>>187279The more you observe yourself like this, the more you'll notice how your perception influences your motivation by making things seem appealing or the opposite. The perceptual frame itself is actually this "preconceived agreeable image" that you've observed that you have and you've noticed that aligning your current activities with that image makes them seem more appealing. Being conscious and aware of this will help you take advantage and help direct yourself more easily, but it's still something that operates inside of the frame, rather than changing it.
A perceptual shift is when that "preconceived agreeable image" shifts into something different and this can cause radical changes to your behavior. The way this is experienced is that old behavior will simply stop making sense to you, so you stop doing it, or new behavior suddenly becomes very natural and effortless. These shifts are possible, but I can't say what exactly causes it. Visualizations and mental imagery don't necessarily, otherwise you'd be having shifts any time a thought popped into your head which would be horrific in its own way (think of people with extreme "mood swings").
Visualizations and mental imagery are tools that can definitely cause a shift, but it's important what you imagine and visualize and it's important in very subtle ways that aren't very clear to me currently. From Bruce Ecker's work, you can force a shift to happen if you guide a person to experience two incompatible realities side by side and it will have to settle on one. For instance, a person might have this very rigid and unchangeable view of reality where people are dangerous no matter what and within that frame, anxiety and anxious behavior are compelling. If you can get the person to experience people as safe or call up a vivid memory of such an experience, then use a visualization technique where those two contradictory realities are set side by side, it's highly likely to cause a permanent shift. I guess perceptual frames have to make sense and be useful to the person, and a contradictory experience will likely dissolve even the most deeply held frames.
This could be generalized and simplified: perceptual frames have "features" or "expectations" that can be contradicted and violated experientially in order to cause them to dissolve or rapidly re-organize into something else.
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