An employee of mine, my transcriptionist, was living in New Orleans until August 28, 2005. On that day, she and her boyfriend and their cats drove north to Tennessee to ride out the storm 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.'
She has anger and sadness for the city and the loss of friends, but has turned the upheaval into a new beginning.
We can use framing as a tool for positive change and a potent instrument for persuasion. When we think about Holocaust "victims", we see "survivors".
The ability to reframe is used by social workers who work with gang members turning murder into something ugly no matter who the victim.
The world of advertising relies entirely on framing. Appealing to different segments of the population, ad campaigns are tailored to youth markets, middle aged markets, senior markets, religious markets, etc. Advertisers take on the rebel and independent attitudes of youth culture to sell their products using edgy slogans and cool ads.
Politicians use framing, 'spin', on issues all the time. Bush's frame is that the war in Iraq is just. In nearly all of his speeches he suggests that 'If you're not with us, you're against us.' And 'It's better to fight them over there, than to fight them over here.' This is a presupposition. Who's to say we'd have to fight 'them' at all?
The Democrats and an overwhelming percentage of U.S. citizens now have the frame that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism, but has everything to do with oil and no bid contracts.
We can use framing as a positive thing depending on what we consider to be positive. If you frame it in a positive light, almost anything can be positive. People use this strategy all the time to convince others to "do the right thing". Martin Luther King Jr. framed segregation as evil convincing many people that it was wrong, and so here we are today with millions of black and white Americans who've grown up together not knowing that kind of blatant inequality. Was he right? I think so. But for opponents of integration, he was absolutely wrong.
Switch frames from hardship to challenge, setbacks to times for reflection, victims into survivors. Embrace the power of framing.
Kenrick Cleveland teaches techniques to earn the business of affluent prospects using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion techniques. This and other unique content 'persuasion' articles are available with free reprint rights.
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