How To Reframe Your Reality With Two Simple Steps

These cognitive shifts can help us deal with rejection and reclaim our time.

On a Monday morning, I sat down to write. Surrounded by brainstorming notebooks, three bottles of water and a stack of pillows. I wondered how long did I have before the inevitable interruption of children or the rambunctious pack of pets that always seem to perk up, right as I sit down?

In my vague frustration, I imagined what if, instead of lamenting the inevitable passage of time, I shifted from thinking about time as a scarcity and instead viewed it as a priceless commodity. Because how we spend our moments is how we spend our lives.

Taking it a step further, I decided to think about other areas I wanted to improve such as unrewarding anxiety and apprehension. What if I also replaced unproductive worry about rejection with concrete cognitive shifts, gently taking the focus off doing and placing it on being. I thought, “I’m not sure how well this will work, but at least it will reduce mindset-enabled stress.”

This was the first step in reframing my ever-shifting reality, and it resulted in a completely new way of thinking and being.

Shifting our mindset requires perceiving life in a new way, which in turn makes it possible to recognize and appreciate the positive aspects of our circumstances. Reframing encourages us to transform life’s inevitable challenges into sparkling new possibilities.

Reframing is about trusting the cycles of life and appreciating how mistakes move us forward.

It’s about attuning ourselves to the cyclical seasonality of time and recognizing that life continually repeats itself, as times of rejection become times of vibrant success. Recognizing this, it’s easier to remain optimistic.

Reframing any instance, situation, or event requires a radical shift in our mindset. The good news, however, is that each shift expands with time until a completely different neural pathway is formed and that mind shift becomes a new way of thinking, being, and seeing.

I used cognitive shifts as catalysts for transformative change, and this is what facilitated my journey from incremental to exponential change.

1. Rejection can ignite creative inspiration.

Everyone experiences rejection at some point, but it’s important to remember that rejection is never a unanimous judgment.

Rejection is normal and even natural, but it doesn’t define you, me, or anyone else.

Realistically speaking, rejection is merely an opinion. It’s easy to assume that rejection is the all-encompassing ultimate truth, but in actuality, just like our own, it’s someone’s perspective, based on a myriad of factors beyond our control. An opinion could be based on someone’s current mood, health, circumstances, experience, culture, or even just personal preference. Each of us is entitled to our opinion, but it’s critical to realize that opinions are usually not rooted in fact.

This is an important realization because we frequently assume that rejection is some cataclysmic sign from the universe of our inferiority.

In contrast, though, rejection is part of life. And it implores us to ask the essential question: Would you rather sit comfortably in a pool of people-pleasing mediocrity or design your own destiny?

It’s imperative that we consciously decide to shift our way of thinking, and this is especially true for creatives who rely on motivation and passion to get the job done.

Many writers are entirely self-taught and withstand daily rejection, but still, continue to write and create from a place of confidence with remarkable resilience and determination.

How do they do it?

One way is through reframing rejection.

We’ve all been rejected in some way. Maybe you approached someone and they brushed you off, maybe you were rejected from a job, or it could be that your ideas were brushed off at work, another subtle form of rejection.

Here’s an example of rejection that I went through, but which ended up being a very good experience after I reframed it.

Several years ago, I decided to reenter the workforce (which was always my intention) after a magical two years with my new baby. I had worked for close to a decade before taking unpaid maternity leave and didn’t anticipate any serious issues when I made the choice to return to work.

I was very unprepared for the way society treats mothers who have taken a break from their career, albeit temporarily. I was rejected over and over, and it began to wear me down until my husband said, “Maybe this is a sign to change paths.” I didn’t want to change paths, but I had to admit that all the signs were there. Did I even want to return to the way that I had lived before?

I thought about my rigid viewpoint, with which I had been raised but which wasn’t my own. This stringent perspective was potentially causing me to miss out on a purpose very different than I had ever intended for myself.

Each rejection was another signal that I was trying to sign up for a career that wasn’t right for my strengths and lifestyle.

The slew of rejections was confusing and painful until I reframed the results and realized what was occurring. By not getting what I thought that I needed, I was gaining something much greater: awareness, grit, and the chance to reinvent my career in a way that was in alignment with my strengths and passions.

The rejection was guiding me to a better, more fulfilled way of being. This shift in mindset helped me to reframe life’s challenges and remain motivated and positive no matter the outcome.

When you feel frustrated or fed-up by a lack of progress, remember that rejection is part of the recipe for success. If we don’t take risks and put ourselves out there, nothing can happen, success included.

2. Time is money; money is time.

I also used a cognitive mind shift to release old existing beliefs I had inherited about money, none of which were healthy.

I was raised with the mindset that money is complex and potentially even dangerous. I started to change my views about money after reading Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. I learned that mindsets, specifically how we perceive our strengths and weaknesses, have an important role in what we believe to be true about our skills and abilities.

If we believe that growth or change is possible, it most certainly is.

This led me to discover that money isn’t the most valuable resource that we can have; rather, time is. Instead of viewing the time-money balance as an insurmountable problem, I dug deep and changed the way that I thought about money. My new view is that money is simply an outward symbol of the time that we invested to earn it, added to the skills and value we already have or wish to acquire.

Simultaneously, I shifted my perspective on time, knowing that stressing about not having enough time will never create more. We need to celebrate the time that we do have, and not mourn the time that we don’t.

This mindset makes it easier to focus on abundance instead of what we lack, and see time as the ultimate resource that we all have when we start to view it differently.

Essentially, any cognitive shift helps us to create a different way of looking at a situation, person, or circumstance by changing its meaning. Also referred to as cognitive reframing, it’s a strategy that can provide us with a different perspective on any situation. Our point-of-view depends on the mindset with which we view it.

When we shift our frame of mind, the meaning that we project onto our reality changes, and thinking and behavior often change along with it.