Asset Framing Doesn’t Make Us Pollyanna
A wider net has a better shot at catching a fish, and we essentially widen our nets to catch more possibilities when we build an asset-framed mindset.
There is a classic team dynamics study that has been duplicated many times where two teams are presented with a problem. One team is instructed to think of all of the hurdles and problems they will face in trying to solve the problem. The other is told to think about all of the possible routes to solving the problem. Both teams are charged with coming up with a viable solution to the problem. Consistently, the team focused on the possibilities not only comes up with more workable solutions but the only one to come up with any possible solutions at all in some cases.
The teams are selected so they have the same levels of quality members, skill levels, and in most measurable ways very much the same attributes. But yet, the simple act of thinking about what is possible instead of focusing only on challenges led one team to solutions and the other to dead ends. There are many popular idioms that describe a similar situation: wearing rosy tinted glasses, being Pollyanna-ish, naïve, and so on. Even being called an optimist carries a certain element of unrealistic expectations. As if real life only goes in one way: down and worse.
But like the study shows, thinking about possibilities can be a very powerful tool. Another way of calling this way of seeing the world is asset-framed. And what life has shown me and what the scientific literature backs up is that when we have an asset-framed mindset, a wider net has a better shot at catching a fish, and we essentially widen our nets to catch more possibilities when we build an asset-framed mindset.
But how in the world can we develop an asset-frame when so much in the world is so darn dismal? Like most things, it takes practice, but it’s very much a skill that we can learn. Here are a couple of practices I’ve incorporated that have helped me make incremental steps towards a greater asset-framed mindset.
Be grateful—When we’re stuck in traffic we make a choice. On the one hand we can build stress and anger and frustration at the slow cars around us. Or on the other hand, we can be grateful that we have a car at all and that we have more time to listen to a favorite podcast or album or audiobook. Of course in order to be grateful for the extra time to listen to things we enjoy, we need to do some prep work. If you know you’ll probably run into traffic at some point, have your podcast on the ready, so you can flip into gratitude mode right away. It’s also a lot easier to be grateful for the extra time to listen to things we enjoy if we have the time to spare, so getting out the door a few minutes earlier can set us up for more success.
Fill the unforgiving minute—I had a favorite poem growing up called If by Rudyard Kipling. One of my favorite lines is “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds-worth of distance run.” When our natural reaction to the people around us is to be frustrated or annoyed, taking a breath or two and giving those people the benefit of the doubt, our whole outlook can shift. Suddenly instead of determining that the person who cut you off must be an idiot and a horrible person, we can think of a different story we can tell ourselves since we’re not in their shoes to explain their rationale. Maybe the person was distracted because of troubles at home. Maybe the person was rushing to the hospital because a family member is sick. Very few humans wakes up in the morning determined to make life miserable for others. And if we can fill that minute with perspective taking, we might end up being very grateful we don’t have to rush.
The Power to Choose—There’s something magical when we realize that we can choose how we react to things. We can’t always control our first impulses. But as humans with conscious minds, we get to decide what happens after that first impulse lands. And taking advantage of the space to choose can help us build resilience when things get rough or stressful. I guess in a way this third tip is an important element of the previous two: we can choose to look at people’s actions in a different way. We can choose to be grateful. We can choose to be prepared for the stressful and frustrating moments so we know what to do beforehand.
Researchers at John Hopkins have even found that people with positive outlooks who were predisposed to heart disease are up to 1/3 less likely to have a heart attack or other cardiovascular problems than those with gloomier outlooks on life (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/the-power-of-positive-thinking). So let’s try to practice some of this stuff. Doctor’s orders.