Have you ever wondered what ministry staff does when they are away on a “study leave” or taking time for “continuing education”? There are occasions when I come back from a time of study and reflection and I am asked “Did you have a good holiday?” I think to myself, I wasn’t on holiday - - - but the tinge of irritation I might feel is unfair, especially if I don’t tell people what I have been doing!
Last week I was considering an elephant, with its rider, moving along a path--I hope that these words have created a picture in your mind. This is the image that Chip and Dan Heath present in their book about change, entitled “Switch”: which was one of the books I read last week and certainly the one that had the biggest impact on me.
The rider represents the “thinking” part of our brains and the elephant the “feeling” part. The rider can certainly control the elephant but this takes concentration on the rider’s part and is only successful for a limited period of time. If the elephant really wanted to ignore the rider and do its own thing, there is absolutely nothing the rider can do.
So, if you relate this to change, our emotions and feelings exert more control over us than our rational, thinking side. In any organisation (I include the church here) when we want to make a change, we bring out a slide deck packed with figures, charts and graphs of projected outcomes. This is appealing to the rider, with no consideration has been given to motivating the elephant.
One of the biggest changes we make in life is getting married or moving in with a long-term partner. Imagine if the “proposal” consisted of flipping open a laptop and running a PowerPoint presentation on the financial advantages of living together!
If you still have that image in your mind of the elephant and the rider, you might well be wondering what the path represents. Well, the path is the external environment or a particular situation. For example if you want to help people eat less, give them a smaller plate!
At Beach, we are making many changes and sometimes that can be very difficult but Chip and Dan Heath encourage us to look for “bright spots”: places where change has already happened and has been successful. We want to care for God’s earth and we have done that by switching to Bullfrog Power. This change motivates us to make others, such as having solar panels on the roof of our renovated building, which has a smaller footprint--another way we are caring for God’s earth!
This is the snowball effect.
Blessings, Karen
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