The Frame's the Thing
A simple matrix for getting out of your own head
Imagine you’ve just had one of those days where everything goes a bit wrong at work. You speak to a colleague in a way you’re not proud of. You find yourself in a meeting which you clearly haven’t done enough preparation for. You receive some feedback from your boss that’s hard to hear. At the end of the day, it’s easy to come home, slump on the sofa and think to yourself ‘I’m not cut out for this’.
I think many of us experience this or something akin to it relatively regularly - I certainly do. There are days when I deem myself a terrible parent; others where I fixate on one or other aspect of leadership that I think I’m not doing well. These thoughts can sometimes last for a few moments, but sometimes can linger for longer, casting a pall over the next few days or even weeks.
Famous introvert Hamlet tells us that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”. This is neither the time nor the place for an essay on moral relativism, but I will say that, for most of us, this statement is a useful thing to remember if we’re in a negativity spiral. Pretty quickly, whatever mental pain we are feeling is not to do with the original incident at all - it’s to do with the lengthy self-flagellation that we’ve decided to inflict upon ourselves because of it.
Seth Godin (as always) has a useful mental structure to help us with this. In this blog from a couple of years ago, he gives us a true / useful matrix which we can use to interrogate our internal narrative. In the top right quadrant, things that are both true and useful can make us resilient - a good example of this could be remembering an achievement at work that made you particularly proud. This is something that is both true (it happened) and useful in as much as it reinforces your confidence and can spur you on to other positive achievements.
In the bottom right quadrant (things that are untrue but useful) we have beliefs. Seth Godin gives the example of the tooth fairy - certainly a useful belief in helping my daughter cope with her wobbly tooth at the moment. When I think about this for grown ups, I often replace ‘untrue’ with ‘unknown’. If you’ve applied for a large pot of funding (and, importantly, also made a plan for what happens if you don’t get it), you may choose to live in the belief that the outcome will be positive in the intervening period when you don’t know what will happen and you have no further control you can exercise. This approach may help you feel more confident and more positive, which will have a knock on effect on how you do your job.
In the top left quadrant - things that are true but unuseful - live the experiences that we dwell upon for no productive purpose. A funder rejected us. We didn’t get a job that we wanted. That project that we’d been working on for ages didn’t really work out the way we thought it might. Feeling the feelings associated with these things is important, but letting them linger rarely leads to anything good. Neither, I think, does prolonged railing against the overarching circumstances in which we are working that we can do little to change. It’s true that there’s clearly not enough money to go round, for example, but endlessly repeating this does nothing to change it and serves only to exacerbate our frustration.
The final quadrant goes one step further to things that are both untrue and unuseful - for example, I’ve written before about how meaningless the phrase “there’s no money” is, because 99% of the time (i.e. unless you literally have zero cash in the bank) it isn’t true and leads only to a mindset of scarcity that helps no one.
The older I get, the more deeply I believe that so much of our experience of the world is in the way that we frame it. We have all met ‘glass half-full’ and ‘glass half-empty’ people. We’ve also probably met people who live with a relatively high level of privilege who insist on telling you that everything is terrible, and people that have far fewer advantages that feel that life is treating them pretty well. Philosophic titan Socrates tells us that “If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.” The difficulty, perhaps, in today’s world, is that the shiny gloss of social media makes it appear that no one else has any misfortunes to lay down - a belief that should probably be relegated to the ‘untrue / unhelpful’ category.
We don’t have to be Pollyannaish about things - sometimes, life bowls us a googly and we should take the time that we need to get cross / get sad / feel whatever it is that we’re feeling. Beyond this, we have a question to answer. Do we stay stuck in what has happened, or do we find a way to frame it that allows us to move forwards? This doesn’t need to involve pretending that hard things aren’t hard; it’s about reminding ourselves that we get to choose, each and every day, how we show up in the world.
In leadership, this choice matters even more deeply, because it determines not only our own experience but that of those that we lead. If your theatre’s latest show just got panned, or a big funding application that you really really needed didn’t materialise, it is how you talk about this, how you frame it, how you tell the story of it, that shapes how the organisation carries it. A one-star reviewed show could be evidence of the idiocy of theatre criticism, or of a director who let you down, or of a show that was ahead of its time, or of a necessary risk when aiming for a radical artistic output. Which of these are true, and which of these help? It’s up to you.