The Elephant Dialogs

How our conscious, thinking self interacts with our emotional, acting self.

1. The ABCs

One of the most common and most useless things we do is fight with our elephant. This is why the elephant and rider is such a good analogy. Elephants weigh 3,000 to 7,000 kg (6,500 to 15,500 lb). The average human weighs 62 kg (137 lb). An elephant is 50 to 100 times larger than the average human. Even if we weigh 200 lb (90 kg or 14 st 4), an elephant is 15 to 30 times larger than we are. 

Your emotional brain is like an elephant. It is effortless and tireless. The cognitive brain can imagine. It creates virtual reality. But this is slow and takes a lot of energy. 

You cannot physically force your elephant to do anything, and it often does things that the conscious mind finds difficult to accept. So what we often do instead (and this actions is also driven by the elephant, not sense or reason) is make up stories to justify what just happened. 

This inner conflict is actually the most common source of conflict with others. Most of our actual conflicts are usually negotiable. But the others are engaging with the elephant (our actions, including all our nonverbal communications), not our story about our actions, the story in which our conscious mind lives. We often often don’t like what we hear, and most often that isn’t about them, but because we don’t like what we see and hear about ourselves. The elephant reacts again, and we are in a feedback loop together. 

The most common ways we fight with our elephant by fighting with others are:

1. Avoiding
2. Blaming
3. Counter-accusing
4. Denying and Defending
5. Excusing and Explaining

These behaviors aren’t just about denying our Self. Our elephant chooses these behaviors in reaction to the other person as well as to our own elephant. In particular when our attachment to the other or to a mutual community is threatened, we will become triggered or even flooded.

They have been observed well by John Gottman, who describes “The Four Horsemen” of a conversation that has a negative feedback loop:

• Criticism
• Contempt
• Defensiveness
• “Stonewalling”

Gottman’s research clearly shows the underlying state driving these behaviors. The person is “triggered” with elevated heart rate and agitation, or even “flooded,” compltely overwhelmed by their emotional state.

So how do we know when we are fighting our own elephant or with another person’s elephant? That is tricky because we are in the Hall of Mirrors.

When the other person is calm assertive and clearly distinguishes between observable our behavior and their reaction or response to it. This is a core skill of people management.

When we

2. Other ways we uselessly struggle with our elephant.