CHAPTER 
Make New Meaning
Shakespeare was right: nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Learn how to choose your response to what happens to you and the story you want to tell about it.
Figure 5.1 The Resilience Cycle: Make New Meaning
PROBLEM
The engineering team of a software organization was in a challenging situation—one that many of their competitors envied. Their users had rapidly risen to 10 million, and growth was teetering on the edge of out of control. Their well-loved chief strategist had just jumped ship for a seven-figure compensation package after a grueling seven years of struggle with the organization’s well-meaning but often meddling founder. Now the engineers were discouraged, grieving the loss of their leader, feeling betrayed, and also fearful of what the founder would do.
Would the engineers now be reporting to him? Or would he recruit a new leader for them? Without a trusted, wise leader, how could they keep up with the relentless demand for new features? And who would push back when the founder asked for too much?
The engineering team didn’t see that it was they who had built the amazing software—not the chief strategist. Also, the strategy had been laid out for the next year, and they knew what they had to do to make it work. Sure, they needed a few more people and someone to negotiate with the founder, but they had all the skills they needed to develop, maintain, and optimize great software.
PROMISE
Have you ever had a key and well-loved leader leave? What was the impact on your team? In times like these, people usually tell scary stories about the future.
First, via executive coaching, we worked with the founder to identify an interim leader and collectively to forge a code of conduct. The founder could contribute his feature suggestions, but a three-person team (engineering, sales, marketing) would determine which features made it into a given release.
Next, we had to dial down the disempowering thinking by shining some light on everyone’s internal process. In a group coaching session, we used our Distorted Thinking Decoder so the engineers could state individually and openly which distortion they were suffering from. This helped them drain the distortion’s power. We also had to let people grieve the loss of their leader and not pretend it wasn’t a big painful deal. Then we had the interim leader start using Neuro Storytelling to help the team form a new, more expansive, and powerful set of beliefs and to help them reframe—to make new meaning about—the challenges they were facing.
RESULT
Fast-forward six months and the engineering team was on fire—they were a well-synchronized, lean mean coding machine. They supported one another in editing their beliefs on a regular basis, and the interim leader did such a great job helping the team pivot that she became the new chief strategist.
Now and then a team will suffer a loss, but that’s OK because they still have the recipe to get them back on track. Going forward, they can forge their new team together. They can navigate their grief together. They can succeed together.
REFRAMING: CHANGE THE STORY, CHANGE THE MEANING
As you learned in Part I, we form our own reality based on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic cues. These cues recall our beliefs about the world and ourselves (our identity), which results in either feeling good or feeling bad. If you’re on a sales team that feels bad, chances are you won’t be achieving your quota because your energy will be low as well as your motivation and creativity. Is there anything you can do right now to feel better and be more productive?
Stuff happens, and sometimes we need to do a quick “pattern-interrupt” to pause our default and choose a better-feeling alternative. Remember, it is not what happens that matters but rather what it means that matters. Change the meaning, change the feeling. We need to make more helpful meaning.
In the last chapter, you learned how mindfulness meditation can help you interrupt repetitive thought patterns and create new grooves of thinking. This sets you up to make new and more helpful meaning. And reframing is a terrific tool for making new meaning quickly and easily, as well as for editing your belief system in the process.
By formal definition, reframing is a way of viewing and experiencing events, ideas, concepts, and emotions to find more useful alternatives. It is a practical and valuable tool to shift perception, including your perception of yourself or others’ perceptions of themselves.
Think of reframing as putting on a different pair of glasses. What would you see if you put on a pair of sunglasses with a heavy tint when you were in a dark room? You would see shadows and dark forms you couldn’t identify. What would happen when you took off those glasses? You may see the most beautiful room in the world. When you switch your glasses, what you see changes. Reframing, mentally and linguistically, does the same thing. It changes the story you tell yourself about what happens.
Harvard researchers proved a while back that the stories we tell ourselves shape our world.1 The good news is that we can also create new stories—the decisions we’ve made about ourselves, our abilities, and the world—and change our experience. Here are two examples.
