How the Elephant Got in the Room
When there’s an elephant in the room, introduce him.
Randy Pausch1
My daughter, Sara, asked me if I could build her a certain piece of furniture. I said, “Of course.” In fact, I gave her a certificate for it for Christmas.
Two years ago.
The problem was that I didn’t know how I was going to build it. I do well with plans but not with making things up. This project didn’t have plans. I would think about how to do it but couldn’t figure it out. So I would set it aside for a couple of weeks, thinking it would percolate in the background and I’d know what to do.
A week or two later, nothing had changed. I wasn’t any closer to a solution. So I kept putting it off week after week, month after month—because I was stumped. When I don’t know how to do something, my default setting is to procrastinate instead of jumping in and tackling it.
Whenever Sara and I would talk, I would carefully avoid the subject. I didn’t want to let her down or appear incompetent. Since we weren’t talking about it, she didn’t know what was happening. I assumed she was either irritated with or disappointed in me. But I never asked, so I never knew for sure. I think I was afraid to ask.
Eventually, I realized the situation had created an unspoken barrier between us. My daughter is one of the people I enjoy talking to the most on the planet, and I want a close, loving relationship with her. But my silence was building an unspoken wall that had been growing for two years.
Once I figured out what was happening, I went to her and told her what I was feeling. I apologized, wanting to do my part to remove the barrier I had created.
As we talked, she said, “Yeah, it was the elephant in the room.”
That’s a word picture we’ve all heard and experienced. An elephant is in the room when something obvious is going on and nobody talks about it, and we pretend it’s not there.
I pictured the scenario. I’m sitting on one side of the living room, and my daughter is on the other side. We’re peering through the elephant’s legs, trying to make conversation. The elephant smells, and it fills the room. It’s noisy. It’s huge. But we don’t talk about it.
Once we acknowledge it, we think, “How in the world did that huge elephant get in this room? It doesn’t even fit through the door!”
Sound familiar? Is there anyone in your life with whom you share an elephant—something that everybody knows about but nobody talks about? Nobody wants to say anything, because it will be uncomfortable and people might get upset. The longer the elephant has been there, the harder it is to talk about. But it’s big, and it smells. It gets in the way of genuine relationships taking place.
So how did that huge elephant get into the room?
It came in when it was little.
If we had talked about it when it first entered, we could simply have guided it out through the door. But when we let it stay, it grew and grew and grew. Getting rid of it became a much bigger issue. Once an elephant becomes full-grown, we might need to remove some walls and get professional help to be rid of it.
When I finally acknowledged the elephant with my daughter, she said, “You know, if you had told me you couldn’t figure it out, we could have spent a day working together on it until we knew what to do.” That would have been an awesome day with her. One of our favorite dates is to get coffee at Starbucks and cruise around a hardware store or lumberyard.
I love my daughter. And I love the fact that we got rid of the elephant. She loves the fact that I finished the furniture. And the house doesn’t smell like elephant anymore.
What’s the lesson? Watch for baby elephants in the room. If you let them stay, they’ll get really, really big.
Tough Talking
Do you want to know what your communication will be like in your marriage?” the counselor asked.
We were young and in love. Like most couples, Diane and I knew our marriage would be different. We had seen other people fall in love, get married with high expectations, but then spiral downward over time. They started fighting or withdrawing from each other, and the marital magic disappeared in the first few years.
We knew that wouldn’t happen to us. We had something special between us, and it would carry us through to sheer bliss. Sure, we’d have struggles. But we were in l-o-v-e, and we believed that our unique passion for each other would help us calmly negotiate those issues, find quick solutions, and make us even stronger.
“Sure,” we replied to the counselor, convinced we knew the answer. We had gone through several sessions of premarital counseling with him already, and his guidance was always spot on. “What’s our communication going to be like?”
“Well, it’s not a foolproof technique,” he continued. “But here’s the best predictor of what your communication will be like. Imagine what it would be like if Mike’s dad was married to Diane’s mom.”
It took a few minutes for Diane to regain consciousness while I picked my jaw up off the floor. That wasn’t what we expected to hear. Our first reaction was, “But that’s not fair. We’re not our parents. We’re our own people. We’ve learned from their mistakes.”
He went on to explain. “Like I said, it’s not foolproof. But no matter what our parents tried to teach us, we learned how to communicate by watching how they did it. We subconsciously believe actions more than words, and we develop a default setting by observing them over time. Sure, we can work around it,” he said. “We can learn new ways of communicating, and we can make intentional choices to do it differently. But when we’re under pressure and emotions are high, our ‘chooser’ muscles quit working. We drop back to our default settings. We respond the way our parents did.”
Diane and I had some long conversations after that appointment. Decades later, we’ve found it to be true. I’m not my dad, and Diane’s not her mom. We’ve made a lot of choices to become our own persons. But their fingerprints are all over us.
Where It Starts
We learn by watching more than listening. We hear words, but we absorb actions. The life lessons we learn come by seeing how the key people in our lives respond to what life brings them. No matter what they say, we see their true character when things get tough and they’re under pressure and their defenses are down.
