Chapter 4: Taking Charge of Your Life 59
a master communicator by changing her behaviour to get the response from
her boss that she wanted... and yes, she did get a pay rise and a promotion!In order to bring about positive change for yourself, you need to step away
from the problem frame and take actions to secure what you want.Getting stuck in a problem frame
As a gross generalisation, because our culture is focused on solving prob-
lems, you tend to look backwards when something goes wrong in order to
analyse what didn’t work. One of the nasty side-effects of this tendency is to
lay blame. The difficulty with the problem frame is it keeps you trapped and
stops you from taking the following positive actions:✓ Moving forward
✓ Thinking about the real results you want
✓ Examining previous successes and modelling them for future use
✓ Learning from what worked for other people and emulating their strategies
✓ Resolving an issue
Instead, when you keep returning to analyse why things didn’t work as you
wanted them to, you tend to focus on the following negative aspects:✓ What’s wrong?
✓ How long have you had this problem?
✓ Who’s to blame for you having this problem?
✓ Why did this problem occur?
✓ Why haven’t you done something about the problem?
Constantly asking ‘why’ is a negative approach and forces you to go even
deeper into the problem, become defensive, and move farther away from
finding a positive solution. A more constructive approach is to ask what you
hoped to achieve by doing something, or what your purpose was behind
doing something.Think of a time when you were so stuck in a problem that you were unable to
see any solution. Maybe you’re having such a problem right now. Ask yourself
whether you’re positively focusing on the result you want or getting too tied
up negatively in the emotion of the moment to have clarity.