In Business
Initial story: It’s really hard getting a job fresh out of college these days. The market is crowded, and overqualified people are competing for every single job. No wonder I’m unemployed—it’s tough.
Reframe: It’s awesome that there are a lot of people job hunting right now because it gives a person the opportunity to really bring his or her “A Game” to stand out. I’m sending my résumé in creative ways to get an interview, I’m doing more research than I ever have done before to prepare for interviews, and then I’m following up after the interviews using different methods. I am learning a ton!
See how the meaning shifts from defeat and deciding that job hunting will be hard (which means it will be because the universe is an exquisite mirror) to a sense of power, can-do, creativity, and agility?
In Personal Life
Initial story: I was a girl in a household of boys. My brothers and parents wanted another boy, so I was perpetually left out and labeled as a disappointment. I’ve never been good enough.
Reframe: I grew up in the perfect family to learn to see and honor my unique value. I was given great opportunities to be independent and forge my path in life. I also learned to be self-reliant, which has made me strong and fearless.
See how the meaning she is making shifts from disempowering to empowering?
Although the tools that follow (the Distorted Thinking Decoder and Neuro Storytelling) will help you reframe your situation, you can also reframe all sorts of scenarios daily. Here’s how it works.
Tool: Reframing
Imagine your spouse has just made the morning coffee. While scooping the grounds into the coffee machine, he or she has spilled a considerable amount on the counter. He or she doesn’t notice this and moves on to the next item in the morning routine. You could focus on the “bad” behavior, complain about the mess, start a fight, and have no coffee or affection that morning. Or you could practice reframing in one of at least two ways:
1. Context reframing: These reframes work on the principle that every behavior is useful in some context. So when we change the context, we also change the meaning we make about another’s behavior. In this spilled coffee example, you could use a context reframe as follows: “Your spilling coffee means we are so much more privileged than 80 percent of the world who can’t afford to have coffee with breakfast!” This is exaggerated, yes, but it illustrates how drastically the meaning can change when you expand and change the context.
2. Content reframing: Content reframes work by changing the actual content of the meaning you give the behavior. In the spilled coffee example, a content reframe might be, “Your spilling coffee doesn’t mean you made a mess. It just means you were rushing to make sure I was taken care of.”
The behavior and the facts of the matter are the same; we’ve just altered our self-talk to make different meaning from the coffee grounds on the counter. And after all, at the end of the day, do you care more about some coffee grounds or about your relationship? In the same way, which do you care more about in business: success as a team or blame and shame?
Tool: Distorted Thinking Decoder
Sometimes a whole team can be stuck in a cycle of negative distorted thinking. That means it’s time for a group reframe and some collective new meaning making!
Recall from Chapter 2 that the brain naturally and usefully deletes, distorts, and generalizes information. It’s necessary for survival because without this capability, we would simply be overwhelmed with input. However, occasionally these distortions can get grooved into a not-so-useful pattern. Look out for some common distortions listed in what we affectionately refer to as the Distorted Thinking Decoder (Table 5.1). Here’s how to use this tool:
TABLE 5.1 Distorted Thinking Decoder
1. Look through the table. Which distortions are most potent for you? For your team? For your organizational culture?
2. For each distortion, name the meaning that is being made from a behavior or circumstance. Think of it like an equation: in our minds, this behavior (or circumstance) = something negative.
3. Try replacing the negative with something positive and/or empowering. Inside your head, say to yourself, “That [behavior or circumstance] doesn’t mean [something bad]. It means [something positive]!” This is what reframing is all about.
For example, let’s say there’s a lot of labeling going on, and someone who made a mistake is a “careless loser.” Try applying the thinking, “What if that behavior (making a mistake) meant something positive?” In this case, you could try, “Making a mistake means someone is trying new things. That person is innovating and learning.” Look for some evidence to back up this new meaning. Then try saying it to others about a particular incident.
