Mahouts-ii (dresorii de elefanți) leagă de obicei un lanț subțire de metal de piciorul unui elefant matur și

apoi atașează celălalt capăt de un mic piron de lemn care este bătut în pământ. Elefantul de 3 metri
înălțime și 10.000 de kilograme ar putea rupe cu ușurință lațul, smulge cuierul de lemn și scăpa în
libertate cu un efort minim. Dar nu o face niciodată. De fapt, elefantul nici măcar nu încearcă. Cel mai
puternic animal terestru din lume, care poate smulge un copac mare la fel de ușor cum ai putea rupe o
scobitoare, rămâne învins de un mic băț de lemn și un lanț subțire.

De ce?

Pentru că atunci când elefantul era bebeluș, dresorii săi foloseau aceleași metode pentru a-l domestici.
La acea vreme, lanțul și cuierul erau suficient de puternice pentru a reține puiul de elefant. Când încerca
să se desprindă, lanțul metalic îl tragea înapoi. Curând puiul de elefant și-a dat seama că încercarea de a
scăpa este imposibilă. Așa că a încetat să mai încerce. Și acum că elefantul este complet crescut, vede
lanțul și pironul și își amintește ce a învățat când era copil - că lanțul și pironul sunt imposibil de scăpat.
Desigur, acest lucru nu mai este demult adevărat, dar nu contează. Nu contează că copilul de două sute
de livre este acum o putere de zece mii de livre. Gândurile și credințele autolimitante ale elefantului
prevalează. Dacă te gândești bine, toți suntem ca niște elefanți. Cu toții avem o putere incredibilă în
interiorul nostru. Și avem propriile noastre lanțuri și piroane - gândurile și credințele autolimitante care
ne țin înapoi. Uneori este o experiență din copilărie sau un vechi eșec. Uneori este ceva ce ni s-a spus
când eram mai tineri. Lucrul cheie de realizat este următorul: trebuie să învățăm din trecut, dar și să fim
dispuși să ne schimbăm ipotezele – perspectiva – despre felul în care sunt lucrurile acum.

Viața nu este statică. Te poți elibera.

7 Powerful Yet Simple Metaphors that Will

Change the Way You Think
WRITTEN BY MARC CHERNOFF // 26 COMMENTS
A metaphor is not an ornament. It’s a necessary lens of perception that allows us to
experience and think about ourselves and the world more clearly. Metaphors have a
way of relating to us in the most profound way, by clarifying immense truths and
intricate lessons in fairly minimal space.

Angel and I have shared the following metaphors and corresponding stories with our
students, coaching clients, readers, and conference attendees dozens of times over the
past decade, and we usually get thanked for doing so. The specifics differ slightly every
time we share them, but the core lessons carry forth.

My challenge for you today is to read the first metaphor below. Then come back
tomorrow and read the next one. Give yourself a little extra perspective every day this
week. See how doing so gracefully changes your thinking from day to day.

1. THE WEIGHT OF THE GLASS

(Note: This first metaphor is an excerpt from our NY Times bestselling book.)

Twenty years ago, when Angel and I were just undergrads in college, our psychology
professor taught us a lesson we’ve never forgotten. On the last day of class before
graduation, she walked up on stage to teach one final lesson, which she called “a vital
lesson on the power of perspective and mindset.” As she raised a glass of water over
her head, everyone expected her to mention the typical “glass half empty or glass half
full” metaphor. Instead, with a smile on her face, our professor asked, “How heavy is
this glass of water I’m holding?”
Students shouted out answers ranging from a couple of ounces to a couple of pounds.

After a few moments of fielding answers and nodding her head, she replied, “From my
perspective, the absolute weight of this glass is irrelevant. It all depends on how long I
hold it. If I hold it for a minute or two, it’s fairly light. If I hold it for an hour straight, its
weight might make my arm ache. If I hold it for a day straight, my arm will likely cramp
up and feel completely numb and paralyzed, forcing me to drop the glass to the floor. In
each case, the absolute weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the
heavier it feels to me.”

