How to Coach Yourself and Others Beware of Manipulation | Page 182

Reframing leaves the facts alone but may well challenge the assumptions. With care, you can change
the other person's reality without causing conflict.
Within the inference filters we use, we classify things into groups and types which have defining
attributes. Reframing may deliberately challenge these. Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch describe this
as: In it's most abstract terms, reframing means changing the emphasis from one class membership of
an object to another, equally valid class membership, or, especially, introducing such as new class
membership into the conceptualization of all concerned.
Reframing may also challenge superficial desires, appeal to more fundamental needs and interests. For
example a request for a pay rise may be reframed as an imperative to keep talented people.
Reframing may even be done physically and symbolically, for example where a social leader goes for
dinner with someone who has hereto been ignored, reframing the person as a friend.
Hale (1998) describes how reframing can be used in dramatic games, for example where people play
roles of victim and hero.
Philips (1999) describes three ways reframing happens in active listening:
•Reflecting some words and ignoring others.
•Inviting or discouraging collaborative meaning-making on selected topics.
•Reformulating what people say (i.e. common usage of reframing).
Bizer and Petty (2005) found that people who framed their political view as in opposition to a political
candidate were more resistant to persuasion than those who were positively supportive of a candidate.
The term 'frame' also appears in the common usage of a 'frame of mind', typically used to describe a
cognitive position or mood. Whilst our current emotional state is not the whole of a perceptual frame, it
is an important element of it and changing emotions will change the frame and hence created meaning.
Beyond personal perception, all ideologies from political systems to religions are frames for creating
meaning. Cultures, likewise, embody methods of interpreting and shared ways of making sense of the
world, as are the models by which we perceive ourselves and others. When we share frames with
others, we share meaning. When we have different frames we can easily fall into conflict if we
consider the frames of others to be non-legitimate.
Reframing is a particularly useful method when two or more people are stuck in opposing and
seemingly-intractable positions. Reframing here effectively changes the ground from under their feet.
It is thus a common method in conflict resolution.
A typical approach is to:
•First get each 'F