Did you leave the room, or did you flee?
Did you eat french fries or did you inhale them?
Did the customer act unusual or squirrely?
For humor writing, you can saturate your sentences with interesting words. For business or professional writing, you might want to use one interesting word in an entire document. It will be noticed. In a good way. For example, in the section above that talks about writing like a sixth grader, I used the word “debris” as my interesting word. One interesting word is all that section needed because I was gunning for comprehension over humor.
Pssst: Gunning was my interesting word in that last paragraph. Did you notice it?
Find the interesting word in this comic.
Use your Body as a Sensor
Good writing makes the reader feel something. This is especially true for humor. That’s why I use my body as a sensor to know when I wrote something funny or emotionally persuasive. When I use my intellect to guide my writing, I write like a soulless professor. But when I let my entire body experience the words as I juggle them in my mind, I can use my physical response to pick the ones with the best kick.
For example, I often write a joke that my intellect tells me hits all the notes to be a proper joke, but my body has no reaction. I don’t laugh, twitch, snort, or react in any way. I delete that joke. Other times I write something that makes no logical sense, but it makes me giggle no matter how many times I reread it. That’s a keeper. My body is a better sensor than my brain when I’m writing for emotional impact. If you don’t feel it, you are not done.
Strangle Your Babies
It’s easy to fall in love with your own sentences. They are like your babies. But if you are not willing to strangle a boatload of your own babies to create a paragraph, you are not yet a writer. The first fifty-thousand babies you strangle will be hard on your brain. But you get used to it. Be aware of this obstacle to good writing and remind yourself to be brutal to your babies. Sometimes you work on a sentence for an hour and delete it. That’s writing. You’re doing it correctly.
Writing as a System
If you see writing as a process of conjuring up beautiful sentences out of thin air and writing them down, you are likely to experience a lot of so-called writer’s block. But if you use the method I described, you will be getting something on the page right away and improving it from there. When I say I reframed writer’s block out of my life, I mean I can always write a bad sentence. And once written, that bad sentence moves me into editing mode, which is already progress. As I fix my most recent sentence, I am likely to have thoughts about related points. I immediately stop and capture those related thoughts in bullet points at the bottom of my working page. Maybe I use those thoughts later, maybe not. But writing them down gets them out of my head so I can get back to my sentence.
And that’s how you beat writer’s block—you reframe it out of existence.
Reframes in Business (The Bad Kind)
I can’t talk about reframes for success without addressing the way people in the business world abuse language in the pursuit of sounding smart, disguising bad intentions, and covering up their mistakes—that sort of thing.
Sometimes the renaming happens in the context of brand management or marketing in general. Other times it happens in the context of bureaucratic weaselness. Everyone wants their job title to sound impressive. And everyone wants their project name to give off a vibe that anyone associated with such a thing should be promoted.
But none of that is the type of reframing I discuss in this book. When you use a reframe on yourself, you are both the therapist and the willing patient. That is an ethical situation. When a company renames a product or service, that can be more like a con artist preying on an unwilling mark. You didn’t agree to be influenced by their wordplay persuasion, but they might impose it on you anyway. That isn’t illegal, of course, but you can make up your own mind about the ethics of it. I would say it depends on the specifics. I don’t mind when a company with a good product goes out of its way to make me like it. But if the renaming and reframing is intended to deceive, that’s another matter.
You will not be surprised to learn that when companies attempt to deceive by renaming and reframing, it is ideal material for Dilbert comics.
Chapter 3
Mental Health Reframes
As I often say, you don’t want to get medical or financial advice from cartoonists. With that in mind, and with uncharacteristic humility, I present reframes in the mental health domain that people tell me have worked for them, some that work for me, and some that have potential. It isn’t science. But it also isn’t dangerous. Let’s jump in.
Knowing Who You Are
I often hear people say they are trying to figure out “who they are,” whatever that means. If it helps, I can think of at least four potential ways to describe who you are.
Are you . . .
Your inner thoughts?
Your preferences?
Your history?
Your current actions?
I suspect most people think of themselves as being inseparable from their secret thoughts. If you privately harbor negative or positive feelings about something in the world, you think that’s who you are. And that’s unfortunate because your secret inner thoughts are probably mostly terrible. Why would you want to be terrible? You have options. This reframe reveals them.
Usual Frame: I am my inner thoughts.
Reframe: I am what I do.
Sometimes you hear people talk about finding themselves, staying true to themselves, and otherwise finding some magic core “self” that needs to be respected and protected. You don’t have a core self. You are what you make of this life, meaning the sum of your actions. Another way to reframe this way of thinking goes like this.
Usual Frame: Find yourself.
Reframe: Author yourself.
You are a blank canvas. You get to paint your life by changing your actions. If you want to become a kind person, do kind acts. If you want to be capable and successful, build a talent stack, and so on. If you see yourself as the ball that is batted around by life, that’s how things will play out. But if you take authorship and design systems for improving yourself in key areas, you can carve your name on reality in ways you probably never imagined possible.
Judging People
You might think that privately judging people doesn’t hurt anyone. We humans judge reflexively; it’s simply something that happens in our heads. Maybe you even share your judginess with a friend. No big deal, right?
Well, there is a downside. The frame you use to judge others is likely to be the frame in which you come to see yourself, and worse, the way you imagine others see you. That can rot you from the inside. Ask any teenager. They live and die based on what they imagine others are thinking of them.
The best way to talk yourself out of feeling judged by others is to stop judging others. Lose that frame. When you judge others on a subjective scale of goodness and badness, you are buying into your own destruction. The more you think of others as good and bad, the more you will suspect people are judging you because that will become your go-to frame. Once it becomes how you think of others, you will become obsessed with how they are judging you. It’s unavoidable. And toxic.