Marshmallows and Partnering
Okay, I admit to not being a big marshmallow fan. Probably due to getting the sticky nature of marshmallows all over me during a campfire when I was a kid. Yes, they taste good, but they are kind of high maintenance.
So, what pray tell, does a marshmallow have to do with partnering?
Certainly the relationships established over the fire making s’mores and talking about life together are quite helpful. After all, is not partnering built on deepening relationships? Yes, but that is not quite the full lesson here.
How about how often we can get frustrated and even burned from our partnering work just as we can from the roasting of marshmallows? Nope. The resiliency of a marshmallow when it gets squeezed and how we can learn from that? All good, but not even close, so let me elaborate.
Over the past week or so I have seen several stories in the newspaper (yes, an old school admission: I still have a newspaper delivered to my home each day), as well as on several blogs about the Marshmallow experiment held in the 1960s at Stanford University.
Basically, they gave preschool age kids a single marshmallow along with a promise that if they would wait until the researcher came back (about 15 minutes), they would get another one. So, in exchange for some patience, you get double! Obviously, most of them ate up the one marshmallow immediately. But the few who managed to wait got rewarded with a second one.
In follow-up studies done years later, the children that had resisted temptation and deferred their enjoyment of the marshmallow for the second one, had scored as much as 210 points higher on their SAT scores than the ones who were more impatient. In addition, they were skinnier, better socially adapted and seemingly had better careers.
in other words, the ones who waited and got the extra marshmallow had a bit of a head start on the others. They had a skill that almost all successful people eventually grasp – the ability to defer gratification; the ability to be patient.
In an age that seems to demand immediate and instant results, this is a skill we need in our partnering. We need to be patient and not eat the first marshmallow we see. The work of partnering is HARD (after all if it was easy, everyone would be doing it!). We need to wait and see what God might do. Nurturing deeper trust and stronger relationships – essential for results oriented partnering – takes time. This is why I often call cultivating partnering a deeply spiritual act. It is more about the why and not the how. We need to realize (and encourage those with whom we are engaged) that the development of working together is a marathon and not a sprint.
I first read about the marshmallow study several years ago in Daniel Goleman’s great book, Emotional Intelligence. Perhaps like you as I’ve told this story, I tried to visualize myself at age 5 and wondered what I would have done. I think I would have eaten the first marshmallow – mostly because a second one had no real draw for me! Now my candy of choice growing up, a Big Hunk candy bar . . . maybe.
However, the real question is what about now? Have we learned that partnering takes time? Perseverance and dedication are character values that never go out of style.
Have you learned that waiting for that second marshmallow is worth it? Maybe if you have, you can see that, much like good wine, our partnering efforts can mature with a little age.
About Brian O'Connell
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