I got in this conversation with this person.

We kind of bumped into one another in LinkedIn as, as want to do.

And he was a chef and he wanted to pivot towards coaching.

And so he was asking me about some of the stuff that I do and he's like, yeah,

I didn't even know this was a thing.

Chefs coaching other chefs.

And I said, well, it hasn't been, but it will be.

Yeah.

Well, and and we've been, you and I have been working together on a few

different things for about a year now.

And, and you know, this comes up a lot.

It's like, what is a, a career coach for chefs?

Like what, like, I mean, in the title we've said, you know, what is that?

So there's, what is that discussion

today about that, I think, yeah.

And and just to decide, I actually booked a client the other day and part of the

conversation started with, He had gone, you know, he's in the culinary industry.

He went on looking for career coaches online, and he kept coming across

kind of similar focuses kind of mainstream in industry career coaches.

And he thought to himself, yeah, I don't even know if these

guys are gonna relate to me.

Yeah, well, like, can, can they even relate to, to the

experience that that I've had?

And I thought that was an interesting.

An interesting viewpoint, not, not one that I previously thought about, but I

think this will give us an opportunity to not only talk about what career

coaching is in general, but how I actually specifically bring that to the culinary

industry and why that might be a little bit more necessary now than it was before.

So, I wanna appreciate you for one moment just because it's our one year

anniversary, and I, I just wanted to let you know that there's, there's

only 1% of, or some crazy statistic, it's either 1% or 10% of all podcasters

who actually make it a full year.

So I just wanted to say thank you because it's been a really

enjoyable experience with you and I, I certainly have learned a lot.

Likewise.

Happy anniversary.

Happy anniversary.

So we'll get to, Culinary Career coach.

What's that?

Right after these messages.

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vocalize, and I guess you know.

Maybe the first question would be, Jim, like why does anybody need a career coach?

Well, I think we should spin that around and ask you, I

mean, you're a big part of the conversation today is about really

like, let's dig into, you know, why people can benefit from some support.

You know, how, a little bit about your strategy on this and

kind of the results mechanism.

But you know, one of the things that I was thinking about leading into this

conversation is that, I had a really big wake up call when I left the sort

of operations world of restaurants.

Mm-hmm.

Because I thought, this is what the whole industry's like.

You know, everything, every restaurant is the same.

We all have the same issues or challenges or whatever it might be.

And it wasn't until I started working with, you know, multiple restaurants

all over the world, basically.

I was like, Everybody has a different challenge going on.

Sure.

There's the big picture ones that are the same, but everybody's got unique

market challenges and you know, these things that you have to try to work

through and, and, you know, maybe you can take this and, and run with it in

a second, but one of the things that I've always found interesting about, I.

Your career path.

And now what you do is you've got so much experience in so many

markets, in so many environments, in so many types of businesses.

You know, there's, there's an insane amount of knowledge there.

So, I don't know, maybe you could kind of take that and

just like, what's the basis of

this whole thing?

Yeah, I, I, and thank you for pointing that out.

'cause sometimes sometimes it's easy to forget just how much we know or.

Midway through my career I was asked to do a quorum on the culinary program

for the Art Institute, the, the Chain of Art Institutes of America.

Mm-hmm.

And their subprogram of culinary arts.

And there were about me and about 10 other chefs and other facilitators in the room.

And the facilitator started by asking like, what are the, what are the

core competencies that you know, That come in real handy with business.

And what do you think our students should be leaving the program with?

Mm-hmm.

And in space of about 50 minutes, she had these yellow stickies all over this

wall of stuff that, that we kind of have gained knowledge in and probably not

given enough credit for even to ourselves.

I looked at that wall and I said, wow, like that is, that's a lot.

And you know, 15 years old I started washing dishes at the local restaurant.

Yeah, the only reason I I started there is because that's where

my dad used to like to hang out.

He was a college professor, so on his breaks, he'd go down there and he'd kind

of laugh and joke with the waitresses and so I think it was kind of a, a

way in which, you know, I could be a little bit closer to my father, and

not that we were estranged, but you know, I, I kind of wanted to see him,

what he was like outside of the family.

Yeah.

It turns out he is a pretty charming person and everybody

seemed to enjoy talking to him.

And one Friday night I was walking past the, the kitchen door with a

whole bunch of plates in my arms that had just got done washing and.

There were two cooks that worked there, both female.

One was a, a larger woman, her name was Artelia White.

She had a gold tooth in the front of her mouth and she was always

smiling and she would work the pass.

And back then it was like the stainless steel wheel that used

to spin in the window where people would put the tickets up.

Mm-hmm.

And so she worked that area and then there was a very thin, severe

woman that worked next to her and.

One, as I said, one Friday night, I was walking past the

kitchen and it was in full throw.

