THE MEANINGS YOU GIVE— THE EXPERIENCE YOU LIVE

Of all of your powers, the greatest of your inherent powers, lies in your ability to create meaning. That’s because the meaning you give is the experience you then live. For designing a healthy and robust resilience, it is here that you will find the heart of a resilience that will allow you to spring back into action after any set-back. In this series I have already recommended specific meanings that will create the resilient state. Yet above and beyond those specific meanings as empowering beliefs, understandings, decisions, and identities is the ability to choose your meanings.

Do you know this power? This is your power to invent a semantic framework that will keep you healthily invested in living your life to the full. After all, that’s what a set-back knocks out of us—our meanings. By definition, that’s what a set-back is—your hopes, dreams, and richest meanings as manifested in your relationships, career, home, possessions, family, etc. suffer a loss. What is set back is your journey to fulfill your highest intentions and meanings.

Whatever that is for you—that’s the content of what you have lost. Yet above and beyond that, you have not lost your ability to create meaning. But many people, maybe most people, act as if they have lost that when they suffer a set-back or a knock-down. They act as if they cannot re-construct their intentions and meanings. They act as if they cannot re-invent themselves and the meaning of their life. Yet that process, the very ability to construct meaning, is your greatest innate power for creating and sustaining your resilience.

To support this claim, look again at the people that we quickly look to and think about when we think about highly resilient people—people who do not let a major set-back stop them. What do they all have in common? They have the flexibility to quickly begin re-constructing the meaning of life. Viktor Frankl did this. Christopher Reeves did this. Sentenced to a Concentration Camp for years and suffering severe privations and suffering a major health crisis (becoming a quadriplegic) represents some pretty major set-backs. Yet both Frankl and Reeves shared something. They used their meaning- making power to reinvent themselves, to give their lives renewed meanings.

When you know that the meaning you live is the experience that you will live, then you will be in a position to flexibly use your meaning-making powers. That realization will put you in a position where you can truly choose your response to the challenges before you. That’s because the option of choosing your response similarly comes from your ability to choose your meanings and to set them as your semantic framework for responding.

If you know this power, how is your skill in using this power? Do you know how to put a positive spin

on things so that you can stay positive? That short statement summarizes reframing. You take something and put a new frame on it so that it can be interpreted in a different way. You take the content of something and say “It does not mean X, it means Y.”

Recently during some of our Group and Team Coach Training, we ran an experiment wherein we gave people a set of complaints to reframe. Group members were given complaints to make in the group and the coach was to take the complaint and give it a positive spin and put it to good use. Some of the complaints where normal kind of complaints, some where exaggerated and really stupid ones. The amazing thing is how difficult most people, even well-trained people, have in taking something and giving it new and better meanings. It sounds easy, but like so many things, it is much more difficult to do (implement) than to understand.

While it may be challenging, even difficult, the ability to frame and reframe is one of the most unique and distinguishing human powers— namely, the ability to assign meaning and interpret things in a way that brings out your best. Whatever meanings you set determine your focus, your response, your emotions, your state, and the way you thereafter live your life.

It has been said that anyone can explain things when everything is going your way. In fact, any fool can do that. But it takes a creative and flexible mind to explain things when life falls apart. It requires true creativity to be able to find and set a great meaning for a set-back that then induces a state of resilience, determination, vision, and optimism. And while it may not be easy, it is certainly highly desirable.

The truth is that at every moment of your life, you are in the process of creating meanings. The question is not whether you are a meaning-maker and that you invent meanings, you do. The question is about the kind and quality of meanings you create. The question is whether those meanings are supportive and empowering for you as a person or whether they are limiting and diminishing.

What happens to you in your life is not always under your control. Things happen. Natural disasters occur. People do hurtful things that affect you. But the meaning that you give to those things is under your control. And the meaning you give will be the experience you live. Knowing this, how will you choose to use your innate semantic-construction powers? Do you need to learn more about those powers and develop your skills in using them to your well being?