121 - Enjoying Your Time in the Culinary Kitchen

Welcome, welcome, everybody, I am so excited. And so glad to have all of you here, we are going to be talking about how to enjoy your time in the culinary kitchen, I'm going to be talking about lots of different topics, we're going to be talking about cultivating a passion for cooking your work life harmony, embracing kitchen challenges, building strong relationships, finding that inspiration daily and then becoming a leader in your kitchen. And that is how I see that you can actually enjoy your, your time in the culinary kitchen, I really want you to be able to have that passion. Let's let's talk about that passion first. And let's talk about what it is in restaurants and why it is so important to have that passion. When you're working in a restaurant. The first and the most important thing is working in restaurants is difficult. It is challenging, you've got all sorts of things that are pushing against you to try and beat you down. And if you don't have that passion for cooking, it's very easy to get discouraged. And even to the point of getting burnt out. So that passion will help you overcome those setbacks and the challenges that are inevitable in this industry. You know, things that can happen are, you know, labor shortages. You know, production issues not having the product coming in COVID really shined a light on that, it's gotten a lot better since then, thankfully, people are starting to figure out how to navigate this new landscape. But it's all challenging, and new things can happen. And every single day is a new challenge. So making sure that you have that passion, building that account passion, cultivating that passion. And really feeding that passion on a daily basis is very important. So again, I'm going to be talking about all of these things. And, and going into depth about each one of these things as we move forward. Also, another way you can kind of continue to have that passion is begin to learn all of the new technologies, and the fusion of cuisines that is happening nowadays. And all of the new methods that are coming out on how to cook and how to produce food, and really just start to begin to be excited about the times that we are in the amount of technologies and processes that we're learning about now. It's just absolutely amazing. So the first thing you can do to help kind of maintain that enthusiasm that you started out with, you know, I don't know how many of you remember what it was, like when you were first decided, hey, I'm going to work into a, I'm going to work in a kitchen. And I want to become a chef, or I want to run a restaurant, I want to own my own restaurant, I want to, you know, have that great, you know, feeling of just having your being your own boss. And one of the things that really gets you excited, the very beginning is everything is absolutely new, everything is exciting. Everything is just you're learning left and right every single day you're learning 1520 100 different things. And your mind is just getting overwhelmed with the amount of information that's being thrown at you. And you're like, there's no way I can handle this. And you know, in that you during that time that you were forgetting things. So maintaining that learning mindset, maintaining that excitement of going out and, and learning and, and growing. No matter how many years you've been working in this industry. No matter how specific you've gone into a specialization. You don't say that you're you've become the greatest barbecue master. You know, greatest pitmaster that's out there right now, right? There's somebody else that still knows more about it than you. Somebody else knows something that you don't know. I don't care if people can consider you to be the best. There's somebody out there that knows more than you do. And you need to go out and learn it, and be excited about it and, and be humble about it. Okay? It's not a, it's not a trying to become better than everybody else. You're just trying to become the best that you can be. And you're going out to try and find out how you can become better from the person that you used to be, you can begin to experiment all the time, you know, try new things. You, you keep work in perspective, like, yes, we have this major passion for our work. We love working in the culinary field, we love working in kitchens, or wherever you're working. But it's only part of who you are. Do not let it become who you are. It's what you do, it's not who you are, it's just a part of what you do. And remember that there are all sorts of other things that that you can be passionate about. And making sure that you maintain that harmony of, of, you know, what you're doing at work and your passions, and your all and your hobbies and, and all the other things that can happen. Another thing to do is to continually to build your friendships, grow your network, okay. And really begin to establish friendships and maintain those friendships, keep in contact with the people that you really enjoy. And that you really appreciate and that you've learned from, keep in contact with them, even after you're done working in that location or after they've gone on and work into a different location. And what I want you to do is I want you to kind of, in the comments below, please explain to me your culinary journey. What is it that got you into this culinary field? What is it that made you excited? And what it is that and how did you grow from that. So as I'm talking about this, I hope that some of these things will start to, you know, bring back some of your memories, and bring back some of the experiences that have been in your life that, you know, explain and, and give a good example as to what the things that I'm talking about. So the next app, once you figure it out, and cultivated your passion, and you've got that, and you're just super excited. Again, remember that it is not working in this industry is not who you are 100% It's what you do. And you need to make sure that you have this work and life harmony, in your, you know, throughout your life. What I mean by See, I'm not a very big fan of the whole work life balance, I don't really like the concept of balance, because when you're thinking of balance, you're thinking everything has to be the same. You have your work, and it's eight hours you have your life, that's eight hours, and you have to maintain that each one is only eight hours, and then your sleep and, and all that other kind of good stuff. So maintaining that balance is