Choosing Your Frames

The deepest application is choosing the frames through which you experience your life.

You are not lying to yourself by picking a more useful frame. You are deciding which truth to focus on. A job loss is genuinely both a crisis and an opportunity. A breakup is both a loss and a liberation.

The discipline is noticing when you have defaulted to the least useful frame — usually the loss frame — and deliberately weighing alternatives before it hardens into the only reality you can see.

People who master framing are not delusional optimists. They are flexible thinkers who hold several perspectives at once and choose the one that serves their goals.