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It’s that time of year again – the time when I get the “reviews” from my students on how I have performed as their teacher. Reading the comments is a fascinating experience for me. One student says, “This teacher is the best one in this school,” while another one says, “This teacher has no personality and is difficult to understand.” How can the best teacher in the school have no personality? Some students claim this is a life-changing course, and others claim it is boring and useless.
 

 One of the women I coach at one of my client firms was telling me a story earlier this month about another individual in her office. She was sharing some “odd” behaviors that this person was displaying, and then explaining to me her view on what was going on with that individual. The person was lashing out at people in meetings and generally being disruptive and difficult. My client told me that it was because the person was fed up with the craziness in their work environment and was finally losing their cool because of how dysfunctional it all was.
 

I love mysteries. Right now I’m reading a great one by Harlan Coben called “Caught.” I won’t give away much of the book, because it’s such a good read, but I do want to talk about something that happens in the book: There’s a series of people who are having their reputations besmirched because of online, anonymous postings about them. The postings accuse them of doing terrible things and talk about them in a very negative manner.

Last weekend I attended a Taylor Swift concert with my youngest daughter and my nieces. While we were waiting in line (a long, long line at that…), a man and his young son pushed their way through the crowd to get in front of everyone. One of the other dads in line said quite loudly, “Me first, huh? What makes you so special?”

I’ve learned many useful things over the years through my hypnosis training, but one thing that has stood out for me has been the idea of “reframing.” This is an NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) technique that can be a very powerful tool to move you from stuck to unstuck, and to give you more energy to deal with things that frustrate you.

“A bleeding-heart Liberal.” “A Conservative who doesn’t care about children.” “A tax-and-spend idiot.” “A callous person who doesn’t want jobs for unemployed people.”