Hello chefs. You're listening to chefs
because a podcast I'm your host Entre natera.
On today's episode, we're going to talk about getting past
mental blocks, so stay tuned. So first, let's start with a
simple update from last week, and I'm not going to take too
much time on the update, because I really don't have a lot to
talk about culinary leadership. Fundamentals, audiobook delayed.
So Audible for some reason, says, 10 days.
I did it 10 days ago that's still not ready.
So, I'm not sure if they're behind due to Christmas or
whatever the holidays. But nonetheless, I'm hoping by
next week, the book is out. It should have been out last
week. Anyway, audibles taking a long
time. The book is done.
Aw, The book is done. So it'll it'll be released
shortly. If you missed last week's
episode, I finalized the video course of culinary leadership
fundamentals. It's about, you know, about an
hour and 15 minutes or so, and it's just, it's basically the
things that are in The Culinary leadership fundamentals.
Book, turned into video. For those of you that are video
Learners, you could buy it or you could rent it.
So you know, if you don't if you don't feel like buying and
having it forever you can rent it.
I think for $8 link is in my bio on all my social media
platforms. So, Anyway, those are the
updates today's episode. So I put up a poll last week and
asked the question. What do you what do you want me
to talk about? You want to do, Q&A, you want to
culinary competitions, where you want to talk about, mental,
overcoming, mental obstacles. So, overcoming mental obstacles,
one. You know, by quite a large
margin and I do get a lot of DMS and requests to speak on mental
well-being, mental Wellness obstacles.
And I should say this, right? I am a little bit reluctant to
speak on the subject because, you know, obviously I'm not a,
I'm not a trained, clinical therapist, I shouldn't be giving
out advice and I'm not going to today.
The only thing I'm going to do today is I'm going to tell you
what works for me, right? I can't tell you what to do for
you. I don't even think legally, I
could tell you what to do for you.
But what I can tell you is, I could tell you what I do.
And I can tell you the things that I've done to overcome He
mental roadblocks that I've encountered and really today,
we're going to dive into three different things.
We're going to talk about you know confidence and sometimes
when you're in areas of low confidence, how you could
overcome it, we're going to talk about building a foundation of
getting strong, mental habits. And, and then the third thing,
we're going to talk about is creative block as a chef.
So we're going to talk about all those three things that I'm
going to throw in. Maybe you know, a couple of
anecdotes and stories but I will say this so people that don't
know me. In real life, I'll tell you
something personal about me that you probably don't know is I
have, you know, a very hyperactive mind.
It's it's what has allowed me to create a podcast, right?
Three books. Great.
A video course, start a business without any training, how to do
any of that, right? I'm trained as a chef and all
these other things. I'm a I'm doing by myself and
the reason I'm able to do it is because my mind is typically
running yo thousand miles per hour.
So I share that. With you is because I have a
three-hour morning routine and my 3 our morning routine is all
about compounding. Good habits and really tuning my
brain and so that I could get better.
So my whole life's purpose is just to get better and better
every day and every way like if I don't know, something I want
to learn it and I want to get good at it.
I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge and I read on average,
probably about a book a week, so for people that don't know me.
I probably go through. I think I added this up to the
day. I think I've read like 163 books
and the last, the last two to three years.
Anyway, in three years, I've read 162 books.
Now, I don't know anyone that reads more than me and for those
of you that are listening, if you do read more than me, I'd
love to talk books with you. I read so many books that
sometimes I forget what I've read and the majority of the
books that I do read are not culinary related.
So I give you for example, like Day.
I received a gift. It's Christmas actually.
So if you're listening to this on Christmas, Merry Christmas
book that I received was it's a, it's a book that includes five
books. So, you know, Art of War
daodejing Confucius analects, so I like to read books on
philosophy strategy. I love, I love like Miyamoto
Musashi's book of five rings anyway, these are these are
things that I read. So I don't typically read
cookbooks but I do. Like I do like books that just
kind of changed the way I think and challenged me to think
differently and so there's something called the
dunning-kruger effect and you may be familiar with it and
basically what it means is that the more you learn, the more you
realize you don't know. And I find that to be very true
in life and also as a chef the more you learn as a chef the
more you realize all the things that you don't know.
But when you don't know a lot, you do think, you know, more
than you you should like you're overconfident at the beginning
thinking, you know, more than you do.
And then as you start to learn, you realize, you don't know
anything. And then kind of in the end, you
realize you didn't really need to do anything.