As most of us students nodded our heads in agreement, she continued. “Your worries,
frustrations, disappointments, and stressful thoughts are very much like this glass of
water. Think about them for a little while and nothing drastic happens. Think about them
a bit longer and you begin to feel noticeable pain. Think about them all day long, and
you will feel completely numb and paralyzed, incapable of doing anything else until you
drop them.”

Let our past professor’s words be your wake-up call today.

If you’ve been struggling to cope with the weight of what’s on your mind, it’s a strong
sign that it’s time to put the glass down.

2. LIKE ELEPHANTS
Mahouts (ancient elephant trainers) typically strap a thin metal chain to a grown
elephant’s leg and then attach the other end to a small wooden peg that’s hammered
into the ground. The ten-foot-tall, ten-thousand-pound elephant could easily snap the
chain, uproot the wooden peg, and escape to freedom with minimal effort. But it doesn’t.
In fact, the elephant never even tries. The world’s most powerful land animal, which can
uproot a big tree as easily as you could break a toothpick, remains defeated by a small
wooden peg and a flimsy chain.

Why? Because when the elephant was a baby, its trainers used the same methods to
domesticate it. At the time, the chain and peg were strong enough to restrain the baby
elephant. When it tried to break away, the metal chain would pull it back. Soon the baby
elephant realized that trying to escape was impossible. So it stopped trying. And now
that the elephant is fully grown, it sees the chain and the peg and it remembers what it
learned as a baby—that the chain and peg are impossible to escape. Of course this is
no longer true, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that the two-hundred-pound baby
is now a ten-thousand-pound powerhouse. The elephant’s self-limiting thoughts and
beliefs prevail.

If you think about it, we are all like elephants. We all have incredible power inside us.
And we have our own chains and pegs—the self-limiting thoughts and beliefs that hold
us back. Sometimes it’s a childhood experience or an old failure. Sometimes it’s
something we were told when we were younger. The key thing to realize is this: we
need to learn from the past, but also to be willing to change our assumptions—our
perspective—about the way things are now. Life is not static. You can break free.

3. SEE THE FLOWERS

Once upon a time there was an elderly woman who needed to walk down to the river
every morning to fetch water for drinking, cooking and cleaning. She carried two
buckets with her, filled them up at the riverbank, and walked back with them to her rural
cottage home.

One of the buckets was newer, perfectly sealed, and held its water flawlessly. But the
second bucket was older and contained a few thin cracks that would leak water onto the
ground as the elderly woman walked. By the time she arrived home, typically about one
third of the water in the second bucket had leaked through its cracks.

One day, on the walk down to the river, the cracked bucket—who had always felt like it
wasn’t as good as the other bucket—said to the elderly woman, “I want you to know that
I’ve been leaking water every morning for the past several years. I’m so sorry for being
cracked and making your life more difficult. I understand if you need to replace me with
a better bucket.”

The elderly woman smiled. “Do you really think I haven’t known about your cracks this
whole time?” she asked. “Look at all the beautiful flowers that grow on the path from my
cottage to the river. I planted their seeds, but every morning it’s you who does the
watering.”
Remember, feeling good enough in life, in work, in business, and in our relationships
has everything to do with how we personally judge the cracks in our own bucket.
Because we all have a few cracks!

But are they cracks that wreck us, that taint us, and that ruin our experience and
desirability?

Or do our cracks water a trail of flowers we haven’t even stopped to appreciate?

Choose to see the flowers through the cracks in your own bucket—choose to see how
it’s exactly those cracks that make you good enough—and your whole universe will
shift!

4. THE TANGERINE
Imagine you had a ripe, juicy tangerine sitting on the table in front of you. You pick it up
eagerly, take a bite and begin to taste it.

You already know how a ripe, juicy tangerine should taste, and so when this one is a bit
tarter than expected, you make a face, feel a sense of disappointment and swallow it,
feeling cheated out of the experience you expected.

Or perhaps the tangerine tastes completely normal—nothing special at all. So, you
swallow it without even pausing to appreciate its flavor, as you move on to the next
unworthy bite, and the next.

In the first scenario, the tangerine let you down because it didn’t meet your
expectations. In the second, it was too plain because it met your expectations to a T.

Do you see the irony here?

It’s either not good, or not good enough.

This is how many of us live our lives… unhappily.