Man.

They were, they were really working hard, but yet they had this, the only way I

could describe it is this dance that they were doing between one another,

almost like a articulated symphony of.

Of steam and pans banging, and yet they didn't say anything to one another.

They knew each other's moves so well.

And that just kind of mesmerized me and I said, I, I don't know what the

hell that is, but I wanna get me some.

So I offer.

And what market was that at?

That was that was right outside of Chicago, on the Indiana side.

So I lived in the Chicago land region is how they refer to it.

Mm-hmm.

And that could stretch as far as you know, almost to Wisconsin and

Michigan, both kind of like at the bottom of Lake lake Michigan.

Mm-hmm.

And so I recognized that if I wanted to go further in my career,

I would need to like, kind of get to downtown Chicago some way, but

both geographically and skill level.

Yeah.

So very often I put myself in jobs that you know, I talked

a really good game and to the.

To your point, you know, I lied a lot, you know, about what I was capable of doing.

I went to work at a Greek restaurant and the guy says, can

you clean te beef tenderloins?

And I said, oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure.

And the very first day I'm standing next to this guy kind of watching out of the

corner of my eye how, how he was doing it.

And I wanna tell you, if anybody's ever, you know, peeled silver skin off of beef

tenderloin, it's, there's an art to it.

And I'm afraid the first couple tender ones I did, there was more meat in

the trash than there was on my table.

You butchered it and not in the right way.

I think one of my saving graces in my career has been and this

being endlessly curious about things.

So I always want to kind of try to figure things out.

I see something and it's always a fascination for me.

I love organization.

I love systems.

I never really had a, an idea of a type of cuisine that I wanted to create.

You know, like Charlie Trotter or, or, or anybody else.

And the thing that really hooked me early was this idea of community within

a restaurant and everybody's in that kitchen working so hard that it builds

relationships really, really quickly.

And you really know who to depend on and who not to depend.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So by virtue of the fact that I could, that I worked really hard and

I was dependable, I became kind of someone that people could count on.

I got my very first executive chef job relatively early in my twenties.

Completely unprepared by the grace.

There was a, there was a crusty old guy that was a food and beverage

director by the name of Ed Jameson, who used to be a purchaser for the

Black Hawk Restaurant downtown Chicago.

Back in the days when they would actually have to go down to the meat

market and he'd had a, he had a stamp.

Mm-hmm.

And an a pad and would go down the lines of these.

Sides of beef and he'd be checking 'em out and stamping 'em for the Black Hawk.

And then he'd spend the rest of the day rest of that afternoon in the

in the office drinking brandy with the guy who was running the floor.

So ed took a shine of me.

And we both kind of came to this conclusion that even though at

first we distrusted one another we were willing to work together.

So I'm here by the grace of several mentors that really

saw my greatness before I did.

And who really guided me, you know, they, they allowed me to make a

certain amount of mistakes that wouldn't necessarily hurt the guest,

but they allowed me to trip and fall.

Because, you know, at that age I was pretty full of myself

and I needed some humility.

Yeah.

So I got taken down probably in my career, probably at three or four times where

you know, to quote Anthony Bourdain, there's nothing like the restaurant

business to pound some humility into.

Hundred percent.

So before you go any further growing, did you play sports?

Yeah, I was a, I was a wrestler in high school.

As a matter of fact, at at one point my, my only dream was to get a college

scholarship to Iowa State and wrestle with Dan Grabble, who at that time was the,

was the United States Gold Medal Champion.

And then something happened that kind of put me on a different trajectory.

So this need, this need for community, this need for a place

to belong really mattered to me.

Yeah.

And then, and

then you were in at least one, if not multiple bands, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Singing in a rock and roll band.

As, as a matter of fact at the first hotel I ever ran, we put a band together

out of people in the kitchen to play the the employee Christmas party.

And that ended up lasting 15 years.

And you can, you can find us on Spotify.

The band's name is Naked Ambition.

Thank you very much.

Amazing.

Well, and the reason, so the reason I ask those two things, like as

you're starting to talk about community in the kitchen mm-hmm.

And, and you know, the mentorship side of things and letting people fail and

how that whole process goes, which I wanna dig into that in a minute.

But there's also a, a side of.

That's competitive, you know, the, the athletics thing, you know, creating

this competitive nature and there's a camaraderie thing that exists

there, which I'm sure you sort of found in the music side of things.

So I always found that your story is really interesting that way.

But thank you.

So, okay, so letting people fail, I mean, there's definitely a

connection to business, to learning and coaching and mentorship for sure.

That's one of the things I always found was the hardest.

As I moved up in management, and I'm hoping you can elaborate on this, one

of the hardest things that I always found was when do you let someone

struggle and potentially almost fail so that they can learn through that, and

when do you step in and bail 'em out?

