Taming your elephant

Self-regulation with 5 helpful coping strategies

In a nutshell:
Jonathan Haidt’s analogy illustrates the interaction between our emotional side (the Elephant) and our rational side (the Rider). The Elephant represents our emotional, instinctual responses, while the Rider symbolizes our rational, decision-making abilities.
Effective self-regulation involves calming the Elephant to allow the Rider to guide behavior, especially in challenging situations.
Positive coping strategies, such as acceptance, positive refocusing, putting into perspective, refocus on planning and positive reappraisal can help tame the Elephant, facilitating better emotional control and rational decision-making.

The Elephant and the Rider:

One of my favourite analogies ever is the Elephant & Rider analogy from Psychologist Jonathon Haidt. 

I have used it in countless situations to clarify thinking - my own and for others. For me, this analogy is basically a more vivid and symbolic representation for Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 framework.

The Analogy is a powerful metaphor for understanding human behaviour, decision-making, and the interaction between our emotional and rational sides. 

The Elephant: Represents our emotional, automatic, and instinctive side. It engages the most primitive part of our brain, the limbic system (often aptly referred to a lizard brain). It is the part of us that drives immediate reactions, desires, and feelings. The elephant is large, powerful, and difficult to control directly.

The Rider: Represents our rational, analytical, and conscious side. It is the part of us that plans, thinks critically, and makes reasoned decisions. It engages pre-frontal cortex in the brain, sometimes referred to as the CEO of our brains. The rider sits on top of the elephant and appears to be in control, but its ability to direct the elephant is limited by the elephant's strength and inclination.

Such a great analogy right? A perfect vivid representation of our behavior.

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Putting the Rider in charge for difficult conversations

At my organisation, we often talk about elephant-led thinking in the context of difficult collaborations or conversations.

Difficult collaborations aren’t usually about the toughest problems.
They are difficult because of strong emotions.

When we get emotional - anxious, upset, angry - our elephants are triggered. When our elephant leads interactions, we talk and act more impulsively. We are likely to say or do things that also awaken the elephant in our teammates. Two emotionally-charged elephants often block communication and connection between the both people leading to a breakdown in teamwork. 

So, it is important to put the Rider back in control when we engage in important, challenging teamwork.

We also know that it is very hard for the rider (rational thinking) to be incharge when the elephant (emotions) has been triggered and has taken control. 

So the first step is to calm your elephant.

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Taming your elephant

There are many ways to calm your elephant down, but essentially it involves 

• Stepping back from the situation 

• Acknowledging your emotions

• Reframing your thinking (Coping)

I have talked more about these in these posts on Difficult Conversations and Building Resilience in the Age of Anxiety.

5 Strategies for Coping / Cognitive Emotional Regulation

In this post I will share a Cognitive Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ)  that I discovered in a paper: Revisiting the relation between academic buoyancy and coping: A network analysis I read recently. The paper is about academic buoyancy (a concept I discovered this year and will definitely be investigating more) and coping. They used the CERQ to classify coping into 9 strategies for coping.

Listed below are the 9 coping strategies, 5 of which may be useful in calming our elephants by reframing our thinking. The other 4 are likely to fuel our elephants.

Positive Coping

• Acceptance: “I think I have to accept the situation”

• Positive Refocusing: “I can think of nicer things I have experienced”

• Putting into perspective: ”I think about how this could have been worse”

• Refocus on planning: “I think about how change the situation”

• Positive reappraisal: “I think I can learn something from the situation”

Negative Coping:

• Self-blame: “I think about the mistakes I have made in this matter”

• Other-blame: “I think about the mistakes others have made in this matter”

• Rumination: “I dwell on the feelings this situation has evoked in me”

• Catastrophizing: “I continually think about how horrible the situation has been”

Now if you are thinking, it feels like even the positive strategies could be counterproductive in some situations. Maybe. It is not formulaic. I look at this as a toolkit that I can draw from. I can pick different strategies for different situations.

I will definitely be referring to this list to help my children build positive self-talk strategies for regulation (In fact I already did).