Episode 50 How to Re-frame Your Difficult Stories: Step 5 (Workshop 5-part Series)

How to Reframe Your Difficult Stories: 5 Part Workshop Series: Step 5– The Final Reframe At any given moment you have the power to say, “This is NOT how the story is going to end.” Join us today as we discuss the 5th and final step in reframing the chapters of your story that feel broken. Today we’ll put all the previous steps together to come to the final reframing of your story. Get ready to rewrite the broken chapters for good. 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. If you are just popping into this episode, I suggest you go back and listen to episodes 46 through 49 before moving onto this one. There are five steps in the process to reframing the chapters of your life that feel broken, or shameful, or you’re just not okay with them. This is the 5th and final step. The step where everything from the previous 4 steps is brought together to help you create your final reframing and advanced understanding of your story. So, if you haven’t you’ll want to listen to the previous 4 episodes, each one dedicated to one of the steps. Now for step #5 – the actual reframe Reframing is looking at a story or event in our lives through a different frame of understanding: hence, the RE frame. Often we are very stuck in our own interpretation of our stories, despite the fact, as we discussed in step 4, that there are many ways to interpret a situation. We see things only as we see things and it’s a process to discover other options. When I was doing the work to reframe my stories, I could not see another way to interpret the things that had happened to me. It took another person to help me see what I couldn’t see on my own. In 2010, in The Huffington Post, Lifestyle Blog, Racheal Freed posted a blog post titled “The Importance of Telling our Stories.”  She tells a story from her life journey and why she feels it’s important to tell our stories. She also had a friend help with her reframe. (quick note – sometimes this in NOT a one person job because we are so stuck in our story. This is where you may need a coach or the right friend or a therapist) Let me tell her story in her words: “The first morning after arriving in Tunis, Oct. 1, 2010, my two sister travelers and I ventured deep into the Tunis Medina (an ancient walled city) to visit the home where I lived some 44 years ago. (At the time, my then-husband and I were New Peace Corps volunteers, and we “inherited” this palace of a 19th-century minister from Peace Corps architects who’d lived there during their service.) In our first week in Tunisia, during September 1966, we made our way, with great naïveté and some trepidation, into the hills of the romantic blue and white Mediterranean coastal town to negotiate a lease for this house with its owner, a shrewd old patriarch. We were served tea, our new language skills were tested, and the rent was agreed upon — exactly what the old man asked for. The house, traditionally built, was completely invisible from the street except for its tall, arched doorway and decorative door. Its rooms were designed on three sides of an interior courtyard. Its arched plaster ceilings, lavishly sculpted in plaster was hung with ornate crystal chandeliers, and the lower halves of the interior walls were encrusted with tiles set in colorful geometric patterns. Its 30-square-foot, marble-paved courtyard had its own well; its walls were tile-decorated and its windows to the interior rooms protected and ornamented in painted metal grill...