psychology

Seeking Equanimity- Confidence and Keeping Level

/ The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Early in my culinary career, I wrote a lot about learning to stay in “the eye of the storm.”

While the frenetic choreography of a working kitchen spun around them, I admired the chefs I saw on TV who seemed to be standing at the center. Iron-spined, stoic, even serenely directing the motion about them to lead their teams through a successful service. I admired the ones who didn’t scream or berate their staff (even then, I knew it was impossible to manage others if you couldn’t manage yourself.)

At the time, I described it as a lot of things. I called it wei wu wei, dignity, patience, and simply confidence in themselves and their team. Years later, I learned with was all those things, and it was something one could learn and train themselves in– equanimity.

Close-up of a spinning top balancing perfectly on a wooden surface against a white background
Photo by Christophe Hautier on Unsplash
Continue reading →

The Difference Between Cooking and Baking Energy

/ The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

When it comes to interviewing for positions, people tend to forget that it’s a two-way process. Both the interviewer AND interviewee are feeling the situation out, trying to see if they are feeling and looking for the same thing.

The idea of someone’s energy or vibe being out of sync with what an employer is looking for might sound strange in an industry where people work close but not so close. If someone comes off as “naturally” nervous or distracted interviewing for an office job, that can be shrugged off as jitters. After all, they’ll be working in their own space.

For kitchen workers, however, where the job means working in close proximity to each other for hours on end and people becoming more like family than coworkers, the energy you possess and project carries a lot more weight. A resume and even a stage might demonstrate an applicants capability, but if they come off as restless, nervous, or even creepy, a manager will think twice before jeopardizing the harmony of their kitchen and their team.

When you walk into an interview, what energy do you convey?

Continue reading →

“No Man is an Island”- An Introvert Outs Himself as a Social Butterfly

/ The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

If anyone had asked me before I became a writer, I would have immediately marked myself as an introvert. I liked my quiet time, being alone, and going inside my own head.

I still do, for the record. I am definitely have an introverted streak and I like to refer to myself as “running out of people minutes” or having “peopled too much” when I’m ready to go off somewhere for a little peace and quiet.

Then I started writing in restaurants, learned that the best stories come from listening and talking to other people, and now I feel bad if I don’t socialize at least a bit every day.

Humans are a social species. We are not built for complete isolation. Enjoying being alone is one thing… but no human is meant to be lonely.

Continue reading →

In Memoriam of What We Were

/ The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

“You cannot change how your story started, you can always change how your story ends.”

For plenty of people, those are wonderful and hopeful words of wisdom. It is hard, and we often need help to do it, but it is possible to rise above our pasts towards a future we want. That is an empowering, terrifying, and beautiful thing. A hallmark of our intelligence as sentiment creatures is the ability to internalize what we’ve experienced and use it to make decisions in the future.

This can be both a blessing and curse. We learn from traumatic experiences as well, and healing from that is as much a (re)learning process as a spiritual/emotional practice. When things happen that really and truly shake you to your core, you can’t always just dust yourself off and go again. If you think you can, I congratulate you on your compartmentalization and/or sociopathy.

The truth is that, even if you think you’ve recovered from a difficult experience, there is no returning to the person you were before. It’s a “what is known cannot be unknown” sort of thing. Before, you didn’t know you could be hurt like that. You didn’t know you could fail that hard. You didn’t know whatever it was could hurt so much. It’s the price we pay for being thinking, feeling, loving creatures- but it’s a price we never consciously think we must pay until it happens.

When it does, we learn. We learn to wake up the next morning and keep trying. We recover, we hope, and we carry on. We also need to mourn the people that we were- because that is never coming back, and it’s something I’ve been wrestling with a lot recently.

A young woman sits cross legged with a hand to the side of her face in sad introspection
Continue reading →

The Difficulty of Doing Nothing

/ The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

When faced with the struggle of others, doing nothing can be the best- and hardest- thing to do.

The willingness and desire to help others is one of the most beautiful things I see in people. It doesn’t get a lot of (the right kind of) press, but our capacity for empathy truly is one of our strengths as a species. When it comes to helping others though, it’s hard to keep your desire to help from overriding whether or not you are helping.

I got a very object lesson in that in the last few weeks, and a dear friend of mine has reinforced it.

Continue reading →