Episode 49 How to Re-Frame Your Difficult Stories: Step 4 (Workshop 5-Part Series)

How to Reframe Your Difficult Stories: 5 Part Workshop Series: Step 4– Changing Lenses A farmer stood with his dog overlooking his fields. Behind them in the grasses peered a small brown rabbit, and above flew a lark. The farmer looked across the field and saw cows, milk, provisions for his family, a new car. The dog saw frustration because wild things could so easily hide and escape his chase. The rabbit saw security. To the lark flying overhead, the field was home. While we may all be looking at the same thing, standing in the same story, the lenses we look through to interpret that story are vastly different for everyone. Join us today as we discuss the fourth step in reframing your story – understanding lenses, and being willing to swap them out every now and again. Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it. Today we are on the 4th podcast episode in a 5-part series: The 5 Steps to Reframing a Difficult Life Story. Welcome to Step #4 – A discussion about the lenses you look through and how they determine what you see, and considering the lenses others look through as well. You’ve heard of putting on rose colored glasses, because it changes the way you see things, makes the world look a little brighter. The way you see the world is certainly affected by different tinted glasses. Well, today we are discussing first of all, the fact that we metaphorically wear lenses and that these lenses form how we interpret what goes on around us, and second of all understanding that we can swap lenses if we need to. Choose a lens, any lens, the lens you look through determines what you see, how you interpret, and often whether you are happy with the story you are creating, or the story you have lived. Understand this concept and you begin to realize that your story CAN change.   Like magic, we conjure our stories from the ether of thought. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves form from numerous things, one of which is a set of criteria and lenses that we have adopted, usually as fact – right and wrong– from our culture and family, from our religion and the things expected of us because of our gender, our economic status, our social standing, our race, education or political beliefs, sexual experience, sexual preference, and moral codes.  There are any number of these lenses that we each, individually look through when we engage in any situation.  Picture if you will a pair of glasses with maybe a dozen lenses stacked on top of one other for us to look through. Everyone has a pair of these glasses that they are wearing. These are the lenses through which we see right and wrong, through which we judge our own stories, through which we judge the stories of others. Everyone around us is also wearing a set of these thick glasses, only a different set, with different lenses. An example of a lens – Brock Dethier, in his book 21 Genres, points out that because of his age (older than draft age) and his education (University professor, so he has enough education to compare wars from history to current situations) BOTH OF THESE ARE LENSES – his education and his age, he is bound to think differently about war than perhaps an uneducated 19-year-old man. Lynn Langer Meeks and Carol Jewkes Austin, in their book, Literacy in the Secondary English Classroom, call these lenses the “Cultural Eye.”  These beliefs, or ways of seeing the world start solidifying themselves from the time we are children, learning and...