It’s why so many of us feel let down, disappointed, and unexcited about almost
everything.

Because nothing really meets our expectations.

Now, imagine you try this instead: remove your expectations of how the tangerine
“should” taste. You don’t know, and you don’t expect to know, because you haven’t
even tried it yet. Instead, you’re genuinely curious, impartial and open to a variety of
possible flavors.
You taste it, and you truly pay attention. You notice the juiciness, the texture of the pulp,
the simultaneously tangy, tart and sweet flavors swirling around on your tongue, and all
the other complex sensations that arise in your awareness as you chew. You didn’t
know how this tangerine would taste, but now you realize it’s different than the rest, and
it’s remarkable in its own way. It’s a totally new experience—a worthwhile experience—
because you’ve never tasted THIS tangerine before.

Mindfulness experts often refer to this as “beginner’s mind,” but really, it’s just the result
of a mindset free of needless, stifling expectations.

The tangerine, of course, can be substituted for almost anything in your life: any event,
any situation, any relationship, any person, any thought at all that enters your mind. If
you approach any of these with expectations of “how it should be” or “how it has to be”
in order to be good enough for you, they will almost always disappoint you in some
way… or be too plain and unexciting to even remember. And you’ll just move on to the
next disappointment or unworthy life experience, and the next, and the next, and so on
and so forth…

Until you’ve lived the vast majority of your life stuck in an endless cycle of experiences
you barely like or barely even notice.

5. ONLY WATER AROUND YOU

Most of the things we desperately try to hold on to, as if they’re real, solid, everlasting
fixtures in our lives, aren’t really there. Or if they are there in some form, they’re
changing, fluid, impermanent, or simply half-imagined in our minds.

Life gets a lot easier to deal with when we understand this.

Imagine you’re blindfolded and treading water in the center of a large swimming pool,
and you’re struggling desperately to grab the edge of the pool that you think is nearby,
but really it’s not—it’s far away. Trying to grab that imaginary edge is stressing you out,
and tiring you out, as you splash around aimlessly trying to hold on to something that
isn’t there.

Now imagine you pause, take a deep breath, and realize that there’s nothing nearby to
hold on to. Just water around you. You can continue to struggle with grabbing at
something that doesn’t exist… or you can accept that there’s only water around you,
and relax, and float.

Today, I challenge you to ask yourself:

 What are you desperately trying to hold on to in your life?

 How is it affecting you?
Then imagine the thing you’re trying to hold on to doesn’t really exist. Envision yourself
letting go… and just floating.

How would that change your situation?

6. A GAME OF CHESS
Almost no one wins a game of chess by only moving forward.

Sometimes you have to move backward to put yourself in a position to win.

The same is true of life.

Because sometimes, when it feels like you’re running into one dead end after another,
it’s actually a sign that you’re not on the right path. Maybe you were meant to hang a left
back when you took a right, and that’s perfectly fine. Life gradually teaches us that U-
turns are allowed. So turn around when you must! There’s a big difference between
giving up and getting yourself moving in the right direction again.

7. THE MIND IS A MUSCLE

Think about the most common problems we deal with in our lives—from lack of
presence to lack of exercise to unhealthy diets to procrastination, and so forth. In most
cases, problems like these are not caused not by a physical ailment, but by a weakness
of the mind.

Just like every muscle in the body, the mind needs to be exercised to gain strength. It
needs to be worked consistently to grow and develop over time. If you haven’t pushed
yourself in hundreds of little ways over time, of course you’ll crumble on the one day
that things get slightly challenging.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. You have a choice…

You can choose to pay attention when it would be easier to pick up your phone. You
can choose to go to the gym when it would be more comfortable to sleep in. You can
choose to create something special when it would be quicker to consume something
mediocre. You can choose to raise your hand and ask that question when it would take
less nerve to stay silent. You can prove to yourself, in hundreds of little ways, that you
have the guts to get in the ring and wrestle with life.

Mental strength is built through lots of small, daily victories. It’s the individual choices we
make day-to-day that build our “mental strength” muscles. We all want this kind of
strength, but we can’t wish our way to it. If you want it, you have to create positive daily
rituals in your life that reinforce what you desire.