Dine on the Elephant: How to Turn Your Tension into Self-Development
Let me clarify right off the bat. I am NOT advocating the eating of actual elephants. Elephants are majestic creatures that should be revered.
However…
I AM suggesting that we should eat the other kind of elephant. I’m talking about the “elephant in the room”, the thing we are NOT talking about. Which begs the question, Why are we not talking about it? And also, What makes it an elephant?
The idiom refers to the problem that no one wants to address because it is too large. We find a way to live with it and pretend it’s not there. And if we all do that together, then is it really there at all? Well… Yes.
The reason we’re not talking about it is because it is too overwhelming to even think about how to address it and no one thinks they have time to address it.
I am here to tell you that it needs to be addressed. And it needs to be addressed before you move on to something else because, by definition, that elephant is getting in the way of you reaching your potential on anything else!
Eat the frog.
Eat the frog is a concept developed by Brian Tracey. The question is, if you had a bunch of things on your plate that you had to eat. You had to. (It doesn’t work if you can choose not to eat them.) And one of the things you had to eat was a frog, eat the frog first. Why? For two reasons. The first is that if you don’t eat it first, it will be weighing on your mind the whole time you are not eating it and since you need to eat it anyway, why add that extra stress? The second is that eating the frog first when you know it is the least appealing, most difficult thing for you to eat, will inject you with a sense of confidence. “If I can eat that frog, then I can do anything!”
What I am suggesting is that you combine these two concepts. The frog is an elephant. And that is all the more reason you need to eat it.
Here’s where we shift gears to Tensions. A Tension is something you are feeling that has become a distraction. Likely, a Tension has been building up for awhile and is becoming more and more of a distraction as time ticks by.
First, it is important to acknowledge that a Tension is not wholly negative. A Tension is only negative as long as we are not dealing with it. But if we recognize Tensions for what they are — an opportunity to learn and grow — then they are great news.
Let’s take a look at Jodie. Jodie works at a people-focused, collaborative organization. That means that the nature of Jodie’s work requires communicating internally with her colleagues — exchanging information and keeping one another in the loop — and communicating with clients daily to ensure that everyone has an accurate picture of the work being done. What is Jodie’s elephant, of all things? Communication.
Jodie was noticing that there were incidents of miscommunication happening all the time, both with clients and with colleagues and that it was really affecting her work. Things were falling through the cracks and deals were lost. No one was happy about it, Jodie least of all.
But it was an elephant. It seemed like such an overwhelming problem that she ignored it. How could she fix such a gigantic problem? Better to just live with it, right?
The problem with elephants, though, is that they keep eating. And the more they eat the bigger they get.
Jodie recognized that if she did not deal with this elephant that she was going to lose her job soon enough. She could sense that her colleagues were getting frustrated with her and that her numbers were not looking good to her managers. She had to do something. So she tucked a metaphorical napkin into her shirt, shined up her metaphorical knife and fork and got ready to dine on the elephant.
Where does she begin? If you’re going to eat an elephant, what do you eat first? (Again, not suggesting that eating actual elephants is okay.)
She began by talking it out with her Coach. You see, Jodie was lucky. She worked at an organization that embraced learning and development and had put into place a partnering system whereby each person in the organization is a Coach and has a Coach. A Coach does a few things:
- A Coach is someone to whom you can verbalize your Tensions without judgement.
- A Coach is someone you can use to hold yourself accountable to the promises you make to yourself.
- A Coach is a co-strategist in solutioning your problems.
So Jodie told her Coach about her Tension. She said, “I am feeling like I am not performing my best because of my communication skills. I’m pissing people off and I’m losing deals.”
With the help of her Coach, she developed a strategy. The first phase of the strategy was simply to observe herself for a week. She documented every instance of miscommunication or missed opportunity due to communication issues or situations where she was causing her colleagues to become frustrated. She did this objectively. She was not judging herself. She was simply watching herself.
