When I was going through the one of the most painful times my life, I developed a strange little coping ritual.
Every morning I would wake up and ask myself: “What’s going to happen today to Our Girl Clare?”
Yep, I turned my own life into a TV show.
And I’ll tell you what, somehow, that small act of narrative distance made the unbearable bearable. I didn’t know why it worked. I just knew it did.
Years later, working deep in the psychology of learning and change, I finally understand what I was doing. I was practicing hypothetical distancing, a form of reframing that works by shifting the level of abstraction at which you experience something. Close and concrete feels overwhelming. Distant and narrative feels survivable.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe: reframing isn’t really a skill. It’s a mental model shift.
When we help someone reframe an experience, we’re not just helping them feel better about it. We’re helping them see it through a different organizing structure, one that generates different emotions, different inferences, and different possibilities automatically. The facts don’t change. The frame does.
And when the frame changes, everything downstream changes with it.
I’ve been exploring some questions that I think matter a lot for anyone working in learning, coaching, or organizational change: What is actually happening psychologically when someone reframes? What are the real mechanisms?
Why do most reframing attempts fail, and what does that tell us about where the intervention needs to happen?
What role does storytelling play? Because I’m becoming convinced that when someone tells you what happened, they aren’t giving you facts. They’re giving you their active frame. The story IS the frame made visible.
And if that’s true, if the story reveals the frame — then skilled listening isn’t just empathy. It’s frame detection.
I don’t have all the answers yet. But I’m finding the questions increasingly hard to put down.