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Leadership Development: There’s a Cow In My Cereal

Guest post by: Sylvia Lafair

Article Overview: A little boy is staring into his bowl of oatmeal. His mother, in a hurry to get him to the school bus tells him to hurry. His sits and stares. She stands over him requesting he finish his breakfast. "But mom, look, there's a cow in my bowl".

Leadership Development: There’s a Cow In My Cereal

A little boy is staring into his bowl of oatmeal. His mother, in a hurry to get him to the school bus tells him to hurry. His sits and stares. She stands over him requesting he finish his breakfast.

"But mom, look, there's a cow in my bowl".

Annoyed she starts putting the mushy mixture on his spoon, treating him like the toddler he once was. "Hurry or you'll be late" she demanded spooning the mixture into his open mouth. He gulps down the mixture of warm oats, sugar and milk.

As they walk to the bus stop he tugs at her hand and again tells her there was a cow in his bowl. "Stop being so childish" she says briskly, forgetting that, for goodness sake, he is a child. She is into her own stress and anxiety about getting to work on time and finishing the project left on her desk from the day before.

"But mom, listen to me, I really saw the cow. I saw the cow in the field who ate the grass one sunny day and then I saw the farmer milking the cow and then I saw the man driving the big vats of milk from the dairy to the place where they put the milk in the cartons and then the trucks that take the milk to the store and then...." The bus swooped the boy into its open mouth and rushed to deposit him at the gate of the school.

In the classroom he raised his nine year old hand to tell the teacher and class about the cow in his cereal. She said they had no time for silly stories; they were going to do multiplication flash cards and then have a spelling test.

The day was cut into hour segments where nothing was connected; math was math, reading was reading, and by the end of the day the little boy had forgotten the wonder of seeing the cow in his bowl.

Learning how everything is connected is a critical aspect of 21st Century living. Little kids know it. Adults have been trained out of it. The "it" is systems thinking.

Once we learn to sort and forget about connections we are freezing a major part of understanding the essence of how all life is relationships and how relationships operate. Life becomes one grand debate about right/ wrong, good/bad. Oh if it were only that simple!

Take a few minutes and when you pour yourself a cup of coffee see the people in the fields gathering the coffee beans, the trucks that take the beans to the processing factory, the packages being delivered into the stores, and finally when you put some milk in the coffee see the cow in your cup!

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Article Tags: cereal, cow, leadership development, mom, stares



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