How To Win At Life With The Stoic Frame Game

Life is full of challenges that can knock you down.

Sometimes these challenges are big, like becoming seriously ill or getting fired. Other times they are small, like missing out on an opportunity to impress someone important to your career.

The Stoic Frame Game helps you change the emotional impact of setbacks and other challenges you face by helping you reframe them as opportunities for growth and resilience.

It’s a practical way to apply Stoic principles when life’s inevitable blows hit you in the face. You may even come to appreciate the hits.

The Frame Game: Stimulus And Response

I won’t go into the history of stoicism, as you’ve probably heard that several times over. I’ll tell you that the old Stoics were fiercely bad-ass in the face of adversity.

Modern psychology has started to catch up and rediscover some of the techniques the Stoics applied. We’ll explore one of those techniques here.

Framing is something we do all the time. Everything that happens to us needs to be put in context and interpreted a certain way. And this is where we have more freedom than most think.

Consider the following example — you’re told you have a severe illness and have the choice between two medical procedures.

The first option has a survival rate of 90% after a month. The second has a 10% death rate after the first month.

Which would you choose?

Most people favor the procedure presented in terms of survival rate, even though the statistical result of each procedure is exactly the same.

Rationally, we shouldn’t have a preference — but the different emotional effects are real. This speaks to the power of framing — it can shift our emotional response to the same content.

When something goes wrong, we have a lot of options for how to frame it. Some people point a finger and play The Blame Game as often as they can — call it The Blame Frame.

However, by coming up with alternative explanations and consciously reframing events, we can undermine this tendency that trigger negative emotions in ourselves.

We can put the setbacks in more neutral, or even more beautiful frames.

Why Play the Game?

If you learn to stop your automatic mind and find better frames, you can profoundly alter your emotional health. You’ll experience fewer negative emotions, as they’re never activated in the first place.

It also improves your chances of dealing with the setback thoughtfully. With a less hot-headed response, you might find solutions that put you ahead.

You may even be excited by the opportunity to “show your stuff”. Thus, you not only avoid the negative emotions, but feel the pride, satisfaction, and joy from rising to the challenge.

Below you’ll find some suggestions for constructive reframes. Some work better in particular situations than others, so try them on for size.

Get familiar with these frames, and practice the mental agility required to make good use of this technique in real life. With clever use, you might even find yourself welcoming setbacks in the future.

The Competing Obligations Frame

Suppose someone refuses to give you something you were hoping to get.

In The Blame Frame, you’ll get angry, deprived, and upset.

However, this person denying you may be entangled in a web of obligations. By giving you what you want, that person won’t be able to give others what they deserve.

If this is the case, it would be wrong of you to expect to get it anyhow, and somewhat unreasonable to get angry about it.

The Incompetence Frame

Several times in the future, you’ll experience someone making some kind of mistake, like losing your dinner reservation.

The person responsible could have done it on purpose.

However, it is far more likely that the person is incompetent or made an honest mistake.

Frame the incident as incompetence rather than malice, and the emotion you subsequently feel might be pity rather than anger.

The Storytelling Frame

When you encounter a setback, think of it as a story you can tell in the future.

The story may be about how frustrated you were, how mean and stupid other people can be, and how the world is really unfair to you. You’ve probably heard this story told by others. It’s not a crowd-pleaser.

Your story can be different.

With a little effort on your part, you can “write” a different story with your behavior. This is not about fabricating a story to make you look good. The point is to change your behavior in a way that will make for a good story you’ll be proud to tell.

Rather than fishing for pity from your audience, you can tell an attractive and aspirational story.

Thinking about your future stories may reduce the sting of setbacks. Your attention will be focused not on how you are being wronged, but on what you have to do to bring the story to a satisfying conclusion.

The Comedic Frame

Using humor is a great way of dealing with setbacks. Finding some funny remark will set the tone, rather than standing around and moaning about how unfair life is.

Humor can also be a great way to deal with insults. When we’re insulted, we often respond by getting angry.

By responding with laughter, we forestall anger and make the person who insulted us look like a fool. He hit us with a verbal shot, and we laugh it off.

If you can bring yourself to laugh at the things that make most people cry, you have a powerful weapon to use against life’s adversities.

The Game Frame

Frame a setback as part of a game.

Consider the setback to be within the rules, and do the best you can within those restraints and circumstances. Whatever happened was a valid move from your competition. It wasn’t unfair, but just a part of the friendly competition. No need to fret and moan — just get on with the competition.

Framing setbacks as components of a game can dramatically reduce its emotional impact.

You can also go more meta, and consider every setback as a part of “The Game of Life”.

The Stoic Test Frame

This frame also has game-like elements.

The Stoics suggest that when confronted with a setback, we should pretend that imaginary Stoic Gods are testing our resilience.

To pass the test and win the game, you must stay calm while finding a workaround for the setback. Don’t assume the setback is unjust punishment, but a test of your ingenuity and resilience.

You may find the notion of “Stoic Gods” to be highly implausible. Still, they can play a significant role in your psychology — if you let them. Consider them to be a convenient fiction that is useful to believe.

Alternatively, you may use some father figure, a teacher, or a mentor of some sort. Whatever suits your liking. Either way, the key is to assume they are testing you for your own good.

Grade Yourself

Keeping these frames in mind will be helpful. But if you want to get more serious about it, you can add more game-like elements.

You can judge and grade your own performance in The Stoic Frame Game.

If you allow yourself to get frustrated, you get a low grade. If you allow yourself to become angry or discouraged — or even worse, regard yourself as a victim — you fail.

Grade yourself in two different aspects. Each can receive different grades:

• How effectively you looked for a solution to your problem
  Did you consider various options before committing to a course of action? Was the workaround you finally settled on optimal — keeping in mind that the optimal does not necessarily mean the most pleasant?
• How well did you respond to the setback emotionally
  The most significant factor to grade your performance is how well your emotional response to the setback was. If you remain calm and collected, you may grant yourself a B. However, if your goal is to get an A or A+, you will have to do more than remain calm; you’ll have to welcome the setback and even perk up a bit on its appearance.

A Final Note On Frames

You may find this Frame Game to be a little constructed and awkward at first. Keep in mind that this is a practice, and it doesn’t matter which frame is true.

The important thing is to choose a beneficial frame that limits your suffering.

We play the Frame Game all of the time, whether or not we’re aware of it. Many of the frames we perceive as true can easily be deflated as pure fiction.

By being deliberate about which frames we adopt, you can save yourself vast amounts of negative emotions.

You can choose to frame the guy who cut you off in traffic as a desperate father trying to get to the hospital with his daughter — rather than an entitled idiot who deserves your rage.

If doing so prevents a surge of negative emotions and keeps you from ruining the next few hours or the entire day, you are much better for it. The entitled idiot in the other car does not care about your anger. He does not “get what he deserves” if you get angry. The only one you hurt is yourself.

Construct your reality in a way that doesn’t contribute to your own suffering.

Learn More

• If you’d like to learn more about stoic practices, you can check out William Irvine’s books. His first and most widely read is “A Guide to The Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy”, and his more recent action-guide is “The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient”
• For other thought-exercises like this one, as well as a range of other thinking tools on various topics, you should head over to TemplatesForThinking.com