The following week, Jodie went over her documented observations with her Coach. Patterns started to emerge. For instance, she noticed that she was not responding to emails very quickly and that her colleagues often had to follow up with a phone call. In her mind, she was considering her answer before responding, but from their point of view, she just wasn’t responding. How were they to know she was thinking deeply about her answer?
She noticed that she was only offering information to her colleagues when they asked for it. She was never pro-actively offering information.
Her Coach did a great job of helping her to look at all of this objectively with an eye towards solutions. She was encouraged to treat it as an experiment.
If she allowed her own ego to get tangled up in it, she would end up getting bogged down by the problem rather than solving the problem.
So she came up with a plan. She committed to writing as quick a response as she could to emails even if she did not have an answer. She would write something like, “I wanted to let you know that I got this. I will have an answer for you by 3:00 today.” And then she would put a reminder in her calendar for 2:30 and make sure that she followed through with her promise.
She also committed to sending out a daily (pro-active) “executive summary” to each of her colleagues laying out, in brief, the information that they might need.
That’s it. Two Commits. Two experiments. One week.
A week later, she met with her Coach and they analyzed the results of the experiment.
Jodie found that there are actually two different types of emails and that her solution of writing back immediately without an answer was only working for one of them. If it was an email that required immediate attention and she wrote that she would get them the information by 3:00, that just made them more frustrated. However, if it was an email that did not need immediate attention, her immediate reply was appreciated.
Her Coach helped her to make a minor adjustment. Instead of writing, “I wanted to let you know that I got this. I will have an answer for you by 3:00 today.” she would (for this coming week) add one sentence: “I wanted to let you know that I got this. I will have an answer for you by 3:00 today. Let me know if it’s more urgent than that.” The idea was that this one sentence would separate the two different types of emails she was getting and allow her to deal with them accordingly. If it was an urgent matter, she would stop everything and get an answer. If it was not, her response would still be appreciated and she would follow through later.
When she and her Coach looked at her other Commit: sending out a daily “executive summary”, she had noticed (based on feedback that she had asked for) that daily was just too often. She was causing information overload, and sometimes there just wasn’t enough new information and she was just repeating herself for the sake of keeping to her “daily” promise.
She made an adjustment here, too. She committed to writing an “executive summary” on Mondays and Wednesdays at the end of the day and sending them at 9AM on Tuesday and Thursday. You see, she felt she would be most likely to achieve her goal at the end of a workday. That was when it was most fresh in her mind and it would give her a chance to reflect back over her day. But she also decided that the end of the day was not a good time for the recipients to be receiving her correspondence. It was a productive time for her to write. Not a productive time for them to read.
Every subsequent week, she looks objectively at her experimental solutions. The ones that work, she keeps. The ones that don’t she discards or adjusts. That ongoing process is as follows:
Identify a problem
Experiment with a solution
Analyze the results of the experiment
Adopt, Adjust or Discard as needed
Repeat
This has allowed her to dine on the elephant in the room. Not only has begun to solve her biggest problem, she has also become dedicated to this process. She now uses this for any problem she has, whether it be elephant sized or frog sized or anything in between.
Here’s your challenge: Look at your work. Identify a Tension. It probably won’t be very hard to do. You’re probably thinking about it all the time. It’s probably weighing on you. What is it? Name it. Then sit down and eat it. Observe yourself and document the moments when the Tension reveals itself. Do this objectively without judgement. At the end of the week, look at your observations and experiment with one solution. Try that solution for a week. Observe the results of the experiment. Adopt, Adjust, Discard as necessary. If you have a partner, that will help. A Coach is extraordinarily helpful when we want to hold ourselves accountable to promises we make to ourselves.
We’d love to hear about what you learn. We at CultivateMe are fascinated with the way people work now, the way people wish they could work in the future and how we can build the bridge to the new world where learning and work are two parts of the same whole. Send me an email at doug@cultivateme.xyz.
If you’d like to Take a Selfie of your Skills, click here and see what you bring to the table, what makes you unique, what makes you fantastic.
