New Year's Resolutions: The Elephant in the Room

It's January and like everyone else, I'm thinking about change. But this year, I'm going to acknowledge the Elephant in the room! The Elephant, according to Chip Heath in his book Switch, is our emotional side. It is the larger and stronger counterpart to the Rider, the rational side of ourselves.

We tend to believe that our Rider always controls our Elephant, but in most cases it’s the other way around. The Rider can help to steer the direction that the two will go, but it’s ultimately the energy and drive of the elephant that dictates most outcomes. So while my Rider has created an amazing OKR spreadsheet with goals and action plans, I won't get the change I want until I have considered the human side of this equation.

This becomes tricky because my Rider is extremely bossy, a perfectionist and loves issuing commands that, if executed, would make me a perfect person and bring world peace. My Elephant, on the other hand, likes status quo, safety, comfort food, comfort things, and is unruly with a likelihood of revolting and digging in its heels in direct proportion to the strictness of my Rider's edicts. I am a classic dueling self.

Too often in this situation, our natural inclination is just to go full drill sergeant and push ourselves, believing we have the willpower to "Just Do It" and move our Elephant along. This can be motivating in the short-term, but only briefly. Eventually, the Elephant starts to rebel. The smarter strategy is to build some Elephant into our plan to begin with.

If your Rider has already done the job of creating New Year's resolutions, there are several "Elephant Tricks," or psychological tactics you can use to adjust your plan and bring yourself along.

• Step 1: Uncover your barriers. The effort to truly know yourself and your problem areas will make your efforts more effective. It seems silly to sleuth ourselves out, but we have cognitive biases that create hidden blind spots. With that in mind, a good place to start is to journal about your behaviors and ask yourself a variety of find-out questions: Why do you do X behavior? What is the job it performs for you? What has stopped you from making this change in the past? What is going to get in your way this time? Honing in on your bottlenecks will help you move past generic goals and find the key levers that will have the most impact on your change effort.
•  Step 2: Be realistic. Armed with a better understanding of your barriers can help you assess whether your goals are realistic. Is your "I will not eat sugar for an entire year" really doable? If you have a habit of eating a donut a day, you might want to chunk it down until you can anchor yourself on something you know with confidence you can achieve. Like, start with skipping sugar on Wednesdays, say. And perhaps you timebox it to a smaller window -- a quarter, for example, after which you can reflect and see if you are ready to level up in Q2.
•  Step 3: Keep it small and incremental. Even if your goal is realistic, you might consider making an even smaller change. In his book "One Small Step Can Change Your Life," Dr. Robert Maurer talks about a patient, Julie, who was seeking help for high blood pressure and fatigue. Julie was overweight, feeling highly stressed by her job, finances and the demands of single parenting and at high risk for diabetes, heart disease and depression. After reviewing her vitals, Dr. Maurer knew that if she didn't make immediate changes, she would head down a disease spiral. Knowing that a recommendation of exercise for 30 minutes a day would be overwhelming, Dr. Maurer used find-out questions to review how Julie moved through a day and honed in on her evening routine of relaxing on the coach for a half hour to watch the news. He asked if she could march in front of the TV for just one minute. This felt so doable that Julie enthusiastically embraced the recommendation and gradually and naturally increased her marching time until it progressed into a more robust exercise program, reversing her health and saving her life. Keeping things small helps us feel successful and fuels us onward.
•  Step 4: Make it Easy. There are several ways to make things easier on ourselves. One way is to attach our goals to existing, pleasant habits. Consider how Julie added her exercise routine to her existing habit of watching the news. Another way is to make our goal more attractive by rewarding ourselves. There are many types of rewards, but one that works consistently for me is visual achievement. I have used marbles to track water intake or smiley faces on a chart to track daily wins. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that my inner kindergartner is so strong, but even as an adult, I will do anything to get all eight of my marbles moved over into the "I've had eight glasses of water" jar or to get seven smileys in a row! :) Another way to make things easier is by using forward-looking goals. They tend to be easier than avoidant goals because life moves in forward motion. Forward-looking goals give us a natural direction. So instead of a goal to avoid cookies, for example, how about a goal to gun for the broccoli? If you have an avoidant goal, try to reverse it into the action you are going to replace it with. Finally, make things easier by reducing friction costs. Small details can make a task more challenging or effortful and can make the difference between doing something and not doing it. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, removing decision costs can have a big impact. Write your meals down in advance, or even consider having the same thing for each meal every day. Sure, it is boring, but it reduces cognition that could get in your way.

Since this is LinkedIn, and since I work in organizational transformation, I can’t end this post without pointing out that these principles apply to organizations as much as individuals. Change management is all about the human side of the organization, the awareness that change only happens if people embrace it, one person at a time. Many leaders are trapped in a 19th-century mindset, thinking of their organization as a rational machine and failing to acknowledge that it is really a community of irrational hearts and minds capable of truly magical things when harnessed effectively. 

Knowing that employees are human and irrational, with both a Rider and an Elephant, helps us design not for how we wish people were, but for reality. For example, successful change initiatives rely on repetition, repeating the same message multiple times through multiple different channels. This may seem redundant if you consider only your employees’ Riders, but it’s the Elephants that need to hear about a change many times to fully understand and support it. Similarly, reducing friction costs for employees by chunking down complex messaging may seem like unnecessary hand-holding from a Rider perspective, but from an Elephant perspective, simple instructions clear the path for easier adoption. Finally, the powerful concepts of psychological safety, employee input, team trust, and team happiness measures are often met with great skepticism by leaders who focus only on the Rider, but the overwhelming evidence that all four are directly correlated with strong organizational outcomes starts to make sense when the Elephant is included in the equation. 

As obstinate as our Elephants can be, we love them because they give our life meaning and purpose. Without them, we would be robots. So this year, thank your Elephant and give it some love by increasing its presence in your personal and organizational plans. 

Go get ‘em Elephants!