Reframing your thoughts is something that everyone needs to do sometimes, particularly entrepreneurs. Being an entrepreneur can be mentally taxing, especially if you’re starting out on your entrepreneurial journey or growing your business. There’s a lot of pressure involved, and this can seriously affect your mindset — if you let it.
Busy minds, like ours, are prone to overthinking. This can lead to negative thoughts intruding on our conscious mind, which can ultimately drain our energy. You need to stop negative thoughts in their tracks before they become a regular part of your reality and affect your success as an entrepreneur.
In this article, we’re going to look at “Reframing” and how harnessing this psychological tool can have a profoundly positive effect on your life as an entrepreneur.
What is Reframing?
“Reframing” is a technique used by psychologists to help people change the way they perceive scenarios. The idea is to shift how you emotionally react to any given situation — which is why you must learn how to harness this technique as an entrepreneur to remove emotional decision making. The conscious ability to see things differently gives you a massive advantage in life. Every entrepreneur faces some form of adversity, but how they choose to perceive it is critical.
Reframing doesn’t mean you’re deluding yourself from the facts. It just means you’ll perceive the same set of circumstances differently.
One example of reframing would be to see the loss of a client as an opportunity to gain an even better client who is willing to pay you more and truly appreciates your time and efforts. Other examples include perceiving a tough sales target as an opportunity to prove how great you are as an entrepreneur, viewing a failed marketing campaign as an opportunity to learn the best marketing techniques and low productivity from your staff as an opportunity to invest in improving business operations and to review your team’s overall health.
Reframing can also work for our beliefs and future events. For example, if you always picture your business plan not working, try to change that way of thinking, and visualize your business plan becoming a resounding success. This will help to reinforce the idea that you and your business plan are both good enough to succeed.
Reframing Techniques
Most reframing techniques are pretty simple. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can get creative and look for new ways to reframe life scenarios and your thoughts.
View challenges as learning opportunities. This is probably the most common and one of the most productive ways for entrepreneurs to use reframing. When you’re facing adversity, view it as an opportunity to learn. Start analyzing the adverse situation for useful information that will benefit you in future decisions.
Feeling the emotion. When reframing scenarios or your thoughts, you must spend time looking at how you’re emotionally reacting. For example, feel the emotion that comes to you when thinking about an adverse scenario. Once you’ve identified the exact emotion (or set of emotions), you can start to replace that negative emotion for a more positive one. By taking the time to rethink how you’re emotionally reacting and taking steps to change that emotion, you’ll be reinforcing your reframing work, so it becomes second nature.
Particle reforming. This is something that works for me. Whenever a negative thought comes into my thinking, I disperse that image into millions of particles and allow them to reform into a positive version of that scenario. I believe this is a powerful way to reframe thoughts and will help you to visualize your future more positively.
How Thinking Impacts Your Reality
As Napoleon Hill states:
“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
That quote is 1000% true in my experience. Many people would back that up also. When you start to reframe your thoughts and see adversity as an opportunity, you’ll begin to liberate your mind from the stress and worries that drain most people and march forward to continue succeeding. Reframing works for both past experiences, the present moment, and for when you’re visualizing your future.
Be proactive, and start by reframing one negative thought or situation every day. Watch how it dramatically changes your life and your success as an entrepreneur for the better.
For more helpful tips on how to improve your life as an entrepreneur, check out the latest posts on our blog.
Written by Lewis James