Support for on-being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer's new study, what does spirituality mean to us?

Reveals how spirituality informs our understanding of ourselves and each other, and inspires us to take action for the common good.

Explore these findings and more at spiritualitystudy.org.

My guest today is Trabian Shorters, a visionary who has seen and named a task that is necessary for all healing and building, for every vision and plan, whether in a family or a world to flourish.

Yet it's a kind of move, often short-circuited in our urgency for action and solutions.

It's called asset framing, and it works with both cutting-edge understandings of the brain and an age-old understanding of the real world power of the words we use, the stories we tell, the way we name things and people.

To understand asset framing, you first have to take in its profoundly intuitive opposite, which is the way we've largely been living, deficit framing.

From everyday social media to hallowed modes of journalistic, academic, and policy analyses, we have a habit of seeing problems and of defining people in need in terms of their problems.

Trabian Shorters is working with all kinds of institutions, from philanthropy to nonprofits to journalism, who are waking up to the fact that the very way we have spoken of and therefore thought about,

the people and crises we wish to serve has often instead stigmatized and sabotaged them.

It has not only doomed some of our best efforts to failure, it leaves all of us prone to cynicism and hopelessness.

What's exciting is that what Trabian Shorters proposes is not only more effective, it is simple and straightforward to grasp.

It is in and of itself dignifying and renewing.

The main question you might be asking at the end of this is why at this advanced stage of our species, it took us so long to learn to asset frame.

I'm Krista Tippett and this is on Beeing.

Trabian Shorters is founder and CEO of BME, a movement to first define black people by their aspirations and contributions.

He's been a vice president of communities at the Knight Foundation, co-led the Ashoka U.S. Venture Team and founded a successful early social impact tech company in 1999.

He grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, which was dying as a factory town and rapidly destabilizing across his childhood.

In an example of asset framing in action in his own education, he was found to have a genius IQ and eventually attended a private boarding school several miles and worlds away from his home.

I'm always curious about the roots in a life of what become that life's passions and callings and kind of animating questions.

Also about however you would define the religious or spiritual background of your earliest life of your childhood.

...