Right.

Like that's, there's, there's such a fine line there, right?

So anyway, do, do you have any, take, any

thoughts on that?

I, I do and I have a very quick story and and the other point that I wanted to make

is, you know, you mentioned those kind of physical and emotional attributes.

The other one I would say is creativity.

I.

So the reason I ended up in a band is because I found myself being

creative in, in several different ways.

Very often people come to the culinary industry and they think, this is my life.

This is all I ever want to do.

And typically my very first piece of co piece of coaching is, yeah, that's cool.

Now get a hobby.

Because in order to have a, to have a creative outlet outside of work is

a very, very powerful thing because you can get fed emotionally that way.

And it does have, doesn't have anything to do with what you do

or how you're making a living.

And could very often turn into something lucrative, but as a side hustle.

Yeah.

And so to your point about that whole delegation thing, so it was a

restaurant in Fort Lauderdale that I was running, it was a seafood restaurant

on the Intercoastal, did mad numbers.

You know, typical nights were seven, 700 to a thousand I think new Year's Eve.

We did one New Year's Eve, we did 1200 covers and yeah, 1200 covers.

Yeah.

Wow.

You start off, you start off with a, a 350 early bird between six and seven 30.

And that, you know, warms up the room and gets everybody in action.

And there was a guy who I hired as my sous chef, Greg Barnhill, who was a

really hot I mean he had had his own restaurant in Fort Collins, Colorado.

I was looking at his resume, thinking to myself, what the

hell is he applying here for?

And will he show me up?

But I hired him anyway.

And so one of the, I, I knew he could cook fabulously.

But I didn't necessarily know if he understood systems and expediting.

And in that particular location, there was one printer that was on

expo at every station, which were there, there were seven stations.

Had to listen to the Expeditor.

There were no tickets there.

So I got really, really good at expediting and I loved it.

It was, you know, such an adrenaline rush for me.

Mm-hmm.

So I said, okay, okay, Greg, you're gonna do early birds.

Okay, cool.

And I stood, you know, kind of out of his way to the side.

I watched him, you know, get in the weeds really, really quickly and he was, the

line was about to crash and burn and that's when I kind of tapped, tapped

him on the shoulder, said, okay, I want you to step over here and let me, let

me just get you outta the weeds here so that I can, you know, so that we can

better understand what the process, which is, you know, you're calling, you're

calling the long ticket, long cook.

Long cook items on all the tickets, and then you're working the first four.

And at that point, you know, you're pulling plates out of the window

and building trays and sending the food runners on their way.

And he got to be very, very, very good.

So in that case, I wanted him to like, get in the jam get in the juice

so that he understood that there was a little bit more to it then.

What he thought it was.

And you know, there might've been a little humility about it, but I would not allow

the guests to suffer and like, let the line crash, of course, because at that

point that that exercise is terrible.

Now, I would, I, I've come away from many, many experiences understanding that

really the best thing if you're coaching and mentoring, so real quick definition.

I always thought it was leading people, you know, getting a group of

people who may speak three different languages from five different company

countries and communicating in a way that each one of them understand.

But we're basically going, going over the hill telling them what, what it is to do.

Coaching and mentoring is completely different in which you are actually

allowing them this opportunity to know not only attune to their guidance, but

also to like, let them make their own mistakes in a way that that would be.

That would drive home the lesson even deeper.

The, you know, the famous trope is, you know, telling your kid, don't

stick your finger in the light socket.

Don't stick your finger light sock.

And then the kid sticks his finger in light socket because very

often knowledge unearned mm-hmm.

Represents no value.

That's why, you know, a lot of people sign up for a lot of free

programs and then never do them.

Right.

They'll sit on their computer hard drive.

They won't do it because it doesn't represent any, any value to them.

Hence some spin in the game.

You got it right there.

So it took me a good long time to recognize that within the culinary

industry, it could not be about the me, it had to be about the we.

As a matter of fact, Greg was standing next to me as I cooked a staff meal for

everybody, and I'm kind of standing there.

I'm proud of myself.

Look at what I did.

Luckily, everybody's so happy and he turned to me.

He said if you think that cooking them a meal would would stop them

from gutting you like a fish.

Had they had the chance you're completely wrong.

I'm like, what?

Hmm?

Like, because no amount of food is gonna make up for, you know, Basically the abuse

and the hard, it wasn't abuse, but it was just a very, very hard operation to run.

So I was hard on all the people.

Yeah.

And for a long time, a long time.

For me, it was about the mission as opposed to the people.

And since that opportunity came to, to make my mistakes and to

learn, I recognized that it's gotta be about the people before

the mission because the mm-hmm.

If not, then I'm on the line by myself and I can't run seven stations by myself.

