Page 24 - G-Gold to Lead

EXERCISE
As you can recognize, the Young Man in the story acts like most children. You want to believe that life should be easy and safe “If I can’t do it quickly or effortlessly, forget it” “If I am not familiar with it... it is too scary.” As parents, it is difficult to understand how your child can maintain these beliefs in light of all the evidence to the contrary. This exercise is designed to help you with a strategy to address some of these issues.
EATING THE ELEPHANT
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! Sometimes you feel overwhelmed by a difficult or unfamiliar task. Your parents or teachers may want you to see these tasks as challenging or interesting but you see them as scary and overwhelming.
Your emotional reaction of fear and frustration and your behavior of saying, “I don’t want to do it” or just staring out the window, are caused by what you are telling yourself. Your thinking may be something like: “I can never finish all of this” or “It is not fair that I have all of this to do” or “I will never be able to figure this out.”
When you are faced with one of these tasks and you say something like, “I will never finish” or “I will never be able to figure this out,” use the Elephant Strategy. Draw an Elephant with all of its parts: head, tusks, body, four legs and tail. Now divide your task (cleaning your room, studying for a test) into pieces and write each part of the task on the pieces of the elephant.
For example, you can’t seem to get started cleaning your room when it is a really big mess. First draw an elephant. Write bed on the tail. The chest of drawers is a leg. The floor is a tusk and so on.
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