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Are you a Cook, Baker, or Chef?

There's thing called cook, baker, chef. Sounds kinda interesting. What do I mean? Has anyone here... I'm gonna just do cook and baker. Has anyone here, someone who's cooked and baked? Someone know the difference? What's different about cooking versus baking? Or baking versus cooking? Yeah, Ruben. I would say, baking is a lot more, like, rigid, like, there's instructions. It has to be a lot more precise. Whereas cooking, you have that flexibility to, sort of, play Ruben, pssh, home run. (audience laughs) Being a baker is precise. If you put baking soda instead of baking powder, your cake will suck. If you put to much baking soda or baking powder, your cake will suck. And these are often very small measurements. It's very specific. It's science, a little more than it is free styling. Cooking is a little more, like, give me the basic things. WHat's the recipe? What are the ingredients I'm using. And you can, kinda like, a dash of this, a splash of that. I'm gonna throw an extra thing ...

in there. And it's gonna probably be awesome. So, when you think about that mentality when coaching someone, some people like higher concepts and they wanna do it themselves. Let me, just give me the basics. Give me the theories and let me go and mix it up and cook it up, yeah? Some people need specific models and prescriptions: do this, put this much, that much, and at the end, voila, you have a souffle. So, you need to know whether someone's more of a cook or a baker. Now, again, like the other one, challenger's encouragement, you can change that over time. We wanna help bakers get out of being purely bakers. Too much certainty or structure is gonna hold them back. We know this, yeah? But someone who's a cook and doesn't really have some of the structural background of things, we might wanna help to be a little more baker-ish, understand, be little more precise. Ultimately, we want is, we want chefs. People that know the rules and know when to break them for what reason, right? They're able to play in both spheres. But on the way there, most of us have little bit more proclivity to get a cook or baker. And we're not gonna probably be a chef in an area we need coaching on cause we're learning, right? So, that menta... Is there any question on those different mentalities? Or how you may use them as a coach? I'd give you a double click for a second. If I'm working with a baker, I will just make up a model sometimes. I'll be talking about a theory and then I can see that they're getting it but they don't feel safe or comfortable with, so like okay, let's just talk through and I'll just freestyle an exact program for them. Here's your three-step process. Here's your practice. I want you to do this, this and this. For a cook I might say, go out and just practice or whatever but with a baker, I'll give them a three-step process and then we'll write it down in their notebook so they can check in on it the next day when they're going to practice. Does that make sense? Any other questions about that? Yeah. So, a baker would, kind of, go back to the fixed mindset because that's exactly what we're dealing with. We're dealing with someone who has a fixed structure or... I think your question is, is a fixed mindset connected to being a baker or cook? Correct. Yes. I would caution against that connection. I don't think that they're connected. Fixed versus growth is, do I feel like I can get better if I practice something. Growth is, if I practice something and put an effort, I'll get better. All this is saying is, when someone is trying to learn and get into practicing something, bakers just a little bit more structure, something that they're fixed per se. They just want more of a prescriptive framework to work through in order to practice. They might believe if I do this framework, I'm gonna grow. So they'd have growth mindset. You see how that's separate? Got it, yes. But it's confusing. I see what you mean by that. Thank you for... I'm sure there is someone in the room or online that had the exact same confusion. No, thank you for that, yeah, that helps. Any other questions about the model? 'cause what I want you to do is, if you have the workbook, then you can just fill that out for cook, baker, chef. What style describes you? And what's your challenge-encourage bar graph? And then I want you to repeat that for one to two team members. Again, please go very fast. So, what is, where are you, where do you land and where does these key people in your world, where do they land? So, if you're online and you don't have the workbook, you don't need it. I just want you to write down, are you more comfortable as a cook, baker, or chef? Where are you in that, in sort of your world, what do you tend towards? Where are you in your challenger's encouragement. So, you can kind of have a bar graph. You can just draw it on paper. Challenges one on the x-axis, encouragement on the other. And a hundred percent is on the y-axis. So for challenge, how much out of a hundred percent do you like challenge and encouragement, how much of a hundred percent do you like encouragement. And then do the same thing for yourself and one to two key people. Make sure fill out that bar graph for challenge versus encouragement below. So, what I'm gonna ask you now is, when someone gets ready to share with me, given your style and theirs, anything you're seeing that you might need to know about yourself and what might be easier challenging in interacting one or two of these key people. Someone give me an insight as they look at that. Yeah, Lauren. Well, my challenge is like at a hundred percent. I like to be challenged and I feel like a lot of times I might do that for people, my staff even if it's not really what how they are grow. You know what I'm saying? So, I need to keep the mind, like, yeah a member of my team wants more encouragement and less of a challenge in a harsh way. Yeah, like overload them when you do challenge. So, what are their challenge numbers at? The two that you wrote out. Challenge for one of them. The one who I'm talking about is at an her encouragement is at 80. And the other one's more similar to me. And you have a harder time with the one that's at 50, I assume. Correct. 