So right by,

so sorry.

Finish, finish your thought there.

No, it was, it was kind of, it's by necessity in order to be

successful, to invest in your people.

And, you know, 20 years later, Greg hired me as his sous chef at one

of the oldest resorts in the United States, the Homestead Omni homestead

in the western part of Virginia.

And I hadn't been a sous chef for 30 years and I was actually

out of the industry for a while.

I was gonna take a different path.

And just like the old mob thing, you know, I thought I was out

and then they pulled me back in.

So I, I was separate from my partner who, who would go on to be my, become

my wife, but, She was down in Florida.

I was, I was in Virginia.

I'm like, I don't understand why I'm here.

Like, I don't, I just don't get it like this, this.

And she says, why don't you just be where you're at and have what you have?

Why don't you just be there completely?

I'll come up and visit.

You can come down and visit, but you know, this whole splitting yourself emotionally

is not gonna do anything for anybody.

And so I took her advice and I recognized that I had this superpower, which was.

Basically running around this resort, having a thousand conversations a

day, just checking in with people, developing these deep relationships,

creating a community within our particular department, which at,

at peak was 150, 160 associates.

Some a large portion that made up by J one and, and H two B visas.

And so there'd be like a click of, or a group coming from

the Philippines or India.

And very often, you know, they would take over as the crew in a particular outlet.

That meant not only that I had to like ramp myself up culturally in order to

motivate and teach them, but also to give them an opportunity again to kind

of like, oh, you think you got this cool, I'm just gonna stand over here

while, while you try to get this done.

Mm-hmm.

So this idea of building community from within, building really,

specifically good, communication skills, relationship building has, It's

been a large portion of my success.

And I also recognize it's not anything that's taught in culinary schools.

And you know, if you're in the insurance business, if you're in the

insurance business and you're gonna manage a team, you might have six

months to a year training before you're even allowed to manage that team.

And because our environment moves so fast and a few other different

scenarios, very often nobody, nobody gets a chance to learn that,

that until they're in the mix and.

Communication skills, leadership skills relationship building skills

that's not really on the job.

Training doesn't necessarily make that a good thing.

Right?

Yeah.

So hard to build those skills while you're cutting fish.

Totally.

And, and there's a big difference between I think management and

mentorship coaching, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, I think one of the things that I'm curious about, and maybe you

could talk a little bit about, is.

You know, you obviously had a really interesting and and exciting path

up through your management career.

Mm-hmm.

Right?

And learning some lessons and some skills along the way.

Yeah.

So, but let's fast forward to now.

Yep.

Yep.

What's your process with people like, someone comes and you identify

somebody, or you get in touch with somebody, you get introduced to

somebody and they're like, listen.

I'm in this position.

I love the industry, I love my career.

I'm, I need to get, you know, over the, the hump I need to get, I really

want this next role or this next, you know, bump in compensation or this

next opportunity and I need some help.

Like what's, what's the process?

How do you interact with that?

Yeah, I built up this framework that I found very helpful

for myself, and it's lent itself very well to my coaching practice.

As a matter of fact, I have a hundred percent success rate

amongst all my coaching clients.

Some going back to their place of business or employment with a renewed vigor

and a grounding that kind of, that is not necessarily passion, but you know,

it's, it's a great way to be in that.

It's.

You know, passion lends itself to ups and downs, whereas being very well grounded

and neutral in your position means that stuff can happen around you and you're

not necessarily getting taken off.

So the very first thing is you know, we have a, there's a very detailed initial

assessment that I have them go through that even though those questions might not

necessarily be about work, certainly to me, illuminates some opportunity for them.

And then, and then there's an initial discovery call in which we kind of dig in

and see where they're at, where they want to go, and what's standing in their way.

So what's the gap between where they, where they are and where

they think they should be?

Now, I'd love, I, I'd love to be able to say that that's all mechanics,

but it's not very often there's, there's some emotional components

and there may be some work that maybe they've been hesitant to do.

I had a client whose parents owned three restaurants in middle of Ohio.

She had been tapped on the shoulder to run them.

Mm-hmm.

Her mother did Mo, her mother did most of the work, and sometimes

that mother-daughter relationship doesn't really work very well.

And I went there, I went there on a site visit and mind Mindy's okay

with me telling this story, but.

Mindy and I went out for lunch and I said, is this anything you really wanna even do?

Mm, right.

Because I, I saw the tension between them and, and it didn't look like her mother

was going to just leave and hands off.

It wasn't gonna be that simple.

And as it turned out, she let that question in.

And as now and at university studying to be a counselor and she wants to counsel

people in the hospitality industry because of what her experience was like.

You know, it can be, it can be fairly traumatic to be in this industry if you're

not prepared for it, and you carry that trauma with you from job to job to job.