very difficult, especially in this industry. Because there are times when we're asked to work 10 hours, sometimes 12 hours, we have to work during the weekends, we have to dirt worked in the holidays, sometimes we'll get three or four days off. And sometimes we'll work seven 810 days in a row. It's part of the it's part of the industry. And it's can be very difficult. And you can get really discouraged if you're thinking that you have to have this balance. What it really means is you need to have a harmony, you have to be able to figure out how to make it work for you. Figure out how many hours you are able to work. And make sure that you don't go past that. Make sure that you understand what it means to rest, and how to really let go of work when you're not at work. So one of the biggest difficulties is that it's we work in such a high stress environment, that when we're done with work, it's hard to let that go. And if we can't let that go, even though we may have worked 10 hours, we're still officially working for another two hours after that, just because we can't let that stress and stuff go so being able to understand like what you're able to do learn some techniques. We're going to talk about these some of these techniques to be able to let it go and to be able to enjoy your time that is not that work. So, the great thing about once you find this balance is that you have the energy needed to be able to be your best. While at working, you have the energy that you need to be able to be your best when you're at home, when you're out out with your friends when you're on vacation, crazy thing, right? But to be able to just let it go. The kitchen can provide a lot of challenges. Some of the biggest challenges like I talked about are the hours that you work, the time zoo work, the heat, and the stress of the environments, the the fast paced environment of working in the in the kitchen, and having everything that happened very quickly, and making sure that you have that attention to detail. So it's like this oxymoron, where you're like working really fast, but you're focusing on the little details. And our chefs, we excel at that. We love it that we thrive on it. But it is still a challenge. And then there's also the whole staffing issues. Very few of our kitchens are fully staffed. And then there's also the issues with training, having having the people to be able to train others having the time to be able to train others, all of those difficulties are very diff are very make working in the kitchen very difficult. But over the years, I've kind of come up with some things that can help you to overcome those challenges. The first thing is, is you want to divide your day up, okay? You know, the, the big thing now is like time blocking, right? But divide your day up, like you've got your prep time, you've got your service time, you've got your cleanup time, you know, if you're, if you're a sous chef or something like that you've got your instructional time, you've got the time that you check everything, you've got the line, and then you've got the planning for the next day kind of kind of things. So break your day up into different segments. And then make sure that you are taking breaks in between each one of those segments. So it creates a definitive line between the two, take a break, just five minutes, step out, release whatever stress that you were building up in that time, release it. And then pump yourself up for the next section. It's like, okay, I'm going to start, you know, I'm gonna start teaching some people and we're gonna go and we're going to do a little pre service, and we're going to talk to people and we're going to tell them, and it's going to be super exciting. Let's go ahead and do it. All right, you know, start building yourself up. Now the thing is, is make sure you're getting your rest. Rest is huge. Because, you know, it's been, it's been told that, you know, people can't really function mentally after about eight hours of work. And we know that to be true more than anybody else, because we're constantly being pushed. But at the same time, for some reason, we're able to push that boundary a little bit. And what helps is to be able to create those breaks. Get your rest, go home, release it. Stop thinking about work. Okay? Those stupid, horrible kitchen printer nightmares, man. I can't tell you how many times I've had those. But it's been a long time since I've had those. Because I've started to learn these these skills. Making sure you're eating well. Getting the exercise, yes, you're on your feet all day, you're working 10 hours on your feet. You don't really want to get up and, you know, go exercise, right? But what is that exercise, it's using something different. Okay? You know, you're walking all around the place, you know, maybe you work on your arms, maybe go on a bike ride or something like that, that doesn't use the same muscles. And really, just make sure that you've continually to build up your endurance, your endurance, and, and by doing that, it uplifts your your spirit. It helps you become better, more excited. It helps you have more fun in the kitchen. And then there's also the meditation. Now, what does that meditation mean? It can be many a lot of things. It can be just straight up reading. It can be the whole yoga and meditation where you're sitting there and just calming your mind. It can be one of my bigger many ways of going on to meditation is to go up into the mountains and just enjoy the outdoors. If I've had a stressful day or something like that, or a stressful week, and I get on my day off, I will head up into the mountains, and just go for a hike, five, six mile hike, and just enjoy nature. And that's one form of meditation for me. Another form of meditation for me, I love music. I love producing music, I play the violin, I'm learning the guitar, that right there is a form of meditation for me as well. But also have that outlet. You know, like I said, you know, I love riding my bike, I love going on a hike, I love producing music. You know, having those outlets, I've done Woodworking for an outlet as well. Get a hobby, something that you can do that has nothing to do with cooking. Find something that you enjoy that has nothing to do with cooking. So that when you're focusing on that you're not thinking about work. And you can, you can release that stress. Another thing is, go out and do service, be part of your community, volunteer in the community, help out when you can talk to people see how you can help them