CHANGE: Practice - Learning to Speak Elephant

Welcome back Viphilus*

If you’re new to this blog or you don’t remember the elephant-rider analogy that I've been using then take a trip back to the posts on March 16 and March 23. Let me recap it though to keep this post complete. In short, the rider is your conscious mind and the elephant is your subconscious mind. The rider is principled, noble and wants to do and be good. The elephant is lazy, pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding (completely indolent) and is only out for himself. This creates a virtual civil war inside of us as our brain is divided on intent.

Oh yeah … a few others things that are REALLY important before we go on. 

1. The rider tires easily while the elephant seems endlessly energized.
2. The elephant wants pleasure NOW, and he wants to avoid pain NOW.
3. The elephant spooks easily at change … any kind of change.

This pleasure-NOW, no-pain-NOW nature within all of us creates the urgency paradigm that we looked at back in March. The elephant has all the power - this is the principle we need to understand; all that remains is to teach the rider how to train his elephant. Self-awareness/knowledge is about getting to know and understand your rider and your elephant. Self-management is teaching your rider how to train your elephant. Emotional intelligence then is the art of elephant training …and the first step in that training is for the rider to learn to understand and speak elephant in order to influence him: to get your idea or message into his head.

Before we try to recreate the wheel, let me highlight some work that has already been done on this. Let’s start with ancient Greeks. Rhetoric was an art developed by the Greek philosophers around 600 BC. This art had the goal of persuading people (individual, audience, etc), convincing them to act, to pass judgment or to identify with given values. Plato described rhetoric as the “art of enchanting the soul.”  According to the Greeks, this art has 3 distinct components (the Greeks loved breaking things down into their constituent parts):

Credibility (ethos – from which we get the word, “ethics”)
Emotion (pathos)
Logic (logos)

Here’s what it all means. Before someone will listen to you and allow you to influence them they must find you to be credible, you must have a logical argument, and that argument must align with them emotionally. The Greeks also stressed practice and training in this art in order to master it.

The next work I want to cite is considerably more modern … albeit still 80 years old. Dale Carnegie wrote on the topic of “influence” and his 1936 book became one of the best-selling self-help books of all time: “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Carnegie’s book is essentially a manual on how to speak to other people's elephants.

If you are trying to influence someone to change their mind … or even yourself to change your own mind … you need to speak directly with the elephant. His language is the language of emotions. Sure, he does care about credibility and logic … but only AFTER his emotions are settled down so he can even consider the other two. And when it comes to change, the overarching emotion to address is fear (of the unknown) because change suggests a different future, and in that future there may be more pain and/or less pleasure. The elephant won’t stand for that … unless he can CLEARLY see that if the change does not happen, the pain will be even greater and/or the pleasure will be even less.

Is this starting to make sense now? Change truth # 3 (June 8 post) is that change in us is always emotional. That’s because the elephant gets riled when he senses that something/anything will potentially thwart pleasure or introduce pain. This is why the Heath brothers, in their book: SWITCH (all about change) highlight the importance of speaking to the elephant (our own if we are trying to convince ourselves to make a change … or other people’s elephants if we are trying to introduce change into their world). Remember, when you are thinking consciously about something and when you are determining to do something or not do something ... that's the Rider doing that thinking. He is very logical and knows right from wrong. The problem is he tries to convince the elephant (the subconscious automated part of you) by using logic. He thinks that Plato himself would be proud of his unassailable arguments and that the elephant would be easily convinced. Well, Plato would shake his head and tell you, "Hey dummy ... why are you speaking 'rider' to an 'elephant' ... he only understands 'elephant' so maybe you better ditch the 'rider language' and learn to speak 'elephant.'

'Elephant' is synonymous with "emotional." The rider's logic must be couched initially in emotional terms that answer the question: “what’s in it for me?” Any other approach is almost always doomed from the outset. Save the fancy Aristotelian logic for arriving at your reasons for the change. When it comes to getting the subconscious onside (or other people's elephants), your primary target is emotional alignment.

Let’s go back to Dale Carnegie’s brilliant book. Below I have listed the 4 sections in the book along with the chapter titles. Take a look at each title and see if, from the title alone, you can identify for each chapter whether the topic is about establishing credibility (C), appealing to logic (L), or appealing to a person's emotions to get alignment (E). Put a C, L or E besides each one below then get a count for each letter (C, L or E) after you have completed the list.

1. Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

1 - "Don't criticize, condemn or complain."

2 - "Give honest and sincere appreciation."

3 - "Arouse in the other person an eager want."

2. Six Ways to Make People Like You

1 - "Become genuinely interested in other people."

2 - "Smile."

3 - "Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language."

4 - "Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves."

5 - "Talk in the terms of the other man's interest."

6 - "Make the other person feel important and do it sincerely."

3. Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

1 - "Avoid arguments."

2 - "Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never tell someone they are wrong."

3 - "If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically."

4 - "Begin in a friendly way."

5 - "Start with questions the other person will answer yes to."

6 - "Let the other person do the talking."

7 - "Let the other person feel the idea is his/hers."

8 - "Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view."

9 - "Sympathize with the other person."

10 - "Appeal to noble motives."

11 - "Dramatize your ideas."

12 - "Throw down a challenge."

4. Nine Ways to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

1 - "Begin with praise and honest appreciation."

2 - "Call attention to other people's mistakes indirectly."

3 - "Talk about your own mistakes first."

4 - "Ask questions instead of giving direct orders."

5 - "Let the other person save face."

6 - "Praise every improvement."

7 - "Give them a fine reputation to live up to."

8 - "Encourage them by making their faults seem easy to correct."

9 - "Make the other person happy about doing what you suggest."

What was your count? Did you get a vast majority with the letter E? If you didn’t, go back and think about them again because most of them are actions to create emotional alignment. Carnegie understood very well that you will never convince anyone to change until you first remove their emotional obstacles. Until you take the emotional objections off the table the elephant won’t budge … and the rider has no power whatsoever to move him. All the convincing arguments in the world won’t make a wiff of a difference.

Same goes for convincing yourself to change … if you don’t address your own emotional resistance your elephant won’t budge. But when you speak to him gently, letting him know that you aren’t judging him (don’t beat yourself up), and letting him know what’s in it for him (your deep reason why change is essential), and that you are going to do everything possible to make the transition journey easier for him (by making the path as easy as possible for yourself) … well, the elephant might just start lumbering slowly in the direction that the rider wants him to go (meaning, you will stop self-sabotaging).

Next week is the 5^th Monday this month so we’ll take a break … but when we come back in July I want to dig deeply into the actual training of your elephant so that he and your rider are working together (which will mark the beginning of the end of the self-limiting, self-defeating and self-destructive behaviour within you).

See you in two weeks.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"