Possible solutions to a harmful situation you are in can usually be categorized into just four types. You can: Exit, Alter, React, or Reframe.
To elaborate, if a situation is causing you harm, you can:
(1) EXIT the situation so that it can’t harm you anymore.
For instance, if you’re in a burning building, you can try to leave the building.
(2) ALTER the nature or characteristics of the situation so that it harms you less, while still remaining in the situation, and otherwise behaving the same way within it.
For instance, if you are cold because your heater broke you can try to fix your heater.
(3) REACT to the situation differently by changing your future behaviors in it, but without trying to alter the nature of the situation itself, and without exiting from it.
For instance, if you’re doing badly in school, you can start paying more attention in class or spending more time on your homework.
(4) REFRAME the situation to change your thoughts or feelings about it (so that you experience less harm from it), without otherwise changing your behavior, and without altering or leaving the situation.
For instance, if you feel upset when friends don’t return your text messages quickly since you think it means they don’t care about you, you can try to reframe the situation by reminding yourself that your friends lead busy lives, which may be the cause of their slow responses; rather than a lack of caring.
I think it’s useful to keep this categorization in mind, since it’s easy to get stuck focusing on just one or two solutions, and miss a potentially better one. The key is to consider which of these strategies, or combination of them, has the best chance of helping you achieve your goals (when you factor in how likely each is to work, and how costly or risky each is). Applying this simple framework of four possibilities (“E.A.R.R”) can help structure your solution oriented thinking.
Consider this example to further illustrate the four approaches. If your boss at work is making your life miserable by frequently getting angry at you, you can try to:
(1) Exit (by quitting the job)
(2) Alter (by asking your boss not to snap angrily at you anymore)
(3) React (by trying to change your behaviors at work so that they no longer trigger your boss’ anger), or
4) Reframe (by trying to become less bothered by anger directed at you from your boss).
Sometimes one strategy won’t fit a certain problem (don’t Reframe if you’re in a burning building that you can Exit safely from, and don’t Alter by trying to put the fire out if it has already grown huge), but usually there will be multiple reasonable methods to apply.
So which method should you choose in a particular case? It depends on:
(a) how likely you think each is to work, and
(b) how costly each is to carry out (in time, money, pain, risk, frustration, emotional energy, etc.)
(c) your sense of justice or ethics (e.g. you may think it’s wrong to be treated that way by your angry boss and therefore not use the Reframe strategy, as a matter of principle, even if it would work).
Let’s consider in more detail when you might apply each strategy in the case of an angry boss:
(1) If you think it would be easy to switch jobs and are excited to do so, you may choose to Exit.
(2) If you think your boss is likely to stop acting up angrily towards you if you make a Human Resources complaint, you may choose to Alter.
(3) If you see a clear cut, easy to change, and undesirable pattern of your own behavior that’s triggering your boss’ anger, you may choose to React.
(4) If you aspire to be the sort of person who can handle being angrily snapped at without feeling bothered by it, and think you can come to feel differently about your boss’ behavior so that it bothers you a lot less, you may choose to Reframe.
So if you are facing a situation that’s causing you harm, it may be helpful to start with the question, what would it look like to Exit, Alter, React or Reframe in this case?
The boundaries between the four categories will not always be sharp (for instance, if you’re doing badly in a class at school, you may think of Exit as quitting that class, but you could instead think of Exit as quitting school altogether, with quitting just that class as an example of Alter, since it’s altering your school environment). There may also be occasionally be options that don’t neatly fall into any of these four categories.
Nonetheless, in most cases these four strategies, EARR, help you search for the best solution when a situation is causing you harm.
Comments