The Frame Changes Everything

What art taught me about the stories we tell ourselves

One of my favorite museums in the world sits in Big Horn, Wyoming — not exactly where you’d expect to find a world-class art collection. But the Brinton Museum has a permanent collection of Western and American Indian art that consistently draws me there. Plus, it’s just a beautiful museum in a gorgeous setting. One thing I’ve noticed, when standing in those galleries, has nothing to do with the paintings themselves.

It has to do with the frames.

Hang a sweeping Wyoming landscape in an ornate, gilded frame and something remarkable happens. The scene becomes intimate and grand at the same time. It evokes something monumental, weighty, and demanding of your full attention. The gold seems to say: lean in. This moment matters.

Now take that same landscape, the same mountains, the same wide sky, the same elk in the foreground and place it in a wide, white mat with a simple black frame. Suddenly it breathes. The space around the image becomes part of the image. The quiet expands. The message shifts: step back. Let it settle.

Same subject matter, even the same painting. Completely different experience. The frame didn’t change the landscape. It changed how the landscape landed and how it’s perceived.

We Are Always Inside a Frame

Here’s what I find most interesting about those frames at the Brinton: someone chose them. The artist, the curator, the gallery director – someone made a deliberate decision about how this work should be experienced. The frame is an act of intention. It begins to convey something before you ever look at the painting itself.

Most of us, when it comes to our own lives, are not choosing our frames. We inherited them long before we knew we had a choice in the matter.

The frames we use to interpret our experiences, like a setback, a conflict, an unexpected change, or even an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, were largely handed to us. By our families. By the culture we grew up in. By early experiences that taught us whether the world was safe or threatening, abundant or scarce, forgiving or unforgiving. By the messages we absorbed about who we were and what we deserved.

Those frames aren’t wrong, exactly. They made sense at the time. They were protective. But they’re also invisible, which is the problem. When you can’t see the frame, you think you’re just seeing reality. You think the obstacle in front of you is simply an obstacle, full stop. You don’t realize you’re looking at it through a gilded frame that says this is a threat or a narrow black frame that says you won’t be able to handle this.

Reactive and Creative: Two Very Different Frames

In the work I do with coaching clients, I pay attention to two fundamental frames – two ways people often find themselves in relationship to their own lives.

A Reactive frame puts you in response mode. Life happens to you. Challenges are threats. Other people’s moods are your responsibility. Your sense of safety depends on external conditions aligning in your favor. When they don’t (and let’s face it, they often don’t) the nervous system braces. You manage, you survive, you get through it. But you rarely feel like you’re at the center of your own story.

A Creative frame puts you in authorship mode. Sure, life happens and often not the way we want it to play out, but you are an active participant in how it unfolds and, more importantly, how it lands. Challenges are information. Setbacks carry lessons. The same difficult conversation that would shut you down in a Reactive frame becomes, in a Creative frame, an opportunity to understand something you couldn’t see before.

I want to be clear: this isn’t about positive thinking. It’s not about pretending hard things aren’t hard. The Creative frame doesn’t make the Wyoming landscape easier — it just gives you more space to stand inside it.

The Moment You See the Frame

I worked with a client recently who came to me convinced she had a people problem. Her team wasn’t listening. Her peers weren’t respecting her expertise. Her organization was resistant to change. As we worked together, something gradually became visible: she was operating from a frame that cast her as the only person in the room who really understood what needed to happen. And from inside that frame, everyone else’s behavior looked like obstruction.

When she began to see the frame itself, not just what was inside it, everything shifted. She didn’t suddenly agree with her colleagues. But she became curious about them instead of frustrated. She started asking questions instead of making cases. The situation hadn’t changed. Her relationship to it had.

That shift from being inside the frame to being able to see the frame is where agency lives. And it’s available to all of us.

The Practices That Shift the Frame

For the past few years, I’ve been developing a framework I call “Vitamin G5” which are five practices that function, at their core, as frame-shifters. Not as self-improvement tactics or productivity hacks, but as genuine perceptual upgrades. Ways of training the nervous system and the mind to hold experience differently.

The five practices — Gratitude, Generosity, Growth, Grace, and Gentleness — aren’t new ideas. But what’s new is understanding them as operating system upgrades: practices that don’t just change how you feel, but how you see. And how you see determines everything else that follows.

I’ll be sharing more about each of them in the months ahead, including the research behind why they work and the specific practices that make them actionable. But for now, I want to leave you with something simpler.

An Invitation to Notice

You don’t have to change your frame today. Change is rarely the right first step anyway.

The first step is simply to notice it.

In the coming days and weeks, when you find yourself in a situation that provokes a strong reaction like frustration, anxiety, defensiveness, or defeat, pause for just a moment before you respond. And ask yourself: What frame am I looking through right now? Did I choose it? Is it serving me?

You might be surprised at what you see when you stop looking through the frame and start looking at it. That’s not a small thing. In my experience, it’s where almost everything important begins.

If you’re feeling the pull to explore your own frames more deeply, to see which ones are serving you and which might be holding you back, I’d love to be a thought partner in that work. This is the heart of what I do. You can learn more about my coaching practice here on my website