I wrestle elephants

“What do you do?”

When I moved to London nearly five years ago I quickly learned how nearly every conversation with new people around business starts with that “so, what do you do?” question. Somehow it felt strange to me, a way of moving past awkward social conversation openings but not really going beyond the surface.

As I wrote about back in 2017 in: “What do you do?” I often use a left-field answer.  A while later I followed that up with the post: “8 questions to ask someone other than what do you do“, so you might find some useful ideas in there 😉

Now, over time one of a list of unusual responses I give when asked “what do you do? is:

“I Wrestle Elephants”

This either puts people off from further conversation, or, if they are truly open and curious, they may ask “ok, so what do you mean by that?”

My response then is typically along the lines of: “In any business, there is always at least one “elephant in the room” that needs to be talked about but that people are finding difficult either to talk about or to work out what to do about. I love to help leaders with that”

If they say “so how do you do that”, that can lead down a lot of different paths depending on what comes to mind for them, though typically by then they are thinking about their own life or business, so I may ask them for what they are thinking of. That said, sometimes I’ll lighten the conversation with the old joke “Do you know how you eat an elephant? …. one mouthful at a time”.

So, “I wrestle elephants”. What do you do?