So the cat is out of the bag. You know that I was out last week in the beautiful, warm Virgin Islands. (Sorry, my snowbound friends). What you may not know is that I was there with an amazing group of really bright, hardworking, executive and entrepreneurial women. And while for the most part our plan was to leave business completely behind which we did rather well, now that I'm back I thought I'd share some of what I learned without even trying.

It's important to change gears. It's important to relax. It's important to be silly. And every one of you already knows that. It's just that many of us get stuck and just don't do what we know we should. As if to drive the point home for me, one of the women on the trip wasn't feeling quite her best but shrugged it off to being overly stressed. Just two days after returning she was rushed to the emergency room and she is now recovering after having a tumor removed from her brain. There's nothing that could have been done to stop the tumor from growing, but it's an incident like this that reminds us to always be ready. It's incidences like these that remind us that the key is self-awareness and no matter how busy  you are, how pessimistic you might be, how important you are to others who depend on you or how stuck in a rut you might be, you should always undertake some activity that will restore your energy and the faith in yourself.

I understand that the term for this is "positive framing". We all frame how we see things all the time. We put things in perspective or "frames" and then process our experiences accordingly. The best part about positive framing is that it accepts the facts of adversity and counters them with action. This is quite different from positive thinking which tries to replace adversity with positive beliefs. Although they can both be learned, the studies show that positive framing is more action oriented and therefore tends to be a better choice, particularly in the workplace.

In 2005 I remember reading that the Chairman and CEO of Avon Corporation, Andrea Jung, accepted the fact that her company was in a decline and that temporary factors wouldn't fix things. She took responsibility that she was the leader who created the strategies for the team responsible for implementing them, so she promptly fired herself on a Friday night. The following Monday she showed up at work as the new turnaround CEO. She regained her glass half-full level of optimism and worked with her team to put in place a workable recovery plan. It was the firing of herself that did it. It was the willingness to stop and do something different.

Other than my dear friend who is in recovery, the women on this trip are performing better and influencing those around them to do better as a result of having taken the time to let it all go. I learned a long time ago that perception really is reality, so it seems to me that learning to frame things in the positive if it doesn't come naturally to you is worth the effort. A great way to frame things in a more positive way is to figure out a way to stop and view things differently for a while. And if you're in a part of the country where winter has you down, I know a little spot...

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