Make a game out of shifting the team out of distortions that are pulling you and others into Critter State. Using the reframe you came up with in this exercise, try saying it to as many people as possible in a morning. Then sit back and watch it go around just like a game of telephone. The words will shift, but the intention won’t. Also note that distorted thinking often occurs due to cognitive biases, which we’ll learn about in Chapter 8.
NEURO STORYTELLING: SHIFT MEANING QUICKLY WITH A GREAT STORY
One of the best ways to help teams reframe is via storytelling. It allows you to change your stance, make new meaning, and shift your team out of the Tension Triangle (victim, rescuer, persecutor) and into the Empowerment Triangle (outcome creator, insight creator, action creator).2
We’ve all seen corporate mission, vision, and value statements that are simply wall art and devoid of emotion. They’re not memorable.
Why? There’s no story.
What’s your favorite movie? I’ll bet you can enthusiastically tell me all about it even if you haven’t seen it in years. Stories are like nutrition for our souls. We remember them and love them. They have deeper meaning for us. On YouTube, there’s a wonderful video clip of a group of marines belting out the lyrics to the theme song from Disney’s Frozen.3 Who would have thought combat soldiers could relate to a Disney princess?
And then there are stories of exceptional organizations. Many of us have heard the story about a Nordstrom’s customer returning a snow tire, and the customer service rep handling that request happily, even though Nordstrom doesn’t sell snow tires. We don’t need to be told that Nordstrom values customer service. We know; we have the story.
People love to tell stories; they are potent engagement and teaching tools. They help us to navigate change by experiencing it vicariously through the characters in the story.
Notice what makes stories memorable for you. For most people, the stories we remember have some sort of emotional impact on us. They have this impact because we can relate to the hero and the story line in some way. The stories you tell about your organization need to be positively impactful too. Neural coupling enables us to connect to the story and personalize it (Figure 5.2). We connect to the storyteller via mirror neurons; we get deeply engaged and feel, hear, and see and even smell or taste what’s happening in the story. Dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter, is released when a story is emotionally engaging. And that’s just a start!
Figure 5.2 The Impact of an Emotionally Engaging Story
Tool: Neuro Storytelling
Here’s the storytelling recipe our clients love to use as they craft their organizational stories.
Step 1. Focus on Your Story Customers and Their Context
Who is the story for? Clients? Prospects? Team members? Take a moment and think about the recipients of the story: what is their context? Notice the situations they are in and make sure they can relate to your stories. Tell stories where they can see themselves as the hero of the piece.
When you tell your story, choose the communication vehicle that fits their context. For example, one client’s target customers are parents of small children, and they tell their stories via parenting blogs. Telling the same story on LinkedIn would probably not have been nearly as effective.
Step 2. Make It Authentic
Fabricated stories don’t usually have the same emotional impact as real ones. You just can’t make up some of those quirky details. As Mark Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”4 People like stories that have enough specific details to create a picture in their mind. Have a contest and ask your team to submit stories of times when your organization’s values were demonstrated. Develop the stories that have the most emotional impact. Remember how emotional engagement affects the brain.
To make it really memorable, it also helps if the story is told by a trusted member of the community. For example, stories told by customers about their own experiences are going to feel more genuine and impactful than ones your company tells about itself.
Step 3. Give the Story Movement
Start your story with a problem or situation, and then show how that problem is resolved. Make sure the story goes from a problem (or a situation that is less than fully desirable) to a more desirable outcome.
The greater the challenge in the story, the more interesting. The more distance between the starting point and the ending point, the more dramatic and compelling. Help us take the journey with you, and we’ll share in the triumph.
Step 4. Make It Value Oriented
What value, insight, or service resolved the problem? For example, marketing stories might show how your product or service helped in a unique or challenging situation. Ask yourself: “What desirable outcome happened for the protagonist?”
Make sure your story demonstrates your values. Other stories might be funnier, but you want to promote the ones that communicate your values, who you are, and how you’ll show up for others.