You just need to be good at who you are.
So anyway, neither here nor there.
Let's move forward and dive right into the subject.
So the first thing I want to talk about is kind of already on
the subject is building a strong foundation.
And the way I do it is I like to build a strong foundation on
compounding good habits. Now, what I mean by that is I'll
tell you what I do. So, every day, I play a game of
chess every day. I read, you know, x amount of
pages in a book. Every day I do, Some type of
mindfulness. Practice every day.
I eat the same thing which is a healthy meal.
So, I have all these habits that I've Incorporated in my life
throughout the course of time. And what happens when you
incorporate a good habit, is you start to push out a bad habit.
So if you incorporate I'll give you an example.
If the Habit that you're trying to incorporate as you're going
to drink a glass of water every day and so you put a glass of
water by your bed. First thing in the morning.
You wake up, you drink it. That's going to be a Good habit.
You might be replacing that with a bad habit of, maybe drinking
something that you shouldn't drink or baby, you're staying
hydrated. So, anyway, adding little habits
little by little throughout the course of time will start to
compound. And what you'll start to notice
is the amount of good habits that you have will start to
diminish, the amount of bad habits.
Now, what makes that extremely difficult is that there's always
a little bit of reluctancy to begin.
Good habits. It's difficult.
So, there's something called cognitive dissonance and maybe
you know what that is, maybe you don't.
But I'll explain it to you in a way that that I liked it
explained to me when I first heard of it and that is that
your brain and your body have to be in sync.
So one thing has to override the other, so I'll give you an
example. If you say, I'm going to go work
out today, and you don't go work out.
Or if you say today, I'm going to start my diet and you don't
start your diet. What ends up happening is your
mind starts to rewire and say, okay?
Every time they say, they're going to do something, they
don't. Okay, got it.
So whenever they say that don't do it, so your mind won't give
you the energy to do it. So I thought It was an
interesting way to look at it. And so, one of my mentors
explained to me the way to correct, that would be to
instead of saying these big things that you're not going to
do, is just say, I'm going to put on my shoes today and then
put on your shoes. And then say, okay, now I'm
going to open the door and then you open the door and I'm going
to brush my teeth, and then you go brush your teeth.
So that way your mind starts to retrain itself to say, anytime
you say, you're going to do something, you actually do it.
So, this is what I started doing to myself, to start building on
those things. And I'll tell you throughout the
course of time. Time as I've learned to say,
okay, I'm going to do this and then you do it and then I say
I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that you start with very
little things. But what you start to notice is
that your mind will start to push you to bigger things.
So if you say for example, okay, I'm going to do one push-up
today and then tomorrow, you say you're going to do two.
And then after a while your body says okay every time you're
going to do that you actually do it then you say I'm going to do
500 and it's like oh shit. This is this is a real
challenge. Is your body going to give you
the energy and what I've noticed is in my case it does.
So if I said Today I'm going to do 250 push-ups, which I'm not,
but if I said I was going to do that, I would somehow find a way
to do it, right? Your mind starts to give you the
strength to overcome this. Now, all of this ties into
building good habits. And what does this have to do
with the kitchen? Well, because all these good
habits tie into the kitchen, a better version of you is a
better version of you in all things that you do in life.
So, a healthier you as a healthier, you and the kitchen a
healthier you as a healthier? You at home, right?
A healthier you as a happier. You so all these things start to
build and compound and all the other areas of your life.
Like I said, I would start adding little habits day after
day, after day, after day, and before, you know it like in my
case, I have a three-hour morning routine that includes
everything from Reading to playing puzzles, and brain
games, and playing several games of Chess.
I love chest. If, you know me, these are all
little things that make you better weather, whatever it is.
Now, if you could, if you could take that same idea and apply it
to the kitchen, right? It's like every day you're going
to do this every day. I'm going to set up my station a
certain way. Right.
A lot of these foundations that you build on can also be applied
to something called decision fatigue and this is something
that I talk about in my book culinary leadership fundamentals
is that if you can have the majority of your good habits on
autopilot and allows you to save that important decision-making,
energy on the things that really require your mental focus and
attention. So I'll give you an example in
my kitchen. I would say cutting boards are
set up this way. Towels are folded right here.
Utensil beIN goes right here. REM kit goes their knives go
here. And so you didn't have to think
about all those things in the kitchen because everything was
always on autopilot. So, it's repetition.
