Effortless Thursdays #9: Cooking: a recipe for true resilience

Time for sport to relinquish its paradigm as a teacher of resilience?

I could always tell there was going to be a feast the next day. The amber coloured skin of the duck glistened as it hung in the kitchen with its glaze infused with secret spices patiently drying overnight.

The next evening, pancakes enveloped generous slices of duck with cucumber and hoisin sauce that were whittled away into hungry stomachs in a fraction of the preparation time.

We weren't short of choice at dinners like that: sweet and sour pork, fish balls, beef with spring onions, steamed seabass with ginger, crab with ginger and egg noodles.

This wasn't a restaurant. It was our dining table at home.

“It’s really not that good this time!”

That’s what my mum would plead, downplaying her prodigious culinary feats. I think I once counted 17 dishes that she made. 

Just for one meal. 

Watching my mum cook up “a meal” was like watching a skier effortlessly go down a slalom,

A recipe for true resilience

We often turn to people in sport to learn lessons about skills that we can use in the workplace: we want to lead with resilience, be strategic, and collaborative.

Yet the art of orchestrating a feast - or, as my mum would call it, “a simple meal” - not only teaches us about those skills, it also lays the foundation for a nervous system and immune system that are calm and working in the way they have been designed.

True resilience comes from a combination not just of how we think, act and feel, but also how we set the conditions for our thinking, actions and feelings. 

Cooking is the gift that offers us that combination.

And when we cook real food, we set those conditions by making health - which starts with food - the foundation for our success.

Lessons from sport that we learn from cooking, too

Resilience is a combination of different skills and capacities. Let's take three as an example.

Learning from past challenges: When a recipe you're trying goes wrong at a dinner feast you're hosting - you've set the stove too high - we can learn from this to adjust our future behaviour.  Recently my mum has been making some dumplings with a gluten free flour. The first batch disintegrated. Tasty, but they looked a mess. The second time, she perfected the wait time for the dough. Delicious to eat, and pretty on the plate (but not for long!)

Tapping into your sense of adventure, meaning and purpose: what I learned watching my mum cook was that she took a receipe and turned it into her own. There was adventure every time in the kitchen. Observing her precision turned into an observation of her intuition. It wasn't about "how big is a pinch of cumin", but rather, what could work.

Recognising the positive in a negative situation: sometimes - it usually involved a curry with a thick sauce, the bottom of the pan would burn. Rather than the entire dish being ruined, the salvage operation began, and we were grateful to still have a delicious dish.

Intentionally creating and seeking out supportive environments: My mum made it easy for me to learn. Cooking became fun. Not least because the results were delicious.

There's lots of other benefits as well:

• creativity: I very rarely cook from a recipe nowadays. Instead, I open the fridge and create something with the ingredients I see.

• bounceback: sometimes what I create goes wrong and it tastes bland or I left vegetables cooking for too long. I'm still grateful for the good health that the ingredients give me, and the lesson I can learn for next time (mushy veggies are definitely a pet peeve of mine!).

• pursuit of excellence: cooking is an expression of love, and it’s a joy to be able to learn how to cook real food that transforms into a gift of better health for the people I love. I know how it’s resolved my autoimmune skin condition, psoriasis, and stopped me having to endure debilitating hayfever symptoms in the summer months. Food truly is medicine. 

Lessons from the kitchen

It’s amazing what my mum can create in a small kitchen. What’s more, it’s shown me the lessons that are important in life and leadership. 

What’s my biggest learning going from the kitchen to leadership? 

When I was a not-so-junior lawyer, I made a massive, multi-billion dollar mistake in an agreement for a deal I was working on.

Frankly, I’m not sure what the word “massive” adds to that last sentence. It seemed to fit the enormity of moment when billion dollar deals were the norm.

It was like all the gas burners in the kitchen were stuck on 10/10, burning the thick-sauced curries and turning the veggies into much. 

What had I done?

I had missed including the word “not” in a clause.

The lesson?

Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and bounceback can make those earlier lessons worth enduring.

Bounceback is arguably an even more impactful strength than resilience. Whereas resilience is your ability to get back up quickly after a setback, bounceback is experiencing a setback that you recover from - maybe not quickly - and that experience launching you to even higher levels of success than before.

I think this 👇 is my finest kitchen success: applying years of practice, creativity, adventure, resilience and bounceback. 

My mum’s peking duck recipe turned into my Peking Duck à la Eric 😋

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What I’m listening to

I’ve been drinking bone broth for years. It’s one of the most nourishing ways to soothe the gut.

But listening to this Revolution Health Radio podcast from Chris Kresser - RHR: Promoting Healthy Longevity with Bone Broth, with Dr. Kara Fitzgerald and Jill Sheppard Davenport - reminded me of the benefits, and addressed some of the concerns us bone broth drinkers have wondered for a while about potential lead and metals toxicity from bones. 

TL:DR Keep drinking bone broth for tasty health benefits.

A few things surprised me:

• that there are broths you can make if you are vegetarian. It’s one of the reasons I’ve ordered this book.

• If you’re histamine intolerant, they recommend an approach to minimise histamine flare ups. 

• there’s recipes for broth based ice lollies

Consuming bone broth is one of the ways we can put a piece of our health foundation jigsaw puzzle together. I usually have a stash of homemade broth in the fridge or freezer that I use for sauces, soups, or for drinking.

Broths are full of glycine, an important amino acid that we don’t get enough of in our modern diets that are focused on lean cuts. Eating the traditionally cheaper, gelatinous cuts, like shin, shanks and oxtails, helps increase your levels. 

Asides from soothing your gut, improving the wrinkles in your skin glycine is an inhibitory neurotransmitter that can decrease anxiety and promote mental calmness. It can also help sleep by assisting the uptake of tryptophan and production of serotonin and melatonin.

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That’s it for this week!

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