Step 5. Test the Efficacy
Try it out. Does the story communicate positively? Test your story on a focus group to make sure it has the intended meaning and impact.
The Internet makes this pretty easy to do, but make sure you have tested your story in a nonrecordable way before you “go big.” Stories are memorable, so you want to make sure people are remembering you positively.
Not every story will meet all of the following criteria, but I like to check my clients’ stories against the CURVE model from Marketing Profs to make sure their stories are creating a positive experience:
• C is for curiosity. Does the recipient want to know what happened?
• U is for urgency. Does the story create a sense of “must get this done now!”?
• R is for relevance. Is the story relevant to the recipient’s situation or context?
• V is for value. Does the story reflect my values? Is the story valuable to the recipient?
• E is for emotion. Does the story have an emotional impact? Is it funny, scary, surprising, or something else?5
Let’s go back to the software engineering organization example from the beginning of this chapter. As part of the solution, we helped the interim leader tell a story to connect with the situation all the engineers were facing: losing someone they considered key and valuable. The interim leader addressed the team members (the audience) face-to-face because this was the most appropriate way to communicate with them.
During her talk, the interim leader addressed the team by sharing stories of adversity in her past—when she was overwhelmed by market demands. She told them about how she lost a key engineer and felt deeply discouraged and at a loss as to what to do.
The main message communicated was that her team already had all the skills they needed to succeed, with or without their leader. The key takeaways were that they simply needed a features team to vote on which features should be added when to best serve their customers. They could succeed by pulling together. This wasn’t the end of the world—just the end of how things had been. And in this new future, they had more power.
With her story, she showed the engineers how to step out of being victims and into becoming outcome creators. Storytelling helped them release their resistance to the PS and direct their attention to the outcome they wanted to create. The engineers were empowered to create the conditions they wanted.
THE POWER OF A STORY WELL TOLD
Remember, stories are potent engagement and teaching tools. They help us navigate change by experiencing it vicariously through the characters in the story. They help us “walk a mile in their moccasins” and “test” the tools the protagonist used. They help us create new beliefs and expand our identity—to see ourselves as bigger, more capable, more powerful than we had previously.
Follow this guide and make sure the stories being told about you and your organization are sending the right message. And then it’ll be time to deeply envision and anchor the outcome, the Desired State you want to step into, which we’ll cover in the next chapter.
1. Reframing is a way of viewing and experiencing events, ideas, concepts, and emotions to find more useful alternatives. It helps us change the story we tell ourselves about what is happening or has happened.
2. There are two main types of reframing: context reframing and content reframing. Context reframes work on the principle that every behavior is useful in some context. A difficult or challenging behavior can be reframed in a different context so that it’s useful. Content reframes work by changing the actual content of the meaning you gave the behavior, which changes the experience.
3. All leaders need to be great storytellers. People love to tell and hear stories; they are potent engagement and teaching tools. They help us navigate change by experiencing it vicariously through the characters in the story.
4. Stories we remember have some sort of emotional impact on us. They have this impact because we can relate to the hero and the story line in some way.
5. We connect to the storyteller via mirror neurons; we get deeply engaged and feel, hear, or see and even smell or taste what’s happening in the story. The stories you tell about your organization need to be positively impactful in this way too.
• It is not what happens but what it means that matters. Change the meaning, change the feeling.
• Make a game out of shifting the team out of meaning distortions that are pulling you into Critter State.
• Stories are like nutrition for our souls. We remember them and love them. They have deep meaning for us.
• Stories are potent engagement and teaching tools. They help us navigate change by allowing us to experience it vicariously through the characters.
• Stories help us create new beliefs and expand our identity—to see ourselves as bigger, more capable, and more powerful than we had previously.
See this chapter’s section on www.PowerYourTribe.com for the following:
• Chapter Quick Take video
• Google’s Optimal Teams Research
• Storytelling That Drives Business Results: How to Craft Compelling Stories
• Brand Trust Factor Assessment: How to Assess the Power of Your Brand