Recently (being Easter) I had the discussion with my wife about Easter, chocolate and the good the bad and the ugly. We often have good debates (that could translate to a heated discussion) and it’s a great time to have a think about the effects of what’s going on right now, moment to moment.

My wife came home after doing some shopping and stated “I cannot believe the highway robbery of Easter!” $9 for a small bag of eggs!

Always looking at an opportunity to create a reframe (also a great way to defuse),
I said “Well isn’t that great, people are helping the coco industry, reducing child labour and creating more wealth for third world countries”.

Closely followed up by, “You did buy the fair trade chocolate, didn’t you?”

So I thought, what other kind of reframes could I use?

At Practitioner level we look at a context reframe and a meaning reframe. For those that need a refresher on reframes.

Lets look at how reframes can change our perspective and how we can learn how to do this sort of reframe in our head on the fly?  The notion of reframing comes from Hypnosis and Milton Erickson and it also comes from transformational grammar and people like Paul Vaclavik.

Now by shifting the logical levels in this context, (and remember the hierarchy of ideas- chunking up and chunking down), we actually chunk up one level or go to a higher level of abstraction.  One of my favourite paradoxes, is from the book “How Real is Real” By Vaclavik, where he talks about this really nice paradox, so if you want to play, do this paradox with me.

Take a piece of paper and draw on it- a box. What I’d like you to do is I’d like you to put your initials in the box if, and only if, you can predict that when I look at the box next the box will be empty. Interesting huh? That’s a fun sort of a paradox.

The thing about paradoxes is that they’re only resolvable on a higher logical level which is what really makes them so much fun to contemplate. Reframing to a large extent is about shifting the context or shifting your thinking from the level that you’re at to a higher logical level.  It’s about changing and moving to a higher logical level.  If you change the thinking and you move to a higher logical level you’ll be thinking outside of the box that the client’s thinking in.

Now here’s the thing, people come to you with a problem, their problem is on a certain logical level or their problem is in a certain context or their problem has a certain set of parameters around it. In essence we could say their problem’s got a box around it.  Now the only way that you’re going to be able to think outside the box for that person is if you’ve practised it.

Your ability to think outside the box is what’s going to give your client and you the most flexibility to make changes.  So contemplating reframing and contemplating paradox is probably one of the most important things you can do in NLP to begin to stretch your brain, to actually begin to see what kinds of things that you can think of differently from the way other people present a presenting problem to you.

So did you check to see if your Easter Eggs are the fair trade chocolate?

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks