The Baby Elephant At The Circus
43. The baby elephant at the circus.
Way back in the olden days, the circus would receive newborn elephants to incorporate into their show. The young elephants had no training and no experience and needed to be conditioned. Even at a very young age elephants are endowed with immense strength and ability to persevere through much adversity. In an effort to constrain this awesome power, trainers would chain these young ones down to keep them under control and teach them early what their boundaries and limitations were. By being chained down at such an early level of formation, the baby elephants were conditioned at a very young age about the boundaries that they could achieve and the limitations their environment provided. Later as adults, these elephants began to accept the limitations that they had been conditioned to accept. Knowing this, the trainers no longer had to hold the adult elephants down by chains and simply used ropes to keep their disciples in line.
Those who saw the elephants held at bay by a simple piece of rope were shocked. “Why doesn’t that elephant try to run away?” “It could break that rope in a second if it wanted to.” You know this and I know this, the problem is that the elephant does not. An animal with the potential to break through the simple restraint that IT has been taught to accept is only real because it perceives these barriers to be real. We see the restraints on this animal as inconceivable because we know it can be broken, but it has no clue of the potential and ability it was born to achieve. There’s a little elephant in all of us.
Now we already heard this in Chapter 1. I used this example in the beginning of the book because I think it paints the clearest picture of why we believe what we believe and why the brain thinks like it does. In addition, the reason I repeated it now is because you will be referring to this list to fill out your blueprint. Second, you may just want to share a Tool with someone who you think could use one and this allows you to find it in quick reference. For you, the bottom line is that once again we have conditioned ourselves and programmed ourselves to believe what we believe. Break the mental chains that you have constructed over time and watch your wins start to pile up.