Written by: Megan Smith / Treatment / January 13, 2021 / 10 minutes read

NOTE: This blog post is a follow-up to last month’s post on home practice (“Am I Getting Enough Practice In?”). If you haven’t read it, I recommend that you do so. Here is a brief refresher:

• In this climate, we need to be more forgiving of ourselves than usual.

• In order to make changes, we must practice our skills.

• Balancing those two needs can be challenging, and relies on an understanding of our thinking patterns, immediate obstacles, and the creativity required to generate novel solutions to them.

When I was in graduate school, studying speech-language pathology, I took a course on patient counselling skills. I had anticipated that it would be a course that would get me an easy A, and figured that the skills themselves would be helpful enough in my future career, regardless of what area of speech therapy I would come to practice in. The second belief was quite correct – the first one was not quite on the mark.

In this class, our first assignment, worth over 25% of our grade, was to pick any habit and maintain it daily for at least a month. This was very difficult, and it got us all thinking about how the “little” things that we ask our clients to do not only add up very quickly over time but also compete with the daily needs and wants of our clients, interfering with their already-established routines.

In order to help us complete this “little” assignment, our professor shared a model of behaviour change that resonated very well with me, and that I regularly share with my clients. It was called the Elephant and the Rider, and its premise was this: making a behaviour change is like trying to ride an elephant down a predetermined path. It can work, but it can be difficult unless three things line up perfectly:

1. The elephant needs to allow us to ride it, and take our directions.

2. The rider must be competent and able to plan ahead for the journey to be successful.

3. The path needs to be suitably easy to traverse (especially because the elephant can opt out at any time, and we cannot really control an animal so large).

In this model, our rational brains serve as the riders on the elephants. We can theorize about the potential obstacles and plan ahead. We can strategize when problems arise and issue commands to the elephant. Our emotional selves serve as the elephants. If it decides that it does not want to move, no amount of rationalization, or poking and prodding, or threatening, or any other move the rider makes will cause it to change. Finally, our circumstances are the paths.

This model provides a fun mental image to ponder when we decide to skip the gym for the third time of the week – an elephant, seated on the ground stubbornly, with its rider begging to keep moving but powerless to elicit that change.

It also provides a helpful framework to consider potential solutions to our problems. How do we ride the elephant all the way to our goals?

1. We appease the elephant by making the steps we take towards our goals desirable.

2. We take full advantage of the rider, planning well and anticipating future needs.

3. We choose the path of least resistance from the options available to us in our current context.

Berating the elephant for failing to move will not get us to our goals, and self-criticism for failing to uphold our plans for ourselves will not help us do better. Instead, try:

• Looking for the fun: how can practicing be made more fun? Try incorporating others in your social circle for social reinforcement, or pairing the practice with a reinforcer that works for you (e.g. practicing just before your favourite TV show airs).

• Breaking the task down into manageable pieces. The elephant may refuse to climb a steep 100m incline, but if the hill itself ramps up more gradually, the elephant may be willing to carry us up the 100m slope over a longer period.

In this model, the rider is an important resource, but also carries a lot of responsibility. To maximize the rider’s success:

• Put your resources to their best use. Rather than focusing on failure and why things are not working, look to the habits that you have already successfully incorporated. What can you borrow from this success to help with the next one?

• Break big goals into smaller ones. Making a detailed plan for a 1000km trip may be impossible. However, planning out the first 50km thoroughly and then reassessing as you go is much more achievable, and avoids the rider getting caught in analysis paralysis.

There are several ways to create a path that is easy to follow. These include:

• Setting up signposts (reminders, such as alarms or appointments) will help us find our way even on a path filled with distractions.

• Making the path more enjoyable by removing some of the major obstacles, or by trying to go around mountains instead of climbing them (if there is an obstacle to your home practice, try to either remove it or work around it rather than pushing through).

I hope that this resource will prove as useful to you as it has been to me, as we approach the new year with our minds set on the goals that we are hoping to achieve in 2021.

If you would like to speak to one of our clinicians about your communication goals, and determine a program that would be right for you, feel free to reach out to us by phone (647-795-5277) or email (info@torontospeechtherapy.com). Interested parties can also book their initial consultation through the online booking system.