Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success

Chapter 8

How to Make Your Own Reframes

Now that you’ve been exposed to the reframes in this book, you’re ready to start making your own. You might want to do that to handle situations I didn’t cover or to tweak my examples for your specific situation. These five rules will get you started:

Reframes don’t need to be true or even logical.

Reframes only need to work.

You can quickly test reframes in your mind and body.

A reframe approaches a topic from a new perspective.

If the reframe creates an advantage, keep it.

A good way to brainstorm reframes is to imagine how the smartest and most aware people you know would approach a given situation. If you have a sense for how those people view the world, you can start seeing it through their eyes. For example, you can rely on some people to put a religious interpretation on events and others to cynically tell you to “follow the money.” Assemble an imaginary advisory board of people you know and then imagine them giving you advice on the topic. The advice you imagine is likely to include some reframes and even more likely to spark your own creativity.

Once you have a reframe candidate to test, see if it’s sticky. Does your mind automatically return to it? Do you find yourself repeating it in your mind or even aloud? If so, that’s a good start. It doesn’t mean the reframe will work, but it does tell you it’s sticky enough to rewire your brain with repetition. Next, you test it. If it isn’t effective, restart the brainstorming.

I’ve known for years how powerful reframes can be. I credit much of my success to their effectiveness. By now, you have experienced the power of some of the reframes in this book. You probably felt some of them as soon as you read them while dismissing others as not applicable to you. And that’s okay.

This is a good time to remind you that some reframes will feel right to you and others won’t work with your unique brain and personality. My only caution is that you might not be good at knowing which ones will work for you because reframes are often non-intuitive—and sometimes goofy—by design.

If you are reading this sentence, you are probably already an improved version of the person who started reading this book. Your software has been updated. You are reborn, bristling with skills and freed from your past.

The final reframe is you.