Is There an Elephant in Your Attic?
By Joe Tye, CEO of Values Coach, Inc.
The "elephant in the room" is a metaphor for the problem that no wants to talk about. Rather than openly talk about underlying problems, we tiptoe around and address superficial symptoms. The real problem is then whispered about in the hallway "meeting after the meeting," but no action is ever taken. As the picture above suggests, the elephant in the room is usually not very helpful (how's that for an understatement!).
The same thing can happen in your head. Any time you find yourself blaming other people for your problems and predicaments, putting off doing important work, allowing low self-esteem and self-limiting beliefs to prevent you from being your best self and pursuing your most authentic goals, chances are high that you have an elephant in the room between your ears.
When you refuse to acknowledge that elephant, and to forcefully escort it out of the mental attic, you end looking the other way at the problems it causes and making excuses for the resultant failures in your own life.
It takes courage to see the elephant, especially since it's probably been up there in the attic for a very long time. It takes even more courage to confront it and to coax, cajole, or manhandle it off to the zoo where it belongs.
There is, of course, a problem with the metaphor "elephant in the room" - it implies that there's just one. Most of us are more likely to have a herd of elephants up there in the attic. The secret to relocating a herd of mental elephants is to move them out one at a time.
Today's Promise of The Self Empowerment Pledge is Resilience and it says "I will face rejection and failure with courage, awareness and perseverance making these experiences the platform for future acceptance and success."
In about an hour (as I type this) I will be boarding a plane for a cross-country flight. I have a big dream sort of project that I will be working on. My first step will be to think about previous rejections and failures that have become the "elephant" up there in my attic and transforming those past experiences from being barriers to future progress to simply being lessons learned. As I do that I will (quite literally!) mentally visualize escorting that mental elephant off to the zoo where it belongs.
I realize that might sound silly to you, but let me ask you this: Is what you are doing now working? Or do you, like me, have some elephants up there in the attic that are wreaking havoc with the furniture. And if so, maybe you, like me, need to try something new and different, something that might seem a bit silly.
