Let me tell you about a chap I’ve made up called Jake.

Jake’s a professional procrastinator. He spends his evenings and weekends sitting on the sofa, scratching his tushie and eating Coco Pops straight from the box. 

Jake wants to be a bit more switched on and he’s made a few half-hearted attempts to get his act together.

He hired a personal trainer, but he skips every session.

He bought an online course called "Productivity Mastery", but he's never finished it.

He wants a promotion at work, but he’s been fired twice from different jobs for poor performance.

Jake basically lives in an endless cycle of telling himself that next Monday is the perfect day to reset and start over. Then Monday rolls around and Jake decides he’ll wait until Tuesday. And on we go.

Things aren’t looking great for Jake.

Until one day, Jake discovers the magic of reframing. That changes everything for old Jakey boy.

Suddenly, Jake isn’t a procrastinator anymore. Oh no. He’s now a "thoughtful prioritisation expert who strategically delays projects to allow ideas to marinate".

Jake isn’t someone who starts courses but never finishes them. Instead, he’s "immersing himself in lifelong learning while refining his lifestyle model".

Jake isn’t skipping gym sessions any more either. Don’t be silly! That’s really Jake "honouring his body's natural recovery instincts”.

And Jake hasn’t been fired twice. He’s actually made "two bold career pivots driven by his unconventional approach to workplace expectations".

Now, you might think I'm being a tad facetious with these reframes.

And you’d be bang on the money.

But here's the thing:

How different are these examples from telling yourself that your terrifying presentation tomorrow is "actually an opportunity for growth"?

Or that your overwhelming workload is "a chance to practice resilience"?

Or that your difficult colleague is "teaching you patience"?

I get that reframes can be helpful sometimes.

But only as a sticking plaster.

It doesn’t matter if you’re using a reframe to calm yourself down or to gee yourself up. You’re still engaging in a bunch of reactive, mental gymnastics which burns through time and energy and crucially don’t even solve what’s really going on.

You can put as many motivational stickers as you want on a flat tyre, but when all’s said and done, you’ve still got a flat tyre.

Here's what's really interesting though:

What if you didn't need to tell yourself that your terrifying presentation was "an opportunity for growth" because you simply didn't see that presentation as scary in the first place?

This is what I call a preframe.

If a reframe is like adding a funky filter to a photo you’ve already taken, a preframe is choosing a different angle before you take the shot.

No wrestling with your thoughts, no tricking yourself into feeling better and no wasted mental energy trying to find the right mindset hack.

Just a shift to a clearer, calmer and more grounded way of seeing what’s really going on. And a way which drops the need to force and grind through life’s tougher moments.

As the Father of Motivation himself Wayne Dyer once wrote:

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

Turns out the flat tyre was never flat to begin with.

If you’d like to get started:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com