Reframing Recipe

Some days are just beautiful. The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, I reach out to glance out of the window. My entire body bursts into goose bumps as I catch the first sunshine of a new day…

This morning was different. I woke up tired, as the night before I refused to swap that last hour spent in Facebook and get into bed. So it was really tough to drag myself out of the bed. Things were getting even worse when I got to work. I was irritated and daily work was only fueling my frustration. I reached my boiling point, when I was kindly asked to translate a brain Computer Tomography report. To put it mildly, I’m not fond of medical translations full of terminology and a special medical style. That’s my Achilles’ heel.

To cut a long story short, I felt like the sky felt down on me. The task seemed to be larger than life, and I nearly broke down in tears.

Hold on, I said to myself! This was one of the days of my precious life, that God gave me, as a great gift, and who was I to ruin it? I remembered a great technique I learned years ago, when I was studying NLP; the reframing technique. I reminded myself, we create what we see. No event has a meaning in itself. We put a frame and give a meaning to all the things that surround us to every single event that affects us. So if we can’t change the situation, all we have to do, is to put a new frame, thus change our attitude towards it. When the frame is changed, the meaning of the problem is also changed. If I simply change the frame, i.e. I change my viewpoint, my emotional state and my attitude towards it.

Suddenly a terrific 3D brain application came to my mind. I uploaded it to my iPhone a while ago, as I was really interested in neuropsychology and structure of the brain. I opened that colorful application, full of 3D images of brain components, along with a brief description of their functions and explanations. Unexpectedly, I was overwhelmed with excitement about this new challenge. I had to translate a Computer Tomography of a brain! I just got an opportunity to research a topic I was really interested in, and I was allowed to do that during my work hours.

So I rushed into my office and got to work. The new adventure took over me completely and I thoroughly enjoyed my research. In two hours flat I was able to read Computer Tomography scan and wrote an outstanding translation. This was the most intriguing project I worked on so far. I went to the doctors’ office proudly handing them my translation, eloquently talking about left and right cerebral hemispheres. It was funny, as I have no medical education. They were surprisingly listening to my just-acquired knowledge. It was very amusing to listen to a medical lecture from a fashion journalist, that’s for sure. We all had a good laugh. I realized how much I benefited from the assignment that seemed to be impossible to accomplish. I learned lots of new things and I also decided to write a blog post about my experience. I was happier than ever.