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The Power of Frames

An employee of mine, my transcriptionist, was living in New Orleans until August 28, 2005. On that day, she and her boyfriend and their cats drove north to Tennessee to ride out the storm in a pet friendly hotel.

For months after her subsequent move to Portland, people, when they found out where she was from, would say, "Oh, you're a victim of Hurricane Katrina?" Her response was always, "Not really. I had two cars and plenty of cash and credit cards. I was 'inconvenienced' by the hurricane and flood and it was a changing point in my life, but I'm not a victim. The victims were the poor people who didn't have the means to leave."

She goes on to frame this even more positively, 'It was an opportunity for a new life, a new profession and a new city where the values are more in line with my own.'

Not everyone was as fortunate and this employee of mine has anger and sadness where the hurricane and subsequent nightmare of New Orleans is concerned, but she turned the upheaval into a fresh start.

Framing is a powerful tool for positive change. It can be an unbelievably potent instrument for persuasion. Look at the frame that we now put on the Holocaust "victims": Survivors.

Thousands of social workers use framing each day. Gang members consider killing an opposing gang member honorable, but social workers and parole officers use framing to show how ugly murder is no matter who is the victim.

Advertising is all about framing. To appeal to younger audiences, advertisers usurp "rebellious" or "indie" mentalities in order to sell their products to the "alternative" youth culture. So now even a carton of eggs seems "edgy" and cool when advertisements imply that these aren't your daddy's old-fashioned, lame, square outdated eggs, these are cool eggs and only the truly awesome are eating our eggs.

Politics would be nowhere without framing. Bush, for example, uses the presupposition that, 'It's better to fight them over here than it is to fight them over here.' Well. . . that presupposes that we'd have to fight them at all. In 2004 he convinced more than half the nation that he was right and used 9/11 to support his frame that we're all in imminent danger.

On the other hand, the Democrats have framed the war as something that has been prolonged and has crossed the line of sacrificing too many American lives for a cause that is based on lies and is less than worthy.

Framing can be used to convince people in positive ways. Martin Luther King, Jr. framed segregation as an evil injustice changing the views of many people. Generations later, black and white students don't know the blatant inequality as they've grown up in fully integrated schools.

Switch frames from hardship to challenge, setbacks to times for reflection, victims into survivors. Embrace the power of framing.

Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles

Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies to earn the business of affluent prospects using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion strategies.
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