out. You can also mentor others, become a mentor, help other people through their situations, you have lots of experience working in the kitchen. Even if you've only got one year, you've got one more year than the person that's just starting, be that mentor, be that person that helps other people. And so those are some of the things that you can do to help kind of remove those challenges, remove that stress, remove that frustration, the the grind, and get that grind down to nothing, okay? To where you're going to the work, you're excited about your work, you're gonna go in, it's like, okay, it's prep time, blah, blah, blah, take your break care service time, blah, blah, blah, knock that out, go home, find that hobby, release it, get that outlet, the next day, go for a nice hike, you know, create that harmony of your life. And, and begin to start building that, that music, that symphony of your life, to where everything has its place and everything and you know, you're peaking at this point. And you're, you know, here comes the holidays, you're gonna be busting your butt working in the holidays, okay, here comes the offseason, I'm gonna take vacation for a week, and then go out, or I'm gonna get him, I'm only gonna work like four hours a day for a week or something like that. Okay, so when, as, as you're going through these kinds of things, and as you're building and learning, you're going to have these challenges. You know, this industry is notorious for the amount of challenges every single day, it can feel like, you're just out there putting out fires. And what you need to realize is these challenges are really opportunities to grow. Or to show what you have learned. And so that you can, so if you come upon a challenge, sometimes you're like, Oh, I got this. And other times this is like it's, you're getting crushed. Take those opportunities, and learn from them, think about what happened, start coming up with a plan. So that it when it that starts to happen again, you can catch it beforehand, you can catch it before so that you can then you know, solve the problem before it ever gets there. You know, keeps the guy out of the forest with the match. Instead of trying to you know, extinguish the forest fire. So opportunities to grow are all around. And so continue to grow and develop when you're working in a kitchen because man the amount of opportunities are endless. Another thing who you're working with, has a very big is a very big factor on how well you enjoy work in the kitchen. You can be working, you can have all of these other things going on and working for you. But if you're working with other people that are difficult, that are you know pessimistic that are always complaining about life. It's very difficult to enjoy working in the kitchen with those kinds of people. Now you can't change them. But you can make sure that you don't become one of them. Okay? So the importance of you being the best that you can be, and start to build a team, start to build those relationships within the kitchen, start to create those friendships. And begin this, you know, if you need to reach outside of your immediate work, go ahead and start reaching outside of your immediate work. Start building a collaboration of other chefs, not to just commiserate on what's going on. But to figure out how to become better. We need to make sure that you have a good working relationship with your supervisors. Talk with them, let them know what's going on in your life. Let them know when you're feeling too much pressure. Ask them for help. They have the experience that they have more experienced than you. They know how to deal with those pressures and those stresses in their lives. And they can teach that to you. But if you don't ever ask for it, if you don't ever go to them and build those positive relationships with them, then you're not going to be able to really advance and become the best person that you can be. The other thing is, as you're building these kitchen relationships, as you're building your friendships, you begin to learn from other cultures, you begin to learn from other ethnicities, you begin to understand what's going on in their lives. And knowing the struggles of other people, helping them work through them. Building those friendships can really put a difference perspective on your life, and help you enjoy when the blessings that you've got in your own life. The next part I want to talk about is finding that inspiration. It can be very difficult for chefs to, you know, always come up with some new thing, okay? There's this constant. There's this constant pressure, that, that you need to come up with the new thing and the greatest thing and become, you know, this new special here there, you know, so where are some things that you can go? Where can you go to find that inspiration? First thing is obviously social media. Tick tock has some great stuff, Instagram has some great stuff. Those kinds of things, like the amount of pictures that are put out there of food. I mean, come on, people love taking pictures of food. So if you want to get inspired, going into that kind of stuff, if you want to get inspired, and you know what the dish can look like and the possibilities of that dish? Or what are some things that people are doing? And how can you make a little twist to it to make it your own? Okay, so that's one source of inspiration. Another port of inspiration is how do you become the best person that you can be? And that, that is through your personal development? What kind of inspirational messages? Or what kind of inspirational messages are you reading? Are you listening to, okay? You're listening to me, I hope that I'm becoming an inspiration to you. I hope that this, these trainings, and these master classes will help you become better. And I hope you are inspired by them. If you want, I have a recording of all of my trainings on my website, cooking physics.com/blog I'm trying to keep that updated within a couple of weeks. You know, life is difficult is very busy. But I try and keep that updated. And so I'm constantly putting these trainings on there. So if you ever want to go someplace, and just get inspired, go there, click on one of the topics and listen to my training. The other thing you can do for inspiration is try new things and see how big of an epic fail you can create. I mean, go into it and just be like, I have no idea if this is going to work. I'm going to try it and just try it and be ready to fail be excited about failing. See, you know, have the thing