So, the only thing you really had to think about was the food
that's in front of you like making.
Whatever is in front of you, perfect and delicious and
beautiful. So if you don't have to think
about all these other things like, oh shit, where do I put my
knife? How do I fold my towels?
What color socks do I wear? Today have as many of your
decisions on autopilot so you could save your decision-making
ability in your mental focus on the things that you're doing.
And this is This is something that has helped me tremendously
as having so many things just kind of on the automatic setting
though. That's what I've done, to build
a foundation, and apply it to life, and also apply it to the
kitchen. So anyway, let's move on the
next thing. I want to touch on is confidence
and I'll tell you that, you know, when I was a young cook, I
was I was not very, I was not very confident in the kitchen,
you know, I was 17, 18 years old, most The chefs around me
were men with many years of experience and, you know, back
then. So you know, 27 years ago, when
I first started cooking kitchens were much rougher and so you
could only imagine what it was like for a 17 year old kid to be
around beer Brown chefs and that arrows, it was a difficult time
for me and I didn't have a lot of confidence in what I was
doing and so little by little I started to figure out.
How can I get confidence in something that I used to say?
For me, this is this is that mental trick that I taught.
Self is I would say to myself often on the other side of fear
is greatness and this is like a mantra that I would repeat in my
head. Anytime I would get to something
that I was afraid of whether it was learning a new skill in the
kitchen or maybe doing something that I didn't want to do like,
talking to a guest. I used to be very shy.
I don't like talking to people and say, on the other side of
fear his greatness and that would push me to do all the
things that I was uncomfortable doing.
And what I started to realize is that whenever I would do that,
there really was a breakthrough to move forward.
Right there was greater things on the other side, one side, get
past these things that I was afraid of doing.
So a lot of times these chefs were afraid of looking stupid.
It's what's called like a spotlight effect.
Like you think there's this big Spotlight on you and your
mistakes are over Amplified and everyone sees them, but it's not
the case. A lot of people really are not
that many people are really paying attention to you as much
as you think. But this Spotlight effect
prevents you from doing things because you might Be afraid to
lose. What I would do is I would, I
would throw myself in situations where I probably would lose and
I would probably fail. And I would do that to push
myself and encourage myself to get better and get over the
fear. So, what I like to call fear
inoculation, I would just push myself a little bit further and
a little bit further and a little bit further, and that's
really what made me better. And I've said this before, like,
if you play video games, it's like the game is more
satisfying. Sighing, when you beat it on
hard mode, then it is on easy mode.
So I would always ratchet things up little by little like a
sliding scale. Like, okay, how can we make it a
little bit harder? If I'm dicing tomatoes, and I
finish case of tomatoes and 30 minutes, can I finish it in 25?
But quality and time was always a metric.
So I was not only improving trying to improve my skills in
quality but also in time. So I would also challenge
people, you know, you still have my culinary decathlon and
kitchens that I would run into, you know, be a list of skills.
And I was always up for a challenge, so a cook come up, to
me and say, okay, I'm going to erase you and cleaning
pineapples and I say sure or Butcher and a salmon or whatever
the case may be, who could butcher it fast and who could
most properly, and whoever did the best would win.
And, you know, their name would go on the board.
And some, you know, I didn't win all of them obviously, and I
didn't mind losing and I did that because one it was good for
the person that was beating me, you know, they built a
conference in confidence up, but to it helped me eliminate that
fear of failure and getting over the fear.
Fear of failure is really what? Holds a lot of people back.
You can't be afraid to to lose because losing prevents you from
playing the game. And if you're not playing the
game, you're never going to win. So, being able to play the game,
at least you have a chance at winning right.
Little by little start pushing yourself, you know, like I said,
fear, not chelation. I'll tell you all the story and
not many people know this, but I was in the United States memory
championships, couple of years back put on by MIT and they
reached out to me. They said, you want to do this
and it's because I do these these brain games and have a
relatively high score. So they reached out to me and
said, you know, based on your scores, you qualify as a
candidate to be in the MIT us memory or maybe it was the world
memory championships. Oddly enough, I can't remember
ironic. But anyway, I got in there was
200 competitors and I was like, yeah, I'll do it.
I mean, I don't know anyone that's been in the memory
championships so I did it and out of 200 competitors that came
in 8th, which Which I thought was funny is like I'd ever done
it. I didn't even really trained for
it but I placed 8th because I was unafraid of competing and
the reason I share that is because it's a stupid story.
