On the last day of a recent holiday to Sicily, our flight home from Catania was cancelled because Mount Etna erupted.
Airlines, it turns out, are picky about flying through clouds of hot volcanic ash.
I told my newsletter readers the full story of the 48-hour logistical assault course that followed, You can sign up over there 👉
The short version involves two hire cars, a 3:30 a.m. start, a flight to the wrong end of England, and me doing roughly eleven hours of driving.
The other three people (my wife and our two best friends) in our party were stressed to the point of needing a lie down in a darkened room with a nice bottle of Chianti and a stash of Valium.
Whereas I genuinely enjoyed almost all of it.
And that’s not because I’m a naturally sunny person who floats through life untroubled.
Far from it.
I’m never more than five minutes away from contemplating my own demise, and that of the entire planet because of Trump’s lunacy.
It’s because somewhere along the line, reframing stopped being a technique I use consciously and became something I just do out of habit.
As a coach, reframing touches almost everything you do: how you handle setbacks, how you market yourself, how you sell, and how useful you are to your clients.
In other words, it’s a big fucking deal and is an integral part in your ability to get coaching clients?
What Is Reframing?
If I snuck into your house while you were asleep, took down your favourite picture, fitted a hideous gold and purple frame studded with fake diamonds round it, and then hung it back up, how would you like it?
After resisting the urge to kick me in the bollocks and telling me to get out of your house, you probably wouldn’t like your new picture as much.
Yet I haven’t changed it, merely reframed it.
But that new frame cannot not impact the way you view what’s inside it.
We’re constantly looking at things, events, situations and people (including ourselves) through frames we’ve constructed.
I did a lot of NLP training between 2005 and 2008, and one of its most famous presuppositions is:
“The map is not the territory.”
It means we all respond to our internal representation of reality rather than reality itself.
And the reason we do that is because of frames. Frames are how the map gets drawn.
Frames are useful, and they save crucial mental energy.
Your brain can’t afford to work out what everything means from scratch every single time, It’s got more important shit to do like beat your heart, maintain your blood pressure, and decide what to have for dinner.
So it applies a ready-made frame and gets on with its life, and yours.
The problem is your brain doesn’t stop to check whether a frame is helpful or accurate, only whether it’s familiar and can be applied quickly.
Which means a frame you built years ago can still be deciding how you feel about what happened this morning.
And that can be very detrimental to your happiness and contentment.
Reframing, which therapists call cognitive reappraisal and forms the basis of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), is the skill of deliberately changing the frame.
It’s not positive thinking, and nobody needs to act like Pollyanna on MDMA at a Tony Robbins seminar to use it.
Because, with reframing, we are never changing the event itself (that would be delusional), just the way we look at it.
Which brings me to an important distinction, because reframing is not the same as bullshitting yourself.
A useful reframe doesn’t deny the facts.
What it does is allow you to take control about how you think of a situation and thus how you feel.
“My launch failed because the universe it’s come inspiring on my behalf to come up with something better.“ isn’t reframing. It’s being delusional.
“My launch failed, but I now have data I didn’t have before” is a reframe.
You can choose to reframe literally any event in your life, and I do mean any event this side of your own death.
But even then, the people around you can reframe your demise.
I’m sure when I shuffle off this mortal coil, there’ll be some people saying, “What a shame Tim’s dead. But on the upside, I’m sure Helen will give me his The Buzzcocks T-shirt.“
I reframed the death of my dad, who I loved very much, by being thankful that he wasn’t in pain for long and that I was lucky enough to have him in my life for over 40 years.
The Only Two Questions You’ll Ever Need to Reframe a Situation
Two very simple questions, used either independently or in combination, can always push you into a reframing mindset, and they are:
“What else can this mean?”
“What can I learn from this?”
The first question loosens your grip on the meaning you slapped on the event in the heat of the moment.
The second turns the event into useful feedback.
Referring back to my NLP training, you may recognise that second question as another very famous presupposition in disguise: “There’s no failure, only feedback.”
Unlike “The map is not the territory”, that one isn’t describing how frames work. It’s a reframe in its own right, and arguably the most useful one ever created.
You don’t necessarily need both every time as one will often do.
And because you’re a coach, I hope you’ll recognise both of them, because they’re incredibly powerful questions in a coaching environment.
Reframing Your Marketing
Let me give you three situations that every coach reading this has either lived through or will.
You had a discovery call and the person didn’t sign up.
What can I learn from this situation?
If you’re recording and transcribing your consults, and I do for every single one, you can go back through the transcript and look at what you actually said rather than what you think you said.
AI can make that analysis considerably easier, especially when you give it the transcript. I’ve included the tools I use and recommend in my guide to the best AI tools for coaches.
- Maybe you talked too much.
- Maybe you tried to get them to sign up too early.
- Maybe you missed the moment they told you exactly what they wanted because it was implicit rather than explicit.
What else can this mean?
It can simply mean there’s a coach out there who is more right for them than you are.
It can also mean the problem isn’t your coaching ability at all, but the way the coaching industry trains people to think qualifications automatically lead to clients. I’ve written about that in more detail in Is the ICF a Pyramid Scheme?
Not everybody is right for us and sometimes we are much better to walk away.
In at least one in three of the consults I do, I don’t think I’m the right coach for the prospect, and I will tell them.
But the flip side is that some consults end up with the client realising I’m not right for them, which is equally fine for them to tell me.
If, after the call, you’re in a better position to sign up clients in the future, or you dodged the bullet of a client who wasn’t right for you, that’s a win.
