The Carrot, The Egg, and The Coffee Bean

 Sally was a teenage girl who was having some troubles in school.  She was always looked at like the weird girl, she didn't have many friends, and some of the other kids at the high school made fun of her.

Obviously, this is not the best situation for someone in a new environment.

Sally went to talk to her mom about what was going on because she was frustrated, emotional, and… just feeling bad about herself.  When one thing got a little better, something else always went wrong. 

 So, after listening for a while, her mother took her to the kitchen and started fiddling around.

She went to the stove and turned on 3 burners.  After that she took out 3 pots and filled them half way with water and put them on the stove.  In the meantime, Sally was still talking and spilling her guts.  Then, her mother took out a carrot, an egg, and a coffee bean and put them each in their own individual pot.  Sally was confused on what her mother was doing, but, she just kept talking

After twenty minutes, Sally wanted her mother to respond, but she didn't say a thing.  She just walked back over to the stove and turned off the burners.

Sally, getting frustrated, asked her mother, “What are you doing? Aren't you going to say anything?”

Her mom calls her over to the stove and asks Sally what she sees?

Sally says, “A carrot, an egg, and coffee.”

Her mom then took a fork and fished the carrot out and asked Sally, “How does the carrot feel?”

Sally said, “It’s soft.”

Then her mom took out a spoon and fished out the egg and asked, “How does the egg feel?”

Sally said, “The shell is hard and the egg itself is hard.”

Then her mom took a spoon full of the coffee and told her to take a sip.

After Sally drank the coffee, she said, “What’s the point of all of that? I just told you about my problems.”

Her mom explained all the things were in the same situation – boiling in water. “The carrot got soft when it was originally hard and strong.  The egg got hard when it was originally soft and fragile.  And the coffee bean changed the water to coffee.”

The moral of the story is: We can choose to let our situations effect us or WE can affect our own situations.  It’s our choice. In business the same thing is the case; we go through tough times. We have a choice of letting those things change how we perform or we can choose to affect the environment.

We are in control of how we respond to a situation; we can take it and conform to what our situation is “making” us do OR we can take our situation and make it how we envision it.