So the first so after those two processes, then it's then it's a discovery process

around what are your core values.

So there and core values are different than what you're really good at.

Core values are like what?

What's non, what's non-negotiable?

Do you need autonomy?

Do you need support?

Do you need clear communication?

You know, what are those things that you are unwilling to negotiate away?

Because very often we're taking jobs because of a financial hardship or

whatever, and don't really get to ask them, ask ourselves those questions.

So to be in this discovery process of, okay, so what's my why?

How do I actually make that?

Why live in the world?

So one's an internal process, the other one's external because they gotta call

people who, who know them and say, yeah, so so what do you know about me?

Like, how do I actually do this kind of stuff?

And that's always a great aha because very often they're unaware that of the way

that they're showing up to other people.

And it could be in complete congruence with that and sometimes not.

But yeah, very since the pandemic and since, you know, 6 million

people got out of the industry, and now I think we're back to

about 4 million have returned back.

I really under, I really understood that this was an opportunity

for them to choose consciously.

Like, do you really wanna be in this industry?

Right.

There's nothing, there's nothing wrong with, you know, taking

a job outside of the industry.

And chef Paul Sorgel during an interview I did for Chef Life Radio said, you

know, if they're not happy, leave.

Just leave, just get out of the industry.

Mm-hmm.

And sometimes what happens is they recognize they fall back in

love with the thing that they were doing before and end up going back.

I think the chef I think the burn chef project did a survey where they,

where it was determined that of the people that left the industry, almost

70% were planning to come back.

Interesting.

But what I knew is that we had to change as an industry and as a

culture in order to make it safe for those folks to come back because.

This veneration of overwork, this you know, beating each other

up verbally and emotionally.

That that shit doesn't work.

Yeah.

And, and, and didn't.

So there's, so there's the discovery process around the, hows the whys.

Then there is a great resume exercise I do that will el immediately

illuminate any recurring patterns that happened, not necessarily at

work, but also in your personal life.

'cause there's an idea of.

Writing down in those timeframes the major life events the story that you made up

about it, and then, and then to tell the story, and then to tell the story as a

reporter would completely neutral in order to see the reality of what was going on.

For me, the first time I did it, what I, what popped way up for me was this

idea that anytime that there were things going wrong in my life, I would typically

pivot to having an illicit romance, because at least I knew how to do that.

At least that made me feel good, you know?

Folks are generally predisposed to running away from pain and towards pleasure.

So when you have someone who thinks that you're the greatest thing

since sliced bread, sometimes that's the easiest pivot to make.

Yeah.

To the detriment of all the rest of my relationships.

Right.

So the other, the great thing is that once, once you're grounded

in your core values and the things that are non-negotiable, then you

can start interviewing employers as opposed to the other way around.

And to be really engaged in that process is very, very powerful.

I.

Because you're not a victim anymore.

You're actually empowered to make the right decision based upon what you want.

Mm-hmm.

And what you want out of your life.

And so I, I think it's something that's incredibly.

Powerful.

And from then it's like mechanics.

Okay?

So are, are you in transition right now?

Are you, you want to, do you want a better job, a bigger job?

Do you wanna become a food and beverage director?

Do you want to move to a different market segment?

You've been in restaurants now, you want to be in hotels.

All these particular skill sets are at the core of the same,

but they're slightly different.

And so, Then it becomes interview prep you know, resume work.

It's whatever needs to happen in order to get them so well prepared

that when, when they're in the interview, not only do they not falter,

but they feel completely secure.

So one of the things with one of my clients, he kept trying to figure out

what, what the employer wanted to hear.

And I said, every, and so we roleplayed this.

And every time he would stumble on his words, I'm like, that's

because you're trying to figure out the answer that I trying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what, so what would it look like if you actually knew cold?

What that answer was, regardless of what they want to hear, because then

you're being completely congruent.

You know in your heart exactly what that is, and you come

across as being confident.

Well read.

There's also a couple books that I like to give folks during the, during

the coaching process, depending where they're in their management principles.

One is Radical Candor by or Radical Cander by Kim Scott, and the other

one is by our friend Kelly Ingham.

You know, maximizing team performance, the ABCs of leadership, which is

assumptions, boundaries and communication.

You know, those three things.

Mm-hmm.

Great.

Both.

Yeah.

We've had around the show several times, but every time it's like, hits me in

my heart in such a way that like those two books combined provide the playbook

for managing and leading people in, in our post covid hospitality 2.0 Reality.

So there's, so, so

how, how long do you typically spend with people?

Like how, how much time

is this?

Yeah, so this process, how long does this take?

It's pretty detailed.

So it's very detailed.

There's a bunch of worksheets.

So I have someone who's, who I'm onboarding right now.

So that foundational session is about 90 minutes.