freakin smoking in the kitchen doesn't really matter. It's like be inspired to try new things. That experimentation and that and that growing is what builds that passion. You know, trying new things, build that passion find that inspiration daily. Again, with the with the various cultures and ethnicities the The kitchen has a multitude of people from all over the world. Every single location has their own style of cuisine, their own way of doing things, learn from them grow, develop in speed, inspired by that kinds of things. And also, the very last section that I want to talk about is kind of this whole entire thing. As you were doing these things, as you were growing, as you were developing, as you were building your passion, as you were seeing these challenges and turning them into inspiration, as you are, you know, maintaining that work life harmony, and building those relationships, and really striving to get that inspiration. People will not people will see you. And they will see that there's something special about this kid. There's something about this guy that I really like. And that is that is an opportunity for you to start to become a leader. The first step in that is get yourself a coach. Find yourself a mentor. You know, one of the biggest challenges in this industry isn't so much the staffing. I know a lot of people may think like no do seriously as a staff, you know, it's really the leadership skills of, of the culinary field. If you really think about it, the people that go to culinary school, what did they learn? They learn how to cook. When people go working in restaurants, what do they learn? They learn how to chop, dice, cook, they learn how to produce, they learn how to make things. When do you start learning leadership skills? Really. Think about that. When was the last time somebody sat you down? Figuratively speaking, speaking, but somebody spent some time with you, and started to teach you how to become a better leader. I remember my first opportunity to really rise up and become a leader. And I was working at the Stein Eriksen Lodge. And I just got promoted to a lead line cook. I was like, yes, sweet lead line cook. I'm like, What can I do to be what can I do? And he looked at me and he said, You know what this position is one of the more difficult positions in the kitchen industry. Like, what is it? Yeah. Because you start to get some responsibility, you start to have the expectation that you are going to begin to lead this line, lead line, you are leading this line, but you don't have the authority. He's like, so it's really difficult position. And that's how I got I was like, I gotta lead the line. Okay, how does everybody else lead the line? You know, everybody's always, they always talk about, you know, lead by example, lead by example. Okay, so I just, I went in there, and I just started working harder. And I worked harder and harder. And I hoped that by working hard, other people would see me and want to follow and do what I was doing. What I didn't realize is, that's not the best way to become a leader. In order to be a leader, you need to be able to not only show them what they need to be doing. Try to become the best of what you're doing. But you need to inspire them. You need and not just hope that they become inspired by looking at you, but actually challenge them and begin to share your knowledge with them. Begin to share your passion with them, talk with them, lead them, help them grow, give them challenges, that that incremental challenges. So it's like, okay, I know you, you did great on this swing, but I know you could do better, let's do better next time, you know, and start showing that empathy, that it's difficult, understand that it's difficult, but challenging them because you know that they can be better and they know that they can be better. There was something that you did that you know, wasn't your best. So I challenge you to do your best to do better to be better next time and challenging them and move them forward, encouraging them, showing them and letting them know and paying attention to what's going on and making sure that you see their improvement because many times we may not be able to see our own improvement. We need somebody else who's going to be there who's going to be watching us and really pinpoint, hey, you really improved in this aspect, I can really say your improvement, encourage them, because it's going to get challenging is the biggest skill that we lack in this industry. So learn the skills. But at the same time, this industry is the best place that you can have to learn these skills, you are put into leadership positions left and right every single day, whether you are the lead line cook, the sous chef or the Executive Chef, or you're just the beginning chef, you have the opportunity to lead and to CRO and show other people, the people who they can become. So share these skills, learn these skills. By doing these kinds of things. If we can collaborate together and really start to grow this industry, we will change the culinary field, we will change this world to one where the leaders where we pump out leaders more than any other industry, because we're always working in small groups, always going to be a leader. So if we can start developing those people, and developing those skills within ourselves, to become leaders to become those great leaders, then we can change this industry. And the culinary industry will become one for it's not just having to deal with all of the crap that we have to deal with. But showing the world that even though we had to deal with this crap, but that's why we are the people we are. That's what made us the great leaders that we can become. So thank you so very much. I really appreciate everybody coming here. How do you how do you enjoy your time in the kitchen, learn, grow, become a leader. Get your friendships together, you know, understand that challenges are really opportunities for you to grow. And make sure that you have that harmony in your life. You are keeping your work and your life all working together to give you the best chance for success. So thank you very much. And I will see you next week. And I'm going to be talking about how we do it. I'm gonna go a little bit further in depth. How do we deal with the stress? What are some tips that you can use to be able to handle this tips? I kind of touched on them a little bit today. But next week, I'm going to go deep dive into those kinds of things. So see you next week, Thursday, one o'clock mountain