At some point in your life you’ve undoubtedly heard the advice. The task of a company-wide report with a tight deadline unexpectedly falls on your desk, a flat tire causes you to miss the appointment and the sale, or an important project fails. Here’s the advice: look on the bright side. Trade the negative story for a positive one. Instead of “This deadline is brutally tight”, reframe it as “This is a great way to meet people in other departments.” Instead of “I’ve got the rottenest luck on the planet”, reframe it as “I’m so grateful to have learned a new skill.” Instead of “The project failed miserably”, reframe it as “Now I know what doesn’t work.”
That’s reframing. It’s in the self-help books, on the wellness posters, and in the mouth of every manager who says “challenge” when they mean “problem.”
Underneath each of those situations is a “no.” That “no” has a name. It’s called resistance: the negative thoughts and feelings you hold about a task. You can find them in the description you use for the task.
Reframing is the managing-your-feelings crowd’s attempt to get rid of that “no.” Replace the negative description with a positive one, and the bad feelings should go with it. It isn’t a crazy idea. The trouble is belief. You have to convince yourself the new story is true, and part of you never quite buys it. So the old story keeps coming back, and you end up on permanent high alert, propping up the new version every time the task comes to mind. That drains your energy and chews up your time.
Managing your feelings is one of the three answers the Productivity Establishment has always sold, right alongside willpower and discipline. All three offer the same deal. The resistance stays, and you spend your energy managing it: forcing your way past it, building routines around it, or talking yourself through it. And when that stops working, the verdict is always the same: you’re the problem.
You aren’t.
Unframing is my main technique for neutralizing resistance. Unframing doesn’t hand you a better story. It neutralizes the “no.” There’s nothing to swap, nothing to maintain, and nothing you have to keep convincing yourself of. Unframing won’t ask you to believe things will turn out well. It doesn’t ask you to believe anything at all.
Here’s what’s different afterward. With the resistance gone, you have no reason to not move on or take the next logical step or action. No resistance means no emotional reactivity so you are free to take action naturally. And the best part: there is no going through life with gritted teeth, no positive spin to keep alive, and no energy drain.
I wrote it down for you.
Unframing: The Anti-Establishment Technique for Increasing Your Productivity is out today. It’s a short 30-minute read you can finish in one sitting, and it teaches my go-to technique for Acceptance in The Frictionless Mindset. It’s the whole technique, start to finish.
You’re seeing it before anyone else, on purpose. This Saturday, October 24, I have a guest feature in the Growth Mindset newsletter, in front of a lot of readers who have never heard of me. Since you’ve been reading my work first, you should get it first.
One last thing. If reframing never stuck for you, you didn’t do it wrong. It was never built to remove anything.
Cheers,
Alessandra