The second session is 60 minutes.

Typically those are within a week.

If someone's on a, a five week program, they want to crash, of course, then

it's, you know, 60 minutes every time.

And I'll also do three months, six months in a year.

And those work a little bit differently where there's, you know, mm-hmm.

2 45 minute calls, there's homework between each one.

There's stuff that they get to do to not only stabilize their

immediate situation, but lay the groundwork for where they want to go.

Yeah.

I, I had a gentleman who a client who knew that he needed to learn more, period.

He wanted to learn more about himself.

It wasn't necessarily about the job, but it was about him.

And that was an incredibly rewarding experience for me because it's not just

me telling people what to do again.

If I'm gonna, if I'm going to coach and mentor and teach them how to coach

and mentor by example and model mature professionalism, which is ultimately

what this is about, then good morning, someone's shouting out from Facebook.

Good morning, chef.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us.

It's an opportunity to for those folks to, to grow.

In an exponential manner.

So yeah, we can do it quickly, but really the process between three

months, six months and a year are individualized as to where they're going.

Right.

I have a guy who I'm very close with, who I, who worked with me at the Omni

Homestead and then eight years later said, yeah, I think I need some coaching.

Okay, buddy.

Yeah.

Couldn't be happier.

Couldn't be happier.

And sometimes that might, that might mean.

That their relationships change at home.

That might mean that their relationships change at work.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

But, but the worst thing is to walk into this situation and, and be uncoachable,

think you have all the answers.

Mm-hmm.

And, and not be willing to go where that leads.

Yeah.

Right.

For sure.

Like, like I, yeah, I want, I want the best job I've ever had,

but, you know, I don't want to have to stop drinking and do it.

Well, you know, and having been with you, Jim, over the last year, It's

also helped inform me and my process and how I coach people based upon how

you were in the hospitality industry.

Mm-hmm.

And I gotta say thank you for that because, you know, it's been an

enriching and rewarding experience for me to be able to kind of frame that I.

My own work in such a way that not only does it make sense to me, but it makes

sense to others because I don't want anything to be a mystery about this.

Yeah.

I wanna be completely upfront, honest with everybody.

And you know, it's for chefs and hospitality professionals

who want to enjoy their career without sacrificing their life.

And that's not everybody.

There's a lot of folks that are still committed to this sacrifice for your,

for my passion idea, and And that works until, it doesn't, until your,

you know, personal relationships are crashing or, or your health.

The other part of this is there's always going to be a, a, a part of my

coaching that is about creating a, a practice of self nurture and self-care.

Mm-hmm.

For me, nothing in my life ever changed until I did, until I was

ready to let go of my bullshit story.

Mm-hmm.

You know, I'm not gonna listen to my own bullshit anymore.

I'm gonna ask for help.

Because Einstein once said, you know, you can't solve a problem

with the same mind that created it.

So very often we need an outside perspective.

I had someone I had someone do an audit of Chef Life Radio just the other day,

and they had three specific points that they told me, and it blew me away

because in the back of my mind I knew it.

Right.

Your call to action.

What's your call to action?

Why are you talking about memberships if you, if, if you do coaching?

I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know.

So it's, it's a, it's a sneaky process because I.

Theoretically, I'm not telling them anything that they don't already know

or don't have the access to learn.

Yeah.

And very often that that remembering is so powerful that they're like,

oh yeah, I, yeah, I knew that.

Yeah.

So the, so the people that you spend time with Yep.

Chefs, hospitality, pros, whatever, whatever their role might be.

Yep.

Is there a, I guess two part question.

Is there a, a common thing that they're, they're looking for?

And, and, and the second part of the question would be, what's the

common feedback when they're done?

Sure.

I would say that there's, they're, they could be in very, very

different stages of their career.

They could be in different market segments.

But the one but the one common factor is they know that there's

something more available.

They just don't know how to get there.

And that's where I get to come in.

The feedback from.

That I've gotten.

I just got just celebrated with someone the other day because they just got

the job of their dreams and they didn't even know that they wanted it, you know?

Nice.

I said, well, how, how are you?

And she said I haven't been this good in years.

Amazing.

So, to, to feel on purpose in the right place with the right with the right

team members and the right, you know, to have support in your, in your career.

Like, there's nothing better than having a food and beverage director

or a general manager who, who gets you and wants to support you because

then, you know, like me, I'm liable to do just about anything in order

to, you know, keep that relationship solid and, and moving forward.

Yeah.

At the same time, I wanna make sure that I don't sacrifice my family,

my friends, my own self nurture.

Because at the end of the day, I talk about this all the time, the

self-identification as a chef, as who I am versus what I do.

Simply because the standpoint, at some point you have to, you, you're

gonna have to hang your apron up.

