Don't Think the Elephant — Think the Quality You Want

Today, while listening to Simon Sinek on YouTube the way I sometimes do – background thinking while cooking this time – something unexpected clicked. A moment of reflection and recognition.

My pursuit of better quality follows the exact same principles that Sinek and Tony Robbins use when they talk about success. They speak as masters from their worlds, and I speak from mine, but the underlying thinking is the same. They give words to something I’ve quietly done for more than twenty years.

Sinek talked about the difference between passion and stress.

“Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is passion.”

And that went straight through me, because that has always been my experience of quality. The real quality work has rarely been stress for me. I love what I do. Truly. If you care deeply, the effort becomes something else entirely.

Tony Robbins says the same in his own way: where your focus goes, your energy flows. And when you put your focus on the things you love, they start to grow almost without you noticing it. It becomes a direction, not a demand.

Don’t Think the Elephant – Think the Quality You Want

But the real insight today came from Sinek’s comment about what not to think.

• Don’t think the elephant, and of course you think of the elephant.

• Tell a skier not to look at the tree, and they hit the tree because that is what fills their mind.

• Tell yourself not to worry, and suddenly worry fills the whole room.

We humans are terribly literal in that sense. We see what we name. We move towards what we place in front of our eyes. Even if it’s something we want to avoid.

And this is where everything came together for me.

What has this to do with quality?

Everything.

If you repeat to yourself and to your organization what might go wrong, the mind starts walking in that direction. If all your attention goes to errors, your whole field of vision becomes errors. And then, slowly, almost quietly, a culture forms around fear and avoidance. People hesitate. They hide small problems. They don’t tell the problems that are already there. They stare at the tree.

But when you talk about the quality you want – clearly, concretely, even simply – people move toward it.When you make the good quality visible, it becomes something people can aim at.

And when you describe what excellent quality actually looks like, it becomes reachable. Not theory. Not slogans. Reality.

It sounds so obvious when you think about it like this. Of course people follow what they focus on. Of course they perform better when they see the path instead of the obstacle. Of course clarity beats fear.

So why do we still, in so many workplaces, keep telling our organizations:

Don’t make errors.

Don’t fail audits.

Don’t break the process.

Why are we still pointing them at the tree?

Maybe it’s time to change the whole direction of looking.

Maybe it’s time to think the quality we want.

Because once you see it, you can actually walk toward it. And hey, that is even fun!

This also explains why, after more than twenty years, my learning has naturally bent from purely systemical quality into the direction of coaching and psychology. It makes perfect sense now.