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My transcriptionist lived in New Orleans until August 28, 2005, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit. She and her boyfriend and their four cats evacuated with two cars full of valuables and art and 'irreplaceables'. They rode out the storm in Tennessee in a pet friendly hotel. For months after her subsequent move to Portland, people, when they found out where she was from, would say, "Oh, you're a victim of Hurricane Katrina?" Her response was always, "Not really. I had two cars and plenty of cash and credit cards. I was 'inconvenienced' by the hurricane and flood and it was a changing point in my life, but I'm not a victim. The victims were the poor people who didn't have the means to leave." She goes on to frame this in even more of a positive way, 'I'm happy with my new life in Portland. It was time for a change even if that change was unexpected.' She has anger and sadness for the city and the loss of friends, but has turned the upheaval into a new beginning. Framing is a powerful tool for positive change. It can be an unbelievably potent instrument for persuasion. Look at the frame that we now put on the Holocaust "victims": Survivors. The ability to reframe is used by social workers who work with gang members turning murder into something ugly no matter who the victim. Advertising is all framing. Advertisers take over the rebellious or alternative youth culture by appealing to them with edgy and non-conformist advertising. They make a carton of eggs seem 'radical' suggesting that these eggs aren't the old fashioned, outdated eggs that your grandpa used to eat. Politics would be nowhere without framing. Bush, for example, uses the presupposition that, 'It's better to fight them over here than it is to fight them over here.' Well. . . that presupposes that we'd have to fight them at all. In 2004 he convinced more than half the nation that he was right and used 9/11 to support his frame that we're all in imminent danger. Now, the Democrats and a large percentage of the population of the U.S. have the frame that this was a war for oil, not a war to prevent them from fighting us over here. Frames can show things in a positive light, 'the silver lining', so to speak. Segregation was framed as an evil injustice by Martin Luther King, Jr. convincing many people that it was wrong. Now several generations of Americans have grown up in integrated schools never knowing that kind of blatant inequality. Switch frames from hardship to challenge, setbacks to times for reflection, victims into survivors. Embrace the power of framing.
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Kenrick Cleveland teaches strategies to earn the business of affluent prospects using persuasion. He runs public and private seminars and offers home study courses and coaching programs in persuasion strategies.
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