Recently, I had a text conversation with someone I’ll call Carla, who said she needed some shots of confidence in order to reach a goal. Over text, I reframed until she was ready to act on her dream.
I often use a ton of reframing in my sessions; even if they’re going to be hypnosis sessions. It’s a good way to get your foot in the door. In this case, since it was a text conversation, reframing was the main tool.
Let’s take a look, first, at what conversational reframing can do. Then, we’ll go through it step-by-step, laying out the strategy.
Here’s the unedited conversation…
The Conversation
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Me: What can I do for you? How can I help?
Carla: I think I just need some shots of confidence
Me: Confidence is irrelevant. Can you do what you need to do without it?
Carla: Yeah
Me: OK. Go ahead. It’s pretty easy to do a good job once you get started and turn your attention to the outside. Lack of confidence requires internal channels devoted to lack of self-worth. The moment you fill up those channels with collected data from the outside, you’re good and your training kicks in.
Carla: Yeah. What I really want to do is partner with my chiropractor with her patients. I already know she’s open to it. I just need to take the leap of faith and start the real meaty convo about it
Me: How do you know she’s open to it?
Carla: I told her almost two months ago when I first started seeing her that I was starting a life coaching biz and was about to get NLP Hypnotherapy training and she mentioned she love to be able to have someone like me to refer her clients to. Also when I saw her for the first time post-training last week she said she is excited to become a client of mine.
Kinda a no brainier –
Me: Lol. What happens when you think about getting it going? What thought comes to mind?
Carla: That she’s this uber experienced guru with healing and energy work and I am so new at this and lack experience. I’m too green is what goes through my head.
Me: Too green for what, exactly?
Carla: To think that I could partner with a guru like her
Me: What color would you need to be?
Carla: Heehee. Blue. But then I’d be sad huh?
Me: Well, you’re already blue about not contacting her.
Carla: Green does mean go
Me: So, you could re-interpret the meaning of the colors
Carla: Yep
You rock
That quickly you turn me around huh?
Me: You’re the one who came up with the solution. I was just a smart ass.
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Silly, right? I checked with Carla later and she was good. That text conversation that was just a few minutes long had changed her frame of mind. But, how? What were the strategies used? Here’s the blow-by-blow…
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The Strategy For Confidence
Me: What can I do for you? How can I help?
The frame is already being set. I’m setting the frame that something I do with her can make a difference.
Carla: I think I just need some shots of confidence
Me: Confidence is irrelevant. Can you do what you need to do without it?
I’m immediately challenging her frame here (You’ll probably need rapport to do this effectively). She is expressing a belief equation. She’s saying she needs confidence in order to accomplish something. Even though she may not consciously believe that she absolutely needs confidence in order to accomplish it, that’s the way she’s expressed it and in her mind, she’s representing it that way.
I’m posing a question that gets her to consider that she can do it anyway, with or without confidence. This expands her frame of reference.
Carla: Yeah
Me: OK. Go ahead. It’s pretty easy to do a good job once you get started and turn your attention to the outside. Lack of confidence requires internal channels devoted to lack of self-worth. The moment you fill up those channels with collected data from the outside, you’re good and your training kicks in.
Here, I’m sending a two-part message. The first part is that if she can do it without confidence, she could just go ahead. I give it as a direct suggestion. The second part reframes confidence as a simple change of attention from inward to outward. Now, her choices are expanded. She can either proceed without confidence, or change her attention to outward and confidence won’t be an issue.
Notice the language shifts to very direct, first person. If we were speaking, rather than texting, I would embed the suggestions, “Go ahead”, “do a good job”, “get started”, “fill up those channels with collected data from the outside” and “you’re good and your training kicks in.”
By describing it, I’m also eliciting past experiences where Carla had her attention outward, so that she can attach those to this context (We don’t even know what that context is yet!).
Carla: Yeah. What I really want to do is partner with my chiropractor with her patients. I already know she’s open to it. I just need to take the leap of faith and start the real meaty convo about it
Me: How do you know she’s open to it?
Here, I’m looking for more information and seeking to elicit the state of knowing that her chiropractor is open to the idea. That would be another resource state that might be useful.
Carla: I told her almost two months ago when I first started seeing her that I was starting a life coaching biz and was about to get NLP Hypnotherapy training and she mentioned she love to be able to have someone like me to refer her clients to. Also when I saw her for the first time post-training last week she said she is excited to become a client of mine.
Kinda a no brainier –
Me: Lol. What happens when you think about getting it going? What thought comes to mind?
Now, I’m going for what has stopped her from acting, so far. Had we been speaking face-to-face, I would have been looking at where her eyes went and any other unconscious markers for the specific representation (thought) that is creating a state that stops her from acting. If we can get hold of that thought and change it, her state will change and she’ll be better able to act.
Carla: That she’s this uber experienced guru with healing and energy work and I am so new at this and lack experience. I’m too green is what goes through my head.
Me: Too green for what, exactly?
Now we’re getting somewhere! At one point Carla does was I call ‘speaking in quotes’. When she says, “I’m too green” she’s telling us that she says that to herself internally. It’s a voice in her head. Otherwise, she would phrase it something like, “It occurs to me that I’m too green.” One thing to do, might be to use an auditory swish pattern on that voice. But I decide to go another direction.
When people express a metaphor, it’s often a good choice to work within that metaphor. The unconscious mind works in metaphor. She gave me the metaphor of ‘being too green’. I thought I’d explore that by asking for more information about how the metaphor is constructed, in a ‘meta modely’ kind of way. Thus, “Too green for what, exactly?”
Carla: To think that I could partner with a guru like her
Me: What color would you need to be?
Remember, the unconscious mind works well with symbolism and metaphor. If she’s ‘too green to work with someone’, she’s representing it that way in her mind. Maybe if we just change the color, in her mind, it will change the feeling. And it’s the feeling that has been stopping her.
Plus, she’s expanding her choices by considering that it could be a different color. In essence, we’re messing with her metaphor 🙂
Carla: Heehee. Blue. But then I’d be sad huh?
Me: Well, you’re already blue about not contacting her.
Here, I’m going for a combination of things. Confusion is likely to happen here as we’re messing with the metaphor even more. Is blue good, or bad? I’m showing her that the meaning of the colors can change. Now, we’ve gotten her to change both the representation (the submodality of color has gone from green to blue) and the meaning (blue could be the color that she needs or it could be sad). When people are stuck, it may mean their representation of the situation is also stuck. Once you start changing things in there, the mind becomes much more flexible and can think of alternative ways of thinking about the situation.
Adding flexibility to the mind in this context will allow your client to come up with their own solution. And…
Carla: Green does mean go
Me: So, you could re-interpret the meaning of the colors
Bam! That’s what Carla does. She comes up with her own solution. With increased flexibility in thinking about her situation, she labels green as being the color of ‘go’, rather than the color of inexperience. She solves her own problem.
Carla: Yep
You rock
That quickly you turn me around huh?
Me: You’re the one who came up with the solution. I was just a smart ass.
Here’s the last reframe. It’s best for your clients to realize that solutions come from themselves. I did my job, which was to create an environment in which change was more likely and to encourage states of mind where it would happen. Carla was the one who suggested green could mean go. In order for her to generalize this flexibility in thinking and apply it to other contexts, it’s best if she recognizes her role in it. Personally, I was going to go in a different direction altogether. I was going to change the color around a bunch and see if a different color would help Carla feel differently. Instead, she changed the meaning of green — probably a far more appropriate solution for her.
Enjoy,
Keith
