Page 23 - Wanda Weasel

COSMOS EXPLAINS WANDA “WANT IT NOW” WEASEL
This is a story about Low Frustration Tolerance. Those big words mean that you are neither patient nor persistent, just like Wanda in the story. You want what you want and you want it now! This is not unusual, particularly for children. As people, you don’t seem to be designed to be very patient or persistent, even though both are very important.
In our story, Wanda’s lack of patience caused her to spoil two hunting trips and get trapped in the top of a tree. Because she was not able to be persistent (work at a task until she had learned it adequately), she quit trying to learn how to hunt. To get food once she had stopped trying to hunt, she tried to obtain fruit to eat. But not knowing much about fruit and being too impatient to learn, she ate a sack of green apples and got “sick, sick, sick.”
It is obvious by this part of the story that Wanda is having trouble. Most of the other young weasels are annoyed with her for spoiling the hunts, she now has little to eat and on top of it all she has a stomach ache. What is not so obvious to her is why she is having all of these problems.
As with most problems you cause yourself (and you do cause most of your problems for yourself), Wanda had too much Stinky Thinking and not enough Good Thinking. Wanda told herself things like, “I just can’t stand listening to all this teaching stuff. I want to do it now! I don’t have time to learn all this and that. I know enough to do it
right now!”
20