It has nothing to do with cooking but it just goes to show
you that you know, if you have the confidence to do something
and you're not afraid of of failure that there's some great
life experiences and there's some great things that can be
had once you get past any fears and limitations that you've put
on yourself. And I got to say it all The
fears and everything. That's preventing you, as you
write all your limitations are self-induced, the more you start
to get past them, the more, you'll start to get past these,
these mental obstacles. So, anyway, I'm going to take a
quick moment and share a story with you.
Also, this is something that a friend of mine had told me.
It was a story and I thought it was very valuable.
So I'm going to change the story up a little bit to make it more.
Applicable to our industry and you some current example.
So if you're familiar with like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or
DC, DC movies, right now superhero.
Movies like they have this Multiverse where where there's a
different version of a person in every single universe and
there's an infinite amount of universes out there.
Now, if you could, if you could just bear with me for a moment,
if you could imagine that it one of these universes, there's Apex
version of you in that Universe. There is the best version of you
in that Universe. This person is extremely
successful. They're the most successful.
You could be him. They're rich.
They're worshiped, their have a lot of money or whatever.
Whatever, you deem successful. You know, maybe that's what I
deem successful, but whatever it is that you deem successful.
Maybe they're the best chef in the world and they have the
number one restaurant or they have a restaurant Empire.
Whatever there is a version of you.
In this alternate universe that always makes the right
decisions. Always does their best works out
every single day. Only eats healthy, right?
This person, this Apex version of you exists in an alternate
universe. Now whenever you're faced with
difficulty, You have to stop and ask yourself, what would the
Apex version of you do in this situation, right?
When you're afraid, I'm too afraid to enter this
competition, because I might lose.
What would the Apex version of you say, when you say, I'm not
good enough to work in that restaurant?
What would the Apex version of you say to you?
When you say, I'm not good enough for this position?
What would that person say to you right when that person says
I'm too tired to go to the gym, I'm too tired to eat, healthy
food, whatever the case may be, what would that Apex version of
you? And this other Universe, say, to
you, when you have those situations arise, what would
they say, right? And normally, they're going to
say, don't make excuses, just do it, right?
The reality is that's what the best version of you.
That exists is going to say they're going to tell you be
unafraid and do it. And when you start to realize
that the only thing that's holding you back is you, then
you start to be unafraid and get past these things, that may be
holding. You back.
So confidence is a big thing that holds people back.
This is a mental block that we have and, you know, kind of on
the last subject I want to talk about is creative block and I
and one of the podcast previously that I recorded
called techniques versus creativity.
I go through a creative exercise on how I would come up with a
menu and things that I would do. So I I'll share it with you
again and I'll try and make it brief, but I set up different.
Anchors. So what an anchor is it's
basically a reminder of the moment, right?
So when you hear a song and it takes you back to a certain
place and time where you smell something and it takes you back
to a certain place and time or taste etcetera, those are called
anchors. So, what I want to do, when I
get need to get into a creative mindset, is I put as many of
those creative anchors around me.
So in my case, I'm listening to classical music, I'm drinking a
cup of green tea, I might be chewing some mint gum and then I
smell these things called boom, boom sticks.
And they're like, they look like lip gloss and they smell like
Peppermint or whatever. So all those things are going.
I'm going to silent room and I'm either writing or I'm typing out
items that I want on my menu. And I know when all those things
are happening it's like it anchors me to put me in that,
creative mind frame, right? So that's one thing, I do.
Another creative exercise that I do to get past mental block.
And I shared a video on this on, on Chefs, PSA.
Instagram feed, is that I will sometimes, let's say, I need to
change a menu and I'm kind of stuck with coming up with menu
ideas, I'll start every day, just like Okay, let me come up
with 10 menu ideas today and then tomorrow 10:00 and I'll do
that for 30 days. And at the end of the 30 days,
I'll have a journal of 300 menu ideas, right?
But I could pull from whenever. Now, what you'll notice when you
do something like this, is that maybe the first couple of days,
it's easy, or maybe the first couple of days is harsh.
But, but anyway, by case, the first couple of days are easy,
and then it gets extremely difficult once you get past all
the low-hanging fruit, like all the easy You're there and then
once you get past that then it becomes easy again.
And that's when the true creativity comes in.