You know, it's a physically intense, emotionally draining

intellectually stimulating mm-hmm.

Career and yet, There's gonna be a moment where you're gonna have to walk away and

pick something else, whether that's a different market segment like healthcare

or turn to turn to teaching because you want to give back, but at some point

you get to hang up your apron and you can't be aligned with that anymore.

So if, yeah, if you're, then who are you?

Are you still a chef?

Are you a, a former chef?

I mean, like, and yeah.

Identity is a big part of it, right?

And if, and if you're counting on that in order to get your emotional.

Emotional gratification, then that ends too.

And then what happens then?

You know, the statistics for, for in the United States for men who

die after retirement, like within years of retirement, it's staggering.

Hmm.

It's not, it's not so much for the feminine, but for men, it seems

like if they, like they need, we need, I need a sense of purpose

in order to get up every morning.

Mm-hmm.

And so if you don't have that in your life or you think that you're gonna

golf your day away or go fishing, you know, there's only so much fish.

Fishermen would probably disagree with me, but you know, geez, how

many days can you go fishing?

Every single one.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

So what's, what's the weight like, kind of just getting back

to the, the process thing again.

What's, if, if we went and asked 50 people that have worked, what

would they say about the sort of, How would they describe this is what

it was like when we were finished?

Where am I?

Like is there a, is there a sort of a common theme?

Yeah.

And again, I just want to kind of reference chef Holly in that, you

know, she had no, she was unclear that safety was important to her.

She had got she had got unceremoniously dumped at a resort after putting

in nine years without necessarily even any feedback from anybody.

They just put her on leave, pending investigation,

whatever the hell that means.

Because a new company had taken it over and wanted to put in their, and

installed their people like many, many do.

But for her, this idea of emotional safety was so powerful and yet she recognized

that that was the thing that she could give to others that would matter the most.

Mm-hmm.

Very often those things that we didn't get enough of as we were growing

up instead of us clinging to that, like, we really, really need it.

That should, that should be a, an immediate giveaway that that's

actually our gift to give to others.

Which I know is kind of a heady concept, but very often it's like,

I, I knew I knew that, but I didn't really know how deep that went.

And working with you, like again, to come back to this point, what I really

want is, is for you, chef, or for you, Jim or anybody, to have their own

connection to their own guidance, because that, and, and to be able to trust

that, like, that, that gut feeling like this, this situation is not working.

And yet you still, you still sit there and grind, grind, grind,

grind and grind and mm-hmm.

And make some terrible sacrifices.

So to be able to be reconnected to your own guidance so that your

own gurus, so that from now on you're your own best advocate.

That's a powerful, powerful thing.

Yeah,

for sure.

And so, you know, we've talked a lot about your career, how you've

kind of gone through this process of learning and changing and

you know, the Einstein quotes.

It's genius, obviously Einstein.

And a little bit about kind of like, okay, here's where people are at when

they start, here's where people are at, you know, through the process.

I mean, there's so much value in this type of support for people, especially

in the restaurant industry, I think because, so I mean, I was one of these

people, but so often on the job training is what it actually means, is like,

here's the keys, you're in charge.

We changed your title on the schedule, so away you go.

Right, right.

And, and those people are left to really kind of, in a lot of cases,

struggle their way through trying to learn a lot of these skills.

So, you know, I think what you're doing is great for the industry and there's

a lot of, there's a lot of need for

it.

Thanks.

I mean, I actually had to leave the industry in order

to learn some of these things.

I had, I had to leave the industry to take a, you know, a.

Actual coaching course to learn how to coach people.

You know, again, telling people what to do is, you know, can be

qualified as leadership or at, you know, at the very least, management.

But in order to be a great leader, you have to be invested in someone else's

welfare and someone else's growth.

And that's not necessarily always apparent.

So for me, it was a, it's a, it's a legacy project to give back to the industry.

You know, it's chef life coaching.

It's not Adam Lamb, the chef life coach.

Because I am looking for others to partner with.

So not only we can grow the brand, but we can also grow the availability of

this type of coaching to more people.

Because, you know, they might not think they need it now, that they

can kind of struggle along that they, that they know what's best.

And sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not true.

Again, to have an outside perspective and say, so you don't think this is

causing you a problem when you know you're in the middle of, you know,

talking about getting divorced with your wife or whatever that conversation is.

Mm-hmm.

Is really, really powerful.

So, you know, underneath that umbrella of leadership, you know, the three pillars

are relationship building, communication skills, and community building.

And with those three skill sets any chef can become A magnet for, for folks

who wanna learn in the industry, become the preferred, preferred employer on

their block, as long as they're in congruence with, you know, the core

values of the place that they work at.

And if not the under to have the understanding that the skill sets

that we have built up that wall with all those yellow stickies

are transferable to any industry.