This is true not just in marital communication. I remember walking into my daughter’s room when she was a toddler and watching how she was disciplining her dolls. She wasn’t using the kind, logical techniques we had tried to use with her. She was using the techniques we used when we were upset.
Ouch.
We learned how to communicate with others by observing the people who raised us. It doesn’t matter if we had a single parent, two parents, multiple custody situations, foster homes, or a dysfunctional setting. We learned to negotiate life by watching how people in that role interacted with others—spouses, siblings, friends, bosses, and strangers. That’s how we built the communication toolbox that we use in our lives and relationships.
When relationships get challenging and conversations get tough, we use whatever default tools we have. We usually don’t stop to question their effectiveness, because they’re familiar. When they don’t work well, we just try to use more force or pressure. It’s like using a pencil eraser to get rid of something written in ink. It doesn’t work well, but it’s all we have—so we either rub harder or give up in frustration.
But we can get new tools and techniques. We don’t have to be stuck with our default settings. We can develop new patterns of communicating that are effective in the toughest conversations.
Our kids are in their thirties now, and we see ourselves in them—both the good stuff and the bad stuff. But we also see who they’ve become by the choices they’ve made. They aren’t us. They recognized the healthy patterns they saw and adapted them. They still have the tools they picked up from us, but they learned which ones are more effective than others, and they got new tools on their own to replace the ineffective ones.
The Wild Card
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of books on how to communicate effectively. Many people have been helped by these books, and they provide resources to strengthen relationships. I recommend many of them to my clients on a regular basis.
But a wild card has appeared that wasn’t present when some of those classic books were written: technology.
Technology has been around for a long time, and we’ve used it as a tool to communicate more rapidly and effectively. But in the past few years, technology has moved from enhancing conversation to replacing conversation. People send messages back and forth, not realizing that they never have live contact with the other person. It’s not unusual for people to connect electronically with someone for months or even years without having a real conversation. (I bet you can think of someone right now whom you frequently communicate with through social media but with whom you haven’t had a live conversation in years.)
“That’s okay, right?” one might ask. “We’re still communicating. The relationship looks a little different, but we’re still connecting back and forth. What’s wrong with that?”
One study showed that only 7 percent of communication is the words we use. Thirty-eight percent is our tone of voice, and 55 percent is body language.2
In face-to-face conversation, we’re using all three. On the phone, we’ve lost the body language—so we’re down to two. When our communication is completely through email, texting, or social media, we’re down to one—and we’ve lost 93 percent of the tools that help us connect.
Early one morning, I was greeted by the training director of a large entertainment company. I had worked with her a number of times in the past. As I set up for class, we chatted about her thirty-plus years with the corporation and how she rose through the ranks to reach her current position. I started the session, and she went back to her office.
We broke for lunch, and the participants wandered out of the room. The training director walked in, and her face looked like she had seen a ghost. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I just got laid off.”
“Seriously?” I said. “And you didn’t know it was coming? Who told you?”
“Someone sent me an email.”
As it turned out, the decision to terminate her had come from someone much younger than her. Evidently, because he was so comfortable with communication through technology, he assumed there wouldn’t be anything wrong with letting her go without a face-to-face conversation.
I don’t know how things turned out, because it was the last time I saw her. But I’ve thought about that situation often since then. I’m guessing he probably got in trouble for that approach, and the training director might have had some recourse. It demonstrated to me that technology has its limitations, one of which is when people use it to avoid having a difficult conversation.
Time for a Change
In general, people have gotten worse at conversation while they’ve gotten better at technology. Everybody communicates. But when people communicate electronically, they’re not communicating in person.
Is that a problem or not?
People are talking less and texting more. That works for casual conversation, but it’s difficult to have tough conversations in writing alone. Unfortunately, people do it all the time, and relationships get damaged in the process. If we think electronic communication is just as effective as face-to-face communication, we’ll assume that it’s just as effective for tough conversations as for casual ones.
That’s a dangerous assumption. It’s like having a phone conversation in which one person loses their cellular signal and gets cut off. But the other person keeps talking, unaware that nobody is hearing what they say.
This book is designed to help us build a strategy for effective conversation in a digital world:
With the right tools and skills, we can learn to negotiate the toughest conversations without intimidation or frustration. We can learn to communicate with:
We’ll also talk about the conversational issues that keep genuine communication from taking place—from the elephant in the room that nobody talks about to the emotion that keeps us from genuine connection.
Starting the Journey
Effective communication is the key to healthy relationships, both personal and professional. We’re not just working on our skills so people will be impressed with our conversational abilities. We do it because we care about these relationships and the people in them.
If we want healthy relationships, we need healthy communication. With a little direction and a little intentional effort, we can move our communication to the next level. We’re not stuck with our default settings. We can get new tools and learn how to use them well.
We don’t mind investing time and money to improve our golf swing, develop a hobby, or work on our fitness. Isn’t it time to make an investment in our communication skills?
The return on that investment will last a lifetime.