One of the most useful, evidence-based techniques in reshaping our perspectives is ‘reframing’, also known as cognitive restructuring; a therapeutic technique that comes out of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Coaching. It’s a simple, yet powerful go-to tool to help you discover, challenge, modify or replace negative or irrational thoughts. By reframing these cognitive distortions with more functional, positive thought patterns, you can start to trust your own ability to feel empowered in a situation that might have made you prone in the past to overgeneralizing, magnifying or catastrophizing.    

There are many reframing tools, but they all follow the steps of: 

1. enhancing your awareness, 
2. 2) identifying potentially damaging thoughts or beliefs, and 
3. 3) deriving an alternate thought through a specific exercise. 

Reframing is second nature to design thinkers, who employ it as the basis of creatively solving problems. Reframing helps move us away from the obvious problem to the unobvious problem spaces to uncover innovative solutions that ‘wow’. People often like to jump directly into solution thinking — especially when it comes to intelligently solving irrational thinking. Borrowing from the creative toolkit of design thinking, how might we suspend knowing the answer and restructure our thinking about our perceived shortcomings or situations?