RIVER REED THINKING
Using elephants to explain fixed thinking
Do you know how people train elephants in India and Thailand? In these countries, elephants carry tremendous loads for farmers: trees, stones, and sand that, in some cases, even a tractor cannot manage. Training these enormous animals when they're fully grown is nearly impossible, so farmers had to be creative.
The trick was this: to condition the elephant's mind from a very young age.
Baby elephants are strong, but only to a point. At a young age, human-made restraints such as ropes are strong enough to persuade a young elephant to stick around: by simply tying a rope to a stake on one end and the leg of a young elephant on the other, the elephant is unable to leave where it is tethered.
Eventually, the baby elephant learns to live in its circumstances and submit to its captivity.
As the elephant grows in size and strength, one might think that the farmer would need a larger stake and rope to hold the animal, but this is not the case. Once the elephant gives up thinking it can escape, the size of the rope and stake becomes irrelevant. In fact, they can even get smaller, because as soon as the elephant feels the slightest tug of restraint, it gives up.
Consequently, when the elephant becomes an adult, all he needs to do is pull out a few river reeds, weave the reeds into small ropes, and use them to tie the two-ton elephant to whatever he wants. Imagine... a simple river-reed rope to restrain an elephant!
Just as the elephant has been conditioned to believe its limitations, so too have we. Without even recognizing it, mankind finds itself buried in this mindset, engaged in “River Reed Thinking.”
Humans, and leaders in particular, face a number of external challenges; but sometimes it's the internal challenges that hold us back the most.
Assess your own thinking: what is holding you back? Is your barrier a concept?
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