Ultimately – Reframing is the difference between your success and failure.

We’re all operating on perspective. Effective reframing is your tool to influencing and altering that perspective. Master it.

To get you thinking, here’s a few reframes I’ve found effective:

• 10 years with the same employer shows strong loyalty. 10 years in the same type of job shows passion and specialisation. 10 years across multiple types of jobs shows adaptability.
• You don’t procrastinate until the last minute to get things done. You’re actually highly efficient – you just need the catalyst of an upcoming deadline to access that efficiency. (The art is in utilising your stress-driven efficiency effectively and without burnout!)
• You didn’t sit there and ‘run meetings for that annoying cross-departmental project working group’ – you ‘led the planning of a key organisation-wide process overhaul that led to over $30M in bottom-line profits’.
• It’s not a pilot project, it’s a lighthouse one. A pilot has the potential for a crash, a lighthouse shines the way forward no matter the result – acting as a beacon on the upcoming journey.
• You can’t change someone’s personality. It’s too damn hard. So reframe the mental role they perform. (E.g., shift them from an ‘order-taker’ to a ‘service-deliverer’, from a ‘policy-enforcer’ to ‘customer-advocate’. I’d probably shy away from ‘sandwich artist’ though…)
• You don’t have insufficient money or time. You have a prioritisation problem.
• You can’t afford for your middle management to be ‘change-observers’. You need them to be ‘change leaders’.