Creative Steps

On the Creative Steps programme we speak about the importance of ‘framing’. When we talk about framing we are speaking about using contexts and perspectives so that we can assign different meanings to certain events in our lives – so we can see them through ‘a different frame.’

We do this because the meaning we automatically assign to an event might not support our creative intentions. In cases like this it can be useful to change the frame so that we better serve ourselves.

Framing is a popular technique used by NLP practitioners and creativity coaches.

Viktor Frankl was a hugely influential psychiatrist who led what became known as The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. He survived three grim years at Auschwitz and other Nazi prisons only to gain freedom and learn that almost his entire family had been wiped out.

Frankl’s school of Psychotherapy made use of the technique of framing. In his own words, [his approach] “makes the concept of man into a whole…and focuses its attention upon mankind’s groping for a higher meaning in life.”

His ability to positively influence a person’s frame helped countless patients and his writing continues to help people today.

It is worth pondering how our creative lives would be improved if we could live as ‘activists’.

“The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively [the activist] is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the full. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future that is in store for him? ‘No, thank you,’ he will think. ‘Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of suffering suffered.”

Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning

It is good to remind ourselves that our work captures a moment in time, a record of our journey. It is worth remembering that our work, in itself, isn’t the destination on our journey.

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