Reframing shifts how you interpret events, breaking the cycle where negative thoughts create negative feelings and actions. The speaker moved from self-criticism about low YouTube views to seeing it as a learning opportunity, and suggests treating a traffic jam as practice for patience instead of fuel for frustration.
If you find yourself struggling with negative thought patterns, stick with me to the end of this video because I'm going to share with you one of the most powerful exercises you can do to combat this. Your thoughts are literally one of the most powerful creative tools you have. Your thoughts lead to your feelings, which lead to your actions, which lead to your results. Now, that's great if you have positive thoughts and and you're getting positive feelings, positive actions, and positive results. But what if you are thinking negative thoughts, and now you're feeling negative, and now the actions you're taking are negative, and now the results you're getting are negative? Enter one of my favorite tools, which is called reframing, which is basically taking any situation and realizing that you're viewing it in a negative light and then shifting your view and viewing it in a more positive light. So kind of reframing the situation. Let me give you an example, and I'll even give you a recent example of something that's been coming up for me in my own life. Um, so obviously I started this YouTube channel and I had some pretty high expectations for the YouTube channel. Now this wasn't exactly turning out the way I wanted it to turn out. I'm getting a lot less views than I thought, a lot less subscribers than I thought, and this got me into some negative thinking. I started thinking, "Oh, maybe I'm not good enough, maybe my videos suck, maybe I shouldn't keep doing this, maybe my dreams aren't going to come true," right? But that just wasn't helpful. So then I started reframing it and thinking of it in a new, more positive light. And I started thinking, "Okay, Morgan, you just started this, that's fine." You're learning, you're growing, you're making progress. You're not gonna be good at this when you start. That's why you're starting, right? To improve. The fact that I'm even being consistent is a positive thing, right? Over time, if I stay in the arena and I keep being consistent, eventually the videos are gonna get better. Eventually the views are gonna come, the subscribers are gonna come. And that is how I reframed things, right? I'm now viewing things instead of "it's a failure" to I'm learning and I'm improving. And that's been really helpful, and overall it's keeping me in the game and it's keeping me more positive. Let me give you another example. I mean, there's, there's plenty of examples, right? You could use it for a situation where maybe you lost your job, or a situation where your boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with you. But even a really, a more simple situation, let's say you're stuck in traffic, right? And that's just, that's the actual situation. You're stuck in traffic, right? But now you get into this negative thinking, you start, you know, getting frustrated and angry, and you're like, oh, like, why is this happening? Like, I should be here by now, and XYZ, right? But what if you reframed that situation, and instead of perceiving it as a negative situation and something that's causing you frustration, and you started to see it as a way where you could maybe train your mind? You know, maybe you're not overly patient and you start saying, "Oh, interesting. I'm gonna use this as a way to actually be more patient or practice being more patient." That's a really good example of reframing that situation from something negative to something more positive and something that's helpful and something that pushes you in the right direction. One of the greatest gifts we have as humans is that, well, we don't necessarily get to choose what happens to us, But we get to choose how we view the things that happen to us, right? We get to choose what they mean to us. So exercise that power, right? Exercise the power of choice that you have to choose what things mean to you. And try this exercise out, right? The next time you see yourself, you know, choosing to think negatively, change it. Start thinking positively. Try it out, let me know how it goes. And if you like this video, give it a thumbs up and please subscribe to my YouTube channel.
