OVERVIEW

Human beings make mental pictures of heroes and villains . Keeping the same old pictures without an occasional adjustment can keep an outdated image as a reference point. This becomes a habit and can become a fixed or rigid belief system. Rigid thinking is not good management. Things change, people change. Thinking needs to match that living process. Most people become acculturated or comfortable with what they know. This is a comfort zone. An extreme comfort zone can become a deep rut if you keep doing the same things over and over, and seeing life through one pair of glasses . Rigid and fixed thinking do not lead toward life-long learning and flexibility that are essential attributes of the progressive manager. Emotional Continuity Management demands life-long learning and flexible thought.

Challenging your own thinking is not easy, but the outcome can be more ideas and more choices. Victims are people with limited ideas and no choices. Changing your mind and your ideas is about being progressive. Being positively progressive rather than negatively progressive is necessary to avoid bitterness. If you meet a bitter person, all you really need to know about that sad individual is they believe they have no more ideas and have lost their choices. They are locked in to whatever thinking they had when they got afraid. This is not life affirming. And it certainly is not fun-affirming.

When J. Haley, a prominent psychotherapist and expert in the techniques of family system therapy and reframing ideas was asked, "How did you ever develop the ability to get such a view of the positive side of a whole lot of things that everybody else would probably consider difficult as hell?" (Haley 1976) He presented his idea of a positive philosophical approach to helping people change by suggesting that if they could define a problem situation in a new way it usually made the problem easier to solve. He named this changing process reframing . Seeing things in new ways should be high on the learning curve agenda of managers. A healthy person and a healthy manager wants to learn and is not resistant or threatened by new information. An excellent manager is a perpetual student. Students are in the business of learning and managing new information. Adjustment depends on the capacity to adapt to a new idea or a new situation.

Now that you have some understanding of emotions you can use your imagination to reframe spinning into a more positive and creative perspective. Reframing is a term that means looking at a picture in a new way. For example, looking at a loud angry customer as "obnoxious" is one frame. Seeing that customer as someone who is in a grieving process through a change is another frame. Seeing that same customer as someone who is reacting to a perceived or real threat and is trying to control their natural survival and grief mechanism through aggressive posturing is another re-frame. Seeing that person as a problem is one frame. Seeing that person as a management skills opportunity for growth is a reframe. Seeing that person as a witch on a broomstick is one frame. Seeing that same person as a cartoon witch on a broomstick changes it. Seeing that cartoon witch as an inch tall and flying a broom through space is another vision. Taking that space-flying, one-inch-tall witch and having it transform into a magical butterfly that sings opera is creative reframing. So, the witch comes to you and asks you to do a task you were avoiding. You either imagine the threat or you imagine the opera. Up to you! You can have new ideas and new choices. No one gets to mandate your imagination.