The Rider and the Elephant - a model for change

How many times do we start a new project or make a resolution to change our daily routine to include some healthier habits and very soon relapse back to the old way of doing things? The trouble is that nearly all of our behaviours (about 90%) is made up of habits. And changing habits takes hard work. When we coach people around improving their 'wellness' we break it down into parts of a workable model that has been shown to be effective. We need a vision, we need to identify obstacles, it helps to recognise what strengths we can bring to the process and of course we need a plan. This is easy to understand but I am always excited when I read of new ways of explaining this to people - when I find a more colourful analogy that might just capture people's interest who have grown discouraged by multiple failed attempts to 'make change stick'.

Ted and Dan Heath, in their book 'Switch' do just this. They have broken down the change process into simple concepts that are easy to picture in our minds, which in turn makes it easy to apply them. They talk about the process of change being likened to a 'Rider and a Elephant' and how the rider who sits on top of the mighty beast is akin to our cognitive reasoning, or mental decision to make a change. We know it's the right thing to do. We understand the benefit of adopting these new lifestyle behaviours. Our rider thinks he is in charge. However, he is really trying to control a mighty beast, the elephant, which is representative of our will or emotions. The rider sits on top making decisions about where to go and attempts to steer elephant below, but he has limited control due to the size of the animal. Unless the elephant is also committed to going in a certain direction, he will blunder forcefully ahead on another path and the rider is simply carried along, despite knowing where he would like to go.

This great analogy supports an important principle of coaching - we need to engage the head and the heart - the rider and the elephant. If we think of the rider being the director of our will-power - our strength to be disciplined, and our ability to resist the easy option, we can then see that his strength is limited. If the rider is constantly fighting the elephant, he will soon tire. Unless we have our elephant on side, who will help carry us along the desired path? In short, we need to engage our emotions in the change process. This applies to someone wanting to lose weight or to get fitter in exactly the same way as it would to adopting a new organisational policy (or a corporate health program). Unless the rider is directed and the elephant engaged, the change won't stick.

So when we are planning our strategy for change, if there are obstacles to overcome or difficulty in effecting the change, we need to ensure that emotions are heavily involved. In the wellness coaching model, we talk about needing to have a 'heart felt reason to change'. Same concept.

We can take this further. Once the rider has decided which path to take and the elephant is on side, we can make their journey easier by shaping the path ahead - by removing big obstacles that could get in the way and making environmental change that helps progress. Take the high fat food out of the fridge. Make the forms easier to complete! There are few change processes where this wouldn't apply.

If we layer coaching on top of this model, we provide another missing ingredient. Confidence. In the last issue you would have read about the importance of consistency. The step by step approach. This allows people to achieve small successes which in turn promote confidence. A good coach can help increase a client's confidence. Without a confident rider our elephant just blunders in the wrong direction! So in summary:

• It's the elephant not the rider who is in charge with his six tonnes of weight
• Self-control (or willpower) that the rider is responsible for, is a limited resource so should be conserved. If we use it in one situation it may not be available in another
• It is always smarter to plan in advance and shape the environment to make the elephant's path smoother
• We need to find the feeling, not the intellectual reason for change - something that makes us care
• Instead of raising the bar, we should put it on the ground to make achieving small steps to success easier

We can learn a lot from what has been written on the subject of motivation. We just need to apply it to our world. There's nothing new about what it takes to make change stick, we just need to increase our understanding of what influences our success.