And it’s certainly a lot better than kicking yourself and telling yourself how shit you are.
Maybe you talked too much.
Maybe you tried to get them to sign up too early.
Your latest LinkedIn post, the one you were really proud of, sank without trace.
What else can this mean?
It can mean the LinkedIn algorithm is being an utter dick, because it frequently is.
It’s mercurial, and sometimes a good post dies for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality.
Or, it could mean the content isn’t as valuable to your ideal client avatar as maybe you thought.
What can I learn from this situation?
Go back through your posts that did land and look for patterns.
- Was it the time of day?
- How did you format it?
- Did you use images? If so, were they consistent with your branding?
- Was the topic on message for you?
Somebody unsubscribed from your email list.
What else can this mean?
It means your list is cleaning itself.
It could also mean that you’re polarising people, which you absolutely have to do for successful marketing.
I don’t regularly make jokes about Trump in emails because I don’t have the ability to keep my mouth shut.
Rather, I do it because if you’re a card carrying member of MAGA, then guess what? I’m probably not the right coach for you, because I’m going to say something at some stage that puts your back up.
The flip side of people unsubscribing is that people are remaining subscribed, and they’re the people you want, the people who like what you have to say and how you say it.
You can’t go trying to convert the world to your point of view.
But, you can go around trying to find the people that already share your point of view.
I genuinely like it when I have a bunch of unsubscribes, and so should you, because it’s valuable feedback.
Reframing is a crucial tool in your marketing
Before I was a coach I spent years in corporate sales, and I can tell you that you’re going to suck as a salesperson if you can’t reframe on the spot.
Because objection handling is reframing in real time.
When a prospect says, “You’re too expensive,” the answer isn’t to apologise or discount.
It’s to reframe.
Early in my coaching days, I was doing a face-to-face consult with somebody who’d come to me for help with stress, and he said that he wasn’t sure he could afford it.
I can’t even remember what I was charging at the time, but it was certainly less than $1,000.
So rather than offering a discount or telling him he’s a cheapskate and needs to get out of my office forthwith, I asked him if he’d got anywhere booked for vacation that year.
He replied that he had. He was going to Costa Rica with his wife.
I said, “Well, that should certainly lower your stress levels.”
And before he had the chance to respond, I said, “Except for maybe the first day or two, when you’re worrying about what you’ve left behind.
And the last day or two, when you’re stressing about going back to work with an increased workload.
Or, at least, that was always how it was for me.”
He agreed and we both laughed.
I went on to say, “Isn’t it weird that we’re prepared to spend thousands of dollars on a one-week vacation to reduce our stress for a very short period of time, but often don’t want to spend $1,000 on removing stress from our life?”
That one reframe helped him to see the situation in a whole new light. And he signed up.
And before you get the wrong idea, reframing an objection isn’t about bullying somebody past a legitimate concern.
If he genuinely couldn’t afford it, that’s a different conversation.
It’s about helping people check whether the frame behind the objection is accurate.
Reframing With Clients
Your clients are paying you, in large part, to help them see their situation differently.
Of course, there are times when the situation itself needs to change, but quite often, that isn’t possible.
And in those instances, reframing is the best tool you’ve got at your disposal.
Which means the two questions above aren’t just for your marketing.
They’re tools you can hand to clients, and every time you use them on an empty calendar or a crap launch, you’re training your brain to be on the lookout for different ways to see things.
Two things to bear in mind, though.
Firstly, timing matters. A reframe delivered too early is worse than no reframe at all.
If a client is still raw from a setback, they don’t want it repackaged as a growth opportunity, they want to be heard.
If you reframe too soon, you’re going to sound unempathetic at best.
Wait until they’re ready and it can change everything.
And secondly, there are some things you shouldn’t be reframing for other people.
If a client tells you they lost all their money in Vegas, including the kids’ college fund., it’s probably best not to say, “Well, at least you don’t have to worry about where to invest your savings.“
The Job Offer That Never Was
Just before I became a full time coach back in 2005, I was told I had been given a job.
It was very highly paid, in IT sales, and it represented the culmination of something I had been working towards for ten years.
After I had chosen my car and started negotiating with HR, I had to go for a meeting with the CEO.
To this day I have no idea what I did wrong or what happened, but the job offer was rescinded.
I was devastated when I got the phone call from the highly embarrassed sales director, who had told me to pick my car.
Even though I used objection handling on a regular basis, I never cottoned on to thinking that it could be used on myself in the guise of reframing.
So I started my own pity party for one.
And all that pity party achieved was pissing my wife off and making myself thoroughly miserable.
The reality of it is now, as I look back, I dodged not just a bullet, but a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Because I never interviewed for another job in sales,
I’m not sure that I could have used the question, “What did I learn from this?“, except maybe, “Don’t count fucking chickens when you can’t even see any eggs.”
But I could have used “What else can this mean?”
Because I could have answered that question:
It means you need to get your shit together with your application for a US green card and stop dicking around applying for jobs that will stress you out.
It was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
If that meeting had gone well, I’d almost certainly have stayed in sales for the foreseeable future, not moved to the US, and not become a coach.
So now it’s over to you.
What’s the situation in your coaching business that you’ve currently got a shit frame around?
It might be the consult that didn’t convert, the launch that flopped, or the social media post that died on its arse.
Run it through the two questions and tell me in the comments what else it could mean, or what you could learn from it.
And I’ll happily tell you whether you’ve found a genuine reframe or whether you’re bullshitting yourself.