited about what I will get done over the next few weeks. And I’ll still be able to leave for my cruise feeling productive and rewarded.

Choose a Better Life ™ by choosing to reframe situations and experiences that would initially be regarded as negative and turn them into something positive and productive.