And there's a lot of industries out there that need the type of, you know, program

management, leadership, mentorship.

That, that we learn in our industry mm-hmm.

That, that a lot of us take for granted.

Like, what do you mean?

Well, dude, it's just, you know, the product's, the product to product, whether

it's a plate of chicken or an ebook or a building, you know, it's all the same.

Yeah.

And it's just so what's our process to get there?

Amazing.

So as you and I have been doing this now for a year and we try

to always make sure that there's some takeaways for people, right?

Right.

Yep.

So I know that you've probably got a few things prepared here, but Sure.

If I'm a hospitality professional, a chef, an up and coming, you

know, whatever it might be a future rockstar in the industry.

Yeah.

What are the, what are three things?

Like what do you recommend that people consider around

this concept?

So, so the very first thing I would say is, if nothing else, Make sure that you

get the two books radical Candor by Kim Scott and maximizing Team Performance,

the ABCs of Leadership by Kelly Feather.

Those are two really great places to start.

I'm not advocating that you go out and get a coach, although depending on

where you want to be, I have a coach.

I know you have a coach.

Several, some people have several different coaches,

and again, I a few actually.

Yeah, yeah.

Understand that you know, you'll be continually learning and growing

throughout your career and may need some support time to time, primarily

from the standpoint of like, it feels really good to have yourself.

Being got by someone else, right?

That's not, that's, that's not, that's not aligned with your work and it's not

aligned with your relationships, right?

You could go home and have that, or go to work and have that, but how do

you actually know where the mm-hmm.

Where the true is until you get something from the outside, go

like, yeah, yeah, man, you're right, you're right on the path, man.

You're, you're doing great.

Keep going.

So, so

the biggest, the best example I have of anyone that I've

ever met in my life around why coaching is important or just not

why coach is important, but mm-hmm.

That just, it is, and it, it provides value and all these different things.

It's an an old colleague of mine mm-hmm.

He.

I actually used to work for him.

He might have even hired me, I can't remember exactly, but definitely promoted

me a few times throughout my career.

He's probably 35 years older than me.

He's retired now.

Uhhuh, he's, you know, he's so, he's in his seventies.

He has five different coaches and he's in his seventies.

One of them is financial coach.

One of them's his nutrition coach.

One of them is his golf coach.

One of them is his tennis coach, and one of them is, is his bridge coach.

Mm.

Because the things that he's passionate about and that he knows are important

in his life, he wants to continue to be learning and be successful at.

So he has coaches, he has a bridge coach.

I mean, I didn't even know that was a thing, but I think it's, every time I

speak to him, I'm reminded that there's, you know, it's, it's important to have,

you know, that whether it's mentorship, Guidance advice, you know, someone to

talk through things with and a process.

So I think what we're doing for the industry is amazing and would

definitely recommend that anyone who is in a position of wanting to

move forward should be in touch with

you.

Right.

And the other thing I would say is if you're not part of a community, you

need to be, and I'm not necessarily talking about a Facebook group with

you know, shitty waitress memes.

I'm talking about being in a committed community of like-minded individuals.

Yeah.

Not only so you can see yourself reflected, but you can also be in

contribution to others, whether that's the a c F or I mean, there's

plenty of professional organizations that you can be a part of.

You can come join the chef Life Brigade at chef life coaching.com/.

Brigade that's the only online community not associated with a

social media platform of like-minded individuals within the industry.

Mm-hmm.

Again we're not about carpet and bitching about what is we want to know about what's

possible and how we're gonna move forward.

Amazing.

So, is that the best way for people to get

ahold of you?

They can get ahold of me several ways.

They can get ahold of me through LinkedIn.

Facebook, I have pretty good presence in.

You can go to chef life coaching.com.

Or you can go to chef life radio.com, which is the podcast that I do that's

in support of that particular thing.

DMM me message me.

You can call me at (828) 407-3359.

If you are currently in distress and you need some immediate help, I can point you

in the direction of some great assets.

And you don't necessarily have to be in a dire emotional

state to, to want to improve.

It could be just part of your process, and again, you're looking for someone

to kind of reflect back to you.

So amazing.

Thanks for giving me this time to talk about what I do and how it, how it how

it serves not only the, the professionals within it, but also the industry as well.

Jim, thank you.

Well, it's been a pleasure and, and I think there's

lots of key takeaways there.

So thanks so much, Adam, and it's been a pleasure spending time with you on this

podcast over the last year or two, so

I, I couldn't agree more, man, and I can't wait till next week.

I'll see you soon.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of Turning the Table with

me, Adam Lamb and Jim Taylor.

We're on a mission to change the food and beverage industry for the better by

focusing on staff mental health, physical and emotional wellbeing, by proactively

measuring and managing staff workloads.

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