Reframing. When you consistently listen to this podcast, you hear April talk about this life-changing idea a lot. The positive impact reframing can have on your mindset work is enormous. In this episode, April talks about reframing a situation we can all relate to: travel delays. She tells a story from her own experience about how reframing a frustrating situation made it a lot easier to bear and helped her quickly regain a winning mindset. You’ll find this episode of the Winning Mindset Mastery Podcast both inspiring and practical. Be sure to listen!
—
Listen to the podcast here
Reframing Travel Delays Can Help You Build A Winning Mindset
The more we get to know each other, the more you are going to realize that I love a reframe probably more than almost anything in mindset work. I love the impact it can have, the habit you can form with it, and how it helps you have peace regardless of what’s going on around you. Because of that, I want to take a situation and reframe it for you each week so that you will have a lot of examples of how you could look at things differently. As things come up in your life and the more you experience this, you will develop those shortcuts in your mind and a habit of looking at things in a way that works better for you and helps you keep your cool.
This episode’s reframe is coming right out of my actual life. I was flying to a speaking engagement and I’d already gotten on the plane and hadn’t taken off yet. We had a couple of delays, which is fairly normal. If you fly often enough, you’ve experienced those. There are equipment delays or different things that go on. At this point, we’d been delayed probably for about 30 minutes. The pilot came on and said it would be another 30 minutes and that they were waiting for a plane to land.
At this point, I was feeling my stress level go up a little bit. That’s when I was like, “Let’s see how we can look at this.” The first question I tend to ask myself is, “What is bothering you about this situation?” I realized that what was bothering me was that I was going to get into town later than I had planned. The answer to that one was that I go in the night before just for this purpose so that I don’t have to be stressed. I might get in later than I wanted to, but I wasn’t going to miss anything important if I got in later.
Reframing: The first question I tend to ask myself is, “What is bothering you about this situation?”
I asked myself what was the next thing that was bothering me. I thought, “I don’t know how long I’m going to sit on this plane. I’m going to be bored.” To that, I could say, “That is an excellent opportunity to get some work done because you have it with you. You also have a great book. There are plenty of things to do.”
These are small reframes that I’m doing for myself by looking at it through a slightly different lens so that I’m not as upset that I’m sitting on the plane. At the same time, there were other people around me who were getting more upset mostly because they thought they were going to miss a connection or not make it to where they wanted to go.
Reframing: These small reframes I’m doing for myself allow me to look at things through a slightly different lens, so that I’m not as upset that I’m sitting on the plane.
As folks are getting a little more worked up, the pilot comes on the microphone and says to us that the plane I was talking about has landed, but it landed on our runway, and we are going to be delayed another 30 minutes. There’s a collective sigh from everyone and people started to murmur. He kept talking and said, “You are probably going to see this on the news tonight, so I will go ahead and tell you the reason that the plane landed on our runway is that one of the passengers had to land it.”
At that moment, everyone got quiet, and then everyone at once started talking with a different tone and a lot of relief. What the pilot had done with that additional information reminded each and every one of us that no matter how inconvenienced we felt or if we were going to be late, we didn’t have to land the plane.
A lot of times, a little bit of gratitude or a focus on a positive aspect of a possible situation is all you need to pull your mindset right into the right place. What was so interesting was everybody’s mindset changed because no matter when we got there or what happened, we were all passengers. There was nothing dangerous about our flight. We were able to look at it from a place of gratitude that we were on a safe flight that was getting where we wanted to go. We were all of a sudden in a winning mindset.
A lot of times, a little bit of gratitude or a focus on a positive aspect of a possible situation is all you need to pull your mindset into the right place. Share on XI hope that’s helpful to you to look at a situation and listen to the different steps of reframing it. I’d love for you to send me the situations that you’d like to reframe. I can do it for you either personally or you can go to my website for the show. It’s WinningMindsetMasteryPodcast.com, and at the very bottom, you can Ask April a question and ask it in your voice personally, and I will answer you back personally and privately.
Reframing: Look at a situation and learn the different steps to reframing it.
Also, if you are okay with me using it on the show, I will use your situation without your name to reframe for everybody on the show. The more situations that you are able to listen to and look at in a different way, the easier it’s going to be for you, which will help you experience things in better ways. Here’s to your success.