Hey everybody, it's Eric from the one you feed back with another mini episode. Before we get started, I want to say that our sponsor this week is Aloha. They make wonderful plant based protein, daily Green's Mix, vitamins, a lot of different things. We're big fans. You can visit a Looha dot com and get off your first order by using the code get fit twenty. This will give you off some great products and give you a chance
to support the show. And now into the mini episode, what I want to talk about this week is a concept called the rider and the elephant, and the basic idea is that each of us have two sides. We have an emotional, automatic, sort of irrational side, which is the elephant. Then we have an analytical, controlled and rational side, the writer. So the challenge you can imagine is that as writers, we come up with these ideas of what we think we should be doing, the behaviors we want
to change, the things we want to accomplish in our life. However, if the elephant is in an alignment with that, then we're going to make small change temporarily at best. The key is to get the two of these entities working together. So there's a few different things, a few different ways you can do this. One of them that I like is the difference between feeling and wanting, and so what this is is we have a tendency to tell ourselves
we don't want to do something. For example, if I say I'm going to start a workout routine, and the second day, I'm sitting there in the morning and telling myself, I don't want to go. I don't want to go. I don't want to go. That's not really true because I have decided that I want to work out. I've thought about it, that more rational part of me wants to work out. However, I just don't feel like it
in that moment. And that can help me often to get over that block because I'm minding myself of what I want, and I'm appealing a little bit more to the elephant at that point. I'm trying to put some positive emotion into it at that point. The other thing is this is why we talk a lot about small successes.
I think that one of the reasons that small successes, so if you're gonna start working out, do it five minutes a day, and do it every day, is that I think those small successes give us an emotional good feeling. We've done what we said we were going to do. Our writer and our elephant are in alignment, and I think that gives us a boost of well being, and that boost of well being will appeal to the elephant. It's more emotional and helps to turn the elephant in
the direction that we want him to go. There's been a third enhancement to this analogy, um where the instructions are kind of direct the rider motivate the elephant. And then there's been a third enhancement, which is called shape the path. And this is really about what's in our environment. Like we've all heard the example of well, if you want to work out, set your gym clothes out in the owning, which sounds silly, but it works for a
lot of people. The idea is that back to the analogy, if we groom a clear path in front of the elephant, he's going to go down the path it's easiest to go down. So as we're trying to make change in our life, we need to make the path we want to go down as easy as possible and make the past we don't want to go down harder. So, for example, if you are trying to eat better. Don't have four boxes oreos in the house right now. If you want to go eat an oreo, you have made that the
harder path to walk. So you can really work with your environment. We've had a couple shows where people talk about that environmental aspect, but really think about what you're trying to do and how you can make it easier for yourself. Another challenge that I find is that what looks like resistance is often just a lack of clarity. So if I say I'm just gonna eat better, I'm
gonna eat healthier, that does not work for me. There's a bunch of reasons it doesn't work, but one of them is it's just very unclear, and so the elephant is not going to get behind that, and the writer can't really direct because he doesn't know what he's directing at that point. So the more specific that I can get on what it is that I am doing or not doing, the better off I'm going to be. So always strive for clarity when it comes to figuring out
the next steps or behavior change. Lack of clarity is always the enemy, and I find this again and again with the people that I'm working with in the coaching. And then the other one is we have a tendency for a lot of a sense. We have started and stopped change programs so many times in our lives that we don't really believe it's possible, and we say things like, well, I'm the kind of person who or I never finish anything I start, and that is um. We think it's
a people problem. We think it's our problem, and it's very demotivating to the elephant. Usually what appears to be a people problem is a situational issue. It's that we don't have the right strategies, we don't know how, we don't have the appropriate triggers in place. So there's a lot of different things, is there. But I find this metaphor to be helpful for me in thinking about if I want to make a change, I have to sort of get both my mental faculties engaged and my emotional
faculties engaged. If I get both of those bought in, change becomes easier. So that's what I've got for today. If you're interested in learning more about the coaching programs we have where we really spend a lot of time on this type of thing, and and other things send an email to me Eric at one you feed dot net and we can talk a little bit more about it. Otherwise, another episode is out Tuesday. Thanks for listening everybody, and we'll talk soon. Bye.