WEAPONIZING EFFECTIVENESS - Lessons from the Land

Morning my children…

This week my SE.A.L. theme takes us to the last place … the LAND.  Why? What’s there? Well, the elephant of course … because I want to talk about how the largest land animal in the world relates to our effectiveness.

So let’s talk about the elephant in the room.

Back in 2008-09 I took an evening course delivered by a neuroscientist called, “How the mind works.” She began the course with this sentence, “All human beings are born as hedonists ... pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding creatures."  My first thought was, “wow, what a dim view of humanity.” My second thought was, “yep … I get it.” Despite it being an unappetizing “truth” for me, I can’t argue with the statement. In fact, I believe it to be a key truth in understanding myself, especially my self-sabotaging nature.

We are born with strong animal instincts for survival and a genetic predisposition towards seeking pleasurable things and avoiding painful things. As we grow older and develop a conscience and a will and something along the lines of self-determination (one of the things that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom), we know that we need to subordinate those basic instincts to our control … to our will. The thing is, these instincts are powerful beyond imagination and will completely dominate us unless we learn how to tame the beast within us so that we act like a human being and not like an animal.

The analogy of taming this beast is brought out very well in Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The HappinessHypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom,” where he shares with the reader a model that he developed for explaining the struggle we all have with the beast within us: a rider on an elephant. The rider is the rational conscious part of the brain and the elephant is the more emotional subconscious part. 

The rider knows where he wants to go … he wants to be good and do good and he wants to head in directions that are noble, principled, spiritual and altruistic. The elephant, on the other hand, is stubbornly selfish, lazy, hates pain and is only interested in what is safe and pleasurable. AND .... the rider is easily exhaustible while the elephant seems endlessly energized. One yeah, one more thing; the elephant spooks easily at change.

Ben Franklin understood the inner conflict as evidenced by his quote: “If passion drives, let reason hold the reigns.” [side note: the Heath brothers … Chip and Dan … turned the elephant/rider analogy into a brilliant strategy for how to effectively bring about change when change is hard … check out their book SWITCH].

OK … here’s the deal. This inner conflict between the rider and the elephant is really a civil war going on inside of us. This isn’t a new discovery; it’s been known about for millennia. If you want the Christian take on this you can look to Jesus who said, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” or the Apostle Paul, who actually describes the civil war in himself in great detail in Romans 7. If you want something more recent then there is the Canadian First Nations story (which, by the way, made a great heritage-moment commercial that I’m sure you remember) where a chief tells a young boy that inside each of us lives two wolves, one who makes us do good and one who makes us do bad; when the young boy asks the chief which wolf wins, the chief offers, “the one you feed.” 

Of course, even this is just a reworking of Plato’s charioteer with two horses (a good one and a bad one). 

Maybe you want something even older than Jesus, Paul or Plato … so I could point you to Buddha’s “internal raging elephant.” Still not old enough? OK, how about King David who prayed to God in the psalms, “Lord, give me an undivided heart.”

Then maybe you want a very modern version from the likes of Freud with his teaching on the id, ego and superego. 

But then again, maybe you’re completely satisfied with the simplest version of all … the Hollywood depiction of the little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other.

Personally, I really like the elephant and rider analogy because it fits well with social science and human performance data … something we will visit in the posts to come. Here are the two driving truths about the elephant:

1. The elephant doesn’t just want pleasure … it wants pleasure NOW. In fact, it wants the pleasure NOW so badly that it is willing to borrow tomorrow’s pleasure and bring it into today, or like in Æsop’s fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs (a fable about the unprofitability of greed), it brings the pleasure of all-the-tomorrows into today. But here’s the rub … the elephant will do this even if it knows that by bringing the pleasure into today, not only will tomorrow’s pleasure be zero, today’s pleasure will actually be a diminished version of what tomorrow’s pleasure would have been. Of course, this is that whole conversation about delayed gratification that brings to mind marshmallows.  
2. The elephant is also highly motivated to experience no pain NOW. In fact, it so desperately wants to avoid any pain NOW that it is quite content to delay the pain until tomorrow … even knowing that when tomorrow arrives, the pain might actually be much worse. All it knows is that it just can’t handle that pain NOW.

This pleasure-NOW, no-pain-NOW nature within all of us creates the urgency paradigm that we looked at in the April 18 post about the matrix. The elephant has 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.

OK guys, I'll wrap up this week with a question, which I will answer in two ways:

Question: So then, how do I train my elephant?

Answer 1: I start by getting to know both the rider and the elephant... REALLY getting to know them. Here are a few truths about them.

Truth # 1: you can't talk directly to the elephant, you can only talk to the rider; therefore, if you want to teach the elephant anything, you'll have to tell it to the rider, who in turn tells it to the elephant. 

Truth # 2: you'll need to teach your rider how to speak elephant language.

Truth # 3: you need to know that the rider and elephant are driven by morally opposite things, with key facts being that the elephant is incredibly indolent (avoids pain and effort at all cost). Sayings like, "no pain, no gain," freak the crap out of him. He is easily spooked by change ... any kind off change. He always wants to take the easiest possible path.

Truth # 4: your rider is easily exhausted; your elephant is endlessly energized.

Truth # 5: your rider believes that the elephant has no self-control and condemns him ... the real problem is that your rider simply needs to learn how to make self-control irrelevant and how to quit putting hard or unclear choices in front of the elephant.

Answer 2: By fully understanding Answer#1, I realize that the strategy of actions fall under 2 categories:

1.            I need to make my (the elephant's) bad behaviour visible to me; in other words, I need to make my unconscious behaviour conscious, so that I can deal with it.

2.            I need to create a better (easier) path for the elephant to walk every day so that the rider doesn't have difficulty in getting him to turn down certain roads.

Watch yourself. Observe yourself. Turn off the TV, IPOD, laptop, cell phone, and any other noise that is distracting you. Do this on a regular basis so that you can get to see what the elephant is really like. Warning though ... he hates being watched ... that too kinda freaks him out a bit, even when it is you (the rider) watching him, so just be prepared for that.

Next week we go to war!

I love you guys.

Dad