A few years ago, I attended a meeting that was filled with tension. It was so tense you could feel the unspoken vibe. Everyone knew there were issues, including missed deadlines, frustrated clients, and a project unraveling, but no one wanted to say it out loud. We danced around it, pointing to small wins and discussing side topics. Meanwhile, the real problem just sat there, obvious, unspoken, and therefore unresolved. What I realized that day is this: ignoring the elephant doesn’t make it disappear. If anything, silence feeds it, and left unchecked, it grows until it completely dominates the space.
So why do we avoid naming the obvious? Fear. Fear of conflict, fear of failure, fear of being wrong, or worse, of being right and having to act. We tell ourselves we’re being polite or diplomatic, but often we’re just scared of the fallout. The trouble is that the problem doesn’t care about your comfort.
There is a children’s joke you’ve probably heard: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” When a challenge feels overwhelming, the only way forward is to break it into small, doable steps. It seems simple, but it’s a powerful thought. The unspoken truth in the room can only be dealt with piece by piece. But first, someone must be willing to point at it and say, “This is real.”
In that meeting, it was our project manager who finally spoke. She looked around the table and said, “We all know this project is failing. Can we please stop pretending it’s not?” The silence was deafening, then someone laughed, not because it was funny, but because the relief was so intense. Suddenly, we could breathe again. And once we could breathe, we could think. The path forward became clear: reset expectations with the client, add resources where the team was stretched too thin, adjust timelines, and examine where we’d stumbled. No single step solved the problem, but together they did.
The “elephant in the room” exists with any type of problem, whether personal or professional. Families who won’t talk about money troubles, friendships weighed down by unspoken resentment, patients afraid to ask their doctors about symptoms. It’s as simple as admitting to ourselves what in our own lives is slowly wearing us down. The hardest part is always admitting there is a problem and saying it out loud. But once you do, the next steps reveal themselves. One conversation. One action. One choice at a time. And often, once the first bite is taken, the rest feels far less overwhelming.
“The first step in solving a problem is to recognize that it does exist.” – Zig Ziglar
So, here’s the real question: what unspoken issues are taking up space in your world? You can’t dance around them forever. At some point, someone must be brave enough to name the elephants and persistent enough to tackle them, one bite at a time.
Have a great weekend.
-Vijay