Now you could do this with a group, let's say you have five
chefs working on your team, you could assign everyone ten
dishes, and then when they all come back together, you'll have
50. So you can see how this works to
amplify your creativity. So I highly recommend you do
that, and then one last creative exercise that I do for myself
when I'm writing menus, when I have writer's block, or creative
block, What it would be like when you're in a kitchen and
you're in a chef, sometimes you have limitations placed on you
that are very real. By the way, these aren't
imaginary limitations, they're very real.
Like, the stove doesn't work or the guard monge cook, doesn't
have any experience, they there. It's very difficult for them to
get food out or whatever the case may be.
So you when you write a menu you say oh I can't do that.
I can't put that on the menu. I can my oven doesn't work.
Anyway. You have all these excuses of
all the things that you can't put on the menu and it stifles
your creativity. So something that I've done And
when I caught myself doing that, as I put myself in a frame of
mind, I said, okay, imagine that you're in the best designed
kitchen with all the equipment, and everything works, with an
infinite amount of money and infinite amount of ingredients
and resources and the best cooks in the in the kitchen and you're
never short staffed. Now, you need to write a menu
that impresses based on whatever parameters you've given
yourself, write it, right? And when you have no limitations
and money is No, Object and resources are no object and you
write that menu, okay? Good.
Now you've written that menu, then you could look at that menu
and say, okay, now pair it back a little bit based on your
limitations and what you'll end up with in my case, in most
cases you'll end up with a menu that is more creative and
pushing a little further than you would have when you
originally started. So again, that's another
creative exercise that I like, and that I use.
But anyway, wrapping it up. I know a lot of people have
asked me lately How do you, how do you deal with the stress and
the fatigue of the kitchen and difficult times?
And I will say that doing all these things, right?
So, so having confidence building a foundation of good
habits, all these things are going to help you with the other
things. Because when you have
confidence, you're able to go to your boss and say I need a raise
your able to go to your boss and say I need days off when you
have the confidence to speak up and like I I said you got to
build it. It's none of these things are
easy, right? All of their like, there's not a
Panacea that I could just say, do this and it fixes all your
problems. No, all everything that I said,
requires work and effort, but doing all these things, building
the confidence, having a strong Foundation of good habits that
you've put in place in your life, eating, right?
Having a mindfulness, practice spending quality time with loved
ones. Getting enough sleep.
Like, they're all the things that all the cliche answers that
people tell you, right? That's, that's really it, like
it's quite easy, you know, What to do.
I'm not going to tell you anything that you don't know,
you know, the right thing to do. You just have to do it doing it
as a whole other thing, right? So when someone says, oh, you
know, I need to, I need to get healthy.
I don't know what to do was like, well, stop eating junk
food, right? Easier said than done, but you
could say little by little you could stop eating junk food like
let's just cut out soda. And then next week let's cut out
chips or whatever. The case may be to disconnect
from work, sometimes put your phone down.
Stop looking at social media, talk to your loved ones.
Check out, establish boundaries And all of these things combined
have helped me significantly. And now I can't sit here and say
that I'm an expert at it, like I said, this is, this is a reason
why I haven't really spoken on the subject too much because I
don't like speaking about things that I'm not as knowledgeable in
things that if it's a puzzle that I haven't solved, I don't
think I'm in a place of authority to speak about it,
right? So if I don't have an answer,
there's no point in me talking about I like to focus on Real
World Experience on things that I've actually done.
I could speak knowledgeable on, but if I, if I haven't solved
the issue, if I haven't figured out how to stop eating junk
food, I can't sit up here and tell you it's easy to start
doing this, right? It's like taking advice from a
poor person on how to get rich. The old expression is don't
take, don't take Financial advice from a poor person
because they can't explain that to you.
And so that I kind of apply by that that same philosophy is
like I can't be giving advice on things that I haven't figured
out or don't understand. So I hope you all understand
that. That sometimes there's a reason
why. I don't speak on certain
subjects is because I just am not knowledgeable enough to
speak on them. Now, hopefully, this, this
episode on mental blocks. It might, it might not help all
of you. Like I said, this, this one
might be a little bit far off from the typical chefs.
PS a podcast and it might not help all of you but hopefully
some of you got something from it.
And like I said, if I just help one person than it was worth it,
right? If one of you got better from
it, great then mission accomplished.
But anyway, If you like episodes in this style of me speaking on
subjects that are not so specific to the kitchen, please
let me know. And if you want to support the
show obviously the easiest thing you could do is subscribe and
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See you next week, hit the porno music.