'Cause your challenge is double theirs. So, we think about the bar graph, you're two times more comfortable with challenge than this other person is, right? So then, for you, again, kinda like what I said before, learn how to sneak challenge in with encouragement. A spoonful of sugar helps the challenge go down. I just sang on live camera. That was a lot. Beautiful. Thank you. (laughs) I gotta give you a high-five for that. It's beautiful. I really appreciate that compliment. Okay, anyone else have any key insights they wanna share? Mine is pretty similar to hers. Great. So, you both challenge people and you have encouragement people. Yeah, exactly. So, there's one person who is very similar to me: likes challenge, likes encouragement but the other person that I have more trouble with is the one who has less on the challenge bar graph but needs more encouragement. Yeah, so similar. Very similar. So, you two, we might, we wanna talk after this. We're together on what you gonna do. How you're gonna do that, right? One thing I would say about challenge like that is, get really connected and build a lot of rapport. Be very, show them you care and you're very kind. Then you can take them a little further in challenge. I once told a client, I said, this is the very end of one of our sessions, after an hour. And I wasn't gonna see this, I wasn't gonna see her for about a month, maybe three weeks. And I left her with, not on purpose, but I just knew we were in that space where I could say this to her. I said, name you're living a lie. You're living a lie. And I just, we just ended the meeting basically, after that. And I didn't realize how impactful it was but she brought it up the next session and then we still talk about it. She was very... She likes to be challenged but she's kinda more on the sensitive side and had done a lot of negative self-talk. So, it took me a while. I didn't do that, it wasn't the first session. We had been working together for a while. But I found an opportunity after we'd had this really nice connection to get into that space and challenge them. And clearly, it landed for her. But it worked because I had told her and she had seen and I'd proven to her that I cared so deeply. She knew I was on her team. So, for you two, spend a lot of energy, if you're already good at challenge, which is a skill. A lot of people are afraid of challenging people. Spend a lot of time getting really connected to the people you're coaching. They'll trust you and then they'll let you challenge them. Sam. I have a question. Say, you're dealing with someone who is a cook and loves to have a high degree of freedom and autonomy and the ability to kinda freestyle within their skill building area but you notice that they're kind of taking a along time or struggling to, you know, grasp concepts or achieve these skills that you think a more structured approach would help. Is it better as a coach to try and shift and provide more of that structure? Or is it better to just, like, let them burn the cycles and let them burn the energy growing the way that they wanna grow? For the first time I'll answer your question with a question. 'Cause I wanna see you as a coach, right? What do you think in that situation? You're a coach. How would you do it? I think it's a little bit situational. Like, if there's, if you can introduce a little bit more structure and still have the same degree of affinity toward the coaching and like, still see that growth and potentially save them time and you time and energy and stress and all that stuff. That I think introducing a little bit of structure over time might be helpful but I think.... Let me pause you there. Beautiful. I'd say lean in on that. So, you're right. What I can say is, I celebrate people's superpowers. So, they're really good at riffin and making it up and for the mot part, that's really great for them but you can see that 20% of that is burning them out and it's holding them back. Great, celebrate this, the F out of them for being amazing at being a cook and then say, hey what I'm seeing is because you're not comfortable with more structure, you'e being limited in these ways. So, I'd like to work with you to add just a little bit in in ways that are comfortable for you to take you to the next level. I would just tell them what I'm doing and then I would help them do it. You're coming in as a coach and adding value to the system, putting order into the system. Things move towards disorder over time. That's entropy. We, with our effort, put order in the systems. And so, you as a coach, I would absolutely encourage you to help that person. Watching them.... Sometimes I let people flounder a little bit so they can see. How's that working out for you? You know, not in a mean way but just, like, so they can, it's evidence, and I show them the pattern. And I get really specific. I zoom in. Here's what you did and here's what I'm seeing. Here's the impact and they go, oh yeah. And then you get them in a place where they go, okay, what's an alternative? And then you can lead them through. So, absolutely you can and should, I think. Help people because... Just go back. I wanted to show this really quick. We want them to get to being a chef. If a chef doesn't know how to have any structure or precision. They're probably not gonna get to the highest levels of being a chef in that area, right? So, I would say, you'd be doing them a disservice by withholding that. Any other thoughts. Sam or anyone else on that? Coaches? I think that's helpful because, to your point, you'd be doing someone a disservice as a coach not introducing that structure if you know that they're open to it and it would help, sort of, level up their abilities. Yeah, absolutely. So then the trick for you is gonna be, how do you do it? Yeah. And you're not gonna know. Maybe, you're gonna have to try some things, right? An what they need specifically is gonna be custom. It's gonna be based on them, yeah?