Reframing Framing

My transcriptionist lived in New Orleans until August 28, 2005, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit. She and her boyfriend and their four cats evacuated with two cars full of valuables and art and 'irreplaceables'. They rode out the storm in Tennessee in a pet friendly hotel.

For months after her subsequent move to Portland, people, when they found out where she was from, would say, "Oh, you're a victim of Hurricane Katrina?" Her response was always, "Not really. I had two cars and plenty of cash and credit cards. I was 'inconvenienced' by the hurricane and flood and it was a changing point in my life, but I'm not a victim. The victims were the poor people who didn't have the means to leave."

On an even more positive note, she says, 'This was a great move for me, a new life, new city, and I'm very happy for the change.'

Not everyone was as fortunate and this employee of mine has anger and sadness where the hurricane and subsequent nightmare of New Orleans is concerned, but she turned the upheaval into a fresh start.

Framing can be used as a tool for positive change and an instrument for powerful persuasion. Nowadays, we don't call people who endured the Holocaust victims, we call then survivors.

Thousands of social workers use framing each day. Gang members consider killing an opposing gang member honorable, but social workers and parole officers use framing to show how ugly murder is no matter who is the victim.

Advertising is all about framing. To appeal to younger audiences, advertisers usurp "rebellious" or "indie" mentalities in order to sell their products to the "alternative" youth culture. So now even a carton of eggs seems "edgy" and cool when advertisements imply that these aren't your daddy's old-fashioned, lame, square outdated eggs, these are cool eggs and only the truly awesome are eating our eggs.

Politics would be nowhere without framing. Bush, for example, uses the presupposition that, 'It's better to fight them over here than it is to fight them over here.' Well. . . that presupposes that we'd have to fight them at all. In 2004 he convinced more than half the nation that he was right and used 9/11 to support his frame that we're all in imminent danger.

Now, the Democrats and a large percentage of the population of the U.S. have the frame that this was a war for oil, not a war to prevent them from fighting us over here.

Framing can be used to convince people in positive ways. Martin Luther King, Jr. framed segregation as an evil injustice changing the views of many people. Generations later, black and white students don't know the blatant inequality as they've grown up in fully integrated schools.

Frame a hardship into a challenge,. Frame a setback into a time for reflection. Frame a victim into a survivor. Frame an old-fashioned product or service into something cutting edge and indispensable and awesome. Frame everything!

Article Source: http://www.rightbiz.com

Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies to earn the business of affluent clients using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion strategies.

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