Pancakes and Paradigm

Several years ago while in college, I received a random email from my grandmother with the subject line “Pancakes”.  When I opened the email it contained a story that was inspirational to me and has stuck with me over the years.  I’ll paraphrase the story for you here and also provide a link for the complete story.

It began with a young boy that decided to get up early one morning to make a pancake breakfast for his parents.  He grabbed everything he could find to whip up the best pancakes ever.  He was so excited to make his parents proud by doing such a wonderful thing for them.  In his excitement, he spilled some flour on the floor, left a mess of broken egg shells, and his clothes were all sticky.  He didn’t even know where to begin with how to cook the pancakes.  Should they go in the oven he thought.  He looked around at the huge mess and began to frantically try to clean things up, when in walked his father.  The boy began to cry, he was sure dad would be upset or spank him, when all he was trying to do was something good.  The boy was surprised when his father responded by embracing him and lovingly encouraging him.

There are many connotations to this story, but I’d like to relate it to the way we think about ourselves.  How often are we like the boy?  We have dreams of doing great things like losing weight, starting a business, going to college, or having great relationships.  We dive in working on our goals only to start making a mess along the way.  When we get overwhelmed from the mistakes we make,
(if we replace the father in the story with our inner voice), do we expect a scolding?  When we make mistakes do we beat ourselves up?  If we allow ourselves to help our inner voice work like the loving father, how much different would our lives be?  It would allow us to rebound from mistakes, take what went wrong and learn from it.  Having a inner voice that is loving you, will help you to continue until you are successful.

I read an awesome book called, Are You Ready to Succeed? by Srikumar Rao.  He helps us to identify the way we see things, or paradigms we have that may not be reality other than we believe them to be.  I enjoyed the book because he also gives application strategies to utilize.  A couple main points throughout the book consisted of changing our mental chatter (inner thoughts) and gratitude.

Mental Chatter– Our inner voice is constantly racing with various thoughts throughout our days.   Have you ever had an experience where you made many assumptions and painted a big picture in your mind, only to find out that it was totally different than you expected?  Worry is a big way we do this.  We stress and worry about something in the future only to find that thing we were worrying about isn’t as bad as we thought, or doesn’t even happen at all.  When we are able to step back and evaluate our thoughts, we can make many positive changes to the way we see our lives.

Gratitude– We have so many little things in our lives that we often take for granted.  Often when we are caught in the spiral of negative thinking or depression, we are thinking about all the things we don’t have, comparing ourselves to others, or just beating ourselves up.  It’s that whole glass half full or half empty mentality.  It can do wonders to end our day pondering about all the little miracles in our lives.  When we began to focus on the things we have and show gratitude our nature changes.  We start to see the good in life and others.  I read a quote that said “There is always, always, something to be grateful for”.

Again, I encourage you to check out this book and add it to your reading list.  Let’s continue to have a zest for making pancakes, regardless of the messes we will make along the way.  “How much you can learn when you fail determines how far you will go into achieving your goals.”
― Roy Bennett