Reframing to Make Your Small Business Resilient

A chance reading of Maria Konnikova’s reporting on the Secret Formula for Resilience for the New Yorker sent us into a deepish dive into resilient thinking and the models that have been created at Penn, Michigan State, Columbia, etc. The reason for so much of this research is summarized well by Konnikova:

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.”

…Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal.

Helping individuals to reframe an event, changes the interpretation of the event to the individual and allows for adaptation (and improvement). Said differently, give the individual the feeling of agency (change the locus of control from external to internal) and that person makes positive changes. From another Konnikova article (oddly this article is about the psychology of torture), we learned that that this was described by Dr. Martin Seligman as an individual’s explanatory style:

The cognitive program taught the kids to identify when they were having negative thoughts, to evaluate those thoughts objectively, and then to come up with alternatives. It also had them reframe any pessimistic explanations that they found themselves giving—my mom is sad, because I did something wrong—for more optimistic and realistic ones—my mom is sad, because she had a long day at work.

…At the end of the two years, forty-four per cent of the children in the control group had developed a form of depression. Only twenty-two per cent of the treatment group had done so. The improvements hinged largely on changes in the children’s explanatory style: the ones in the prevention group had learned how to create explanations that rendered them hopeful instead of hopeless.

There are countless articles on resiliency and reframing (some of which we’ve included). So, we carefully considered adding to the compendium before publishing. Here was our determination: Reframing promotes resiliency and resiliency is immensely important to small business success (the longer you survive the greater your opportunity to generate cash flow). The insights in our reading were novel to us and we felt might be the same for others in the small business community. In a way, publishing a model of reframing for small businesses helped us to clarify our understanding and we hope that it can help other small business leaders do the same.

A Reframing Model for Small Business Owners

Becoming resilient requires considered practice. We learned from our research that resiliency can be taught (good news) but can also be forgotten (bad news) and is highly situational. Having a reframing model helps us to keep the path and course-correct when we deviate. The basic structure of our model: At an activating event, pause (both physically and mentally) to review your beliefs on that event. If the beliefs fall into a problem thinking frame (examples below), then begin your reframing practice with these challenge thinking questions (also below) to improve your response and adaptation to the event.

There are different types of activating events, one-on-one interactions, group interactions, large group interactions, etc. It may be that the challenge question examples we’ve provided don’t apply to your event. That’s OK. Use these questions as references in your challenge thinking process to get started on the path of reframing from external forces (where you do not have control) to internal forces to improve your outcomes for future events. Each time you challenge yourself to use challenge thinking you will get better at the process and train your thinking to be more resilient for positive outcomes. Also, we’ve added a few problem thinking questions below so you can easily identify the traps of this type of thinking.

Avoid Problem Thinking for Negative Outcomes

• This is never going to change.
• Why is [person/world] out to get me?
• If this doesn’t go perfectly what will I do?
• Why can’t I ever figure this out? Why is this so hard?

Implement Challenge Thinking Questions for Reframing

• How do I adapt for the next time?
• What are the benefits of this moment?
• What energizes me to tackle this challenge?
• How do I use this to build a better system/process?
• How can I interpret this to strengthen my relationship with him/her?

There’s more great reading on reframing from Psychology Today, including this article by Linda and Charlie Bloom. Additionally, we believe that our reframing tool layers nicely with our small business change management framework. Both tools help to deal with emotionally charged events, including selling your small business. As always, if you believe that Endurance Eagle could be a good fit for your small business as your transition ownership, we’d love to discuss buying your small business.