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Mise En Place Your Life: How This Culinary Concept Can Boost Your Productivity

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“Mise en place” may sound like a highfalutin term, but it is a French phrase that means “set in place.” In the culinary world, it refers to the practice of preparing all ingredients and equipment in advance of cooking. This means tasks such as chopping vegetables, measuring ingredients, preheating ovens, and organizing equipment are taken care of before cooking begins. The benefit of this preparation is that cooks can concentrate entirely on cooking during service, free from the need to stop and gather or prepare ingredients. Mise en place is an essential aspect of professional cooking and symbolizes a well-organized and efficient kitchen.

When it comes to exceptional cooking, chefs take their craft seriously. Mise en place isn’t just a time-saving technique; it’s a way of life. Messing with it is like kicking a hornet’s nest, as Anthony Bourdain, the culinary world’s travel documentarian, underscored in his bestselling book, Kitchen Confidential (2000): “Mise en place is the religion of all good line cooks.” Everything from their station to their tools, supplies, and backups should be arranged with military precision, and disturbing this sacred set-up is like throwing the universe off balance. Things can quickly spiral out of control, and anyone in the restaurant is advised not to mess with a line cook’s “meez” unless they want to face their wrath!

The same concept can be applied to any project or task. Pre-planning and careful preparation reduce the risk of interruptions and distractions. Take time to plan ahead, gather the necessary resources, and know your goal before starting. Keep the mundane concerns from keeping you focused on the job you’re there to do.

Think of it as a personal mise en place. Sit down and plan out what you need to succeed, including the necessary skills, resources, and people. Doing so allows you to channel your full attention to the task at hand, avoiding distractions and increasing your overall effectiveness.

It Takes Luck as Much as Talent

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In The Frontiers of Management (1986,) Peter Drucker writes about how Thomas J. Watson, Sr. emerged as a pioneer in the development of accounting and computing equipment:

Twice in the 1930s [Thomas J. Watson, Sr.] personally was on the verge of bankruptcy. What saved him and spurred IBM sales during the Depression were two New Deal laws: the Social Security Act in 1935 and the Wage-Hours Act of 1937–38. They mandated records of wages paid, hours worked, and overtime earned by employees, in a form in which the employer could not tamper with the records. Overnight they created markets for the tabulating machines and time clocks that Thomas Watson, Sr., had been trying for long years to sell with only moderate success.

Idea for Impact: It’s hard for people who pride themselves on their extraordinary skills to accept that they’re just as lucky as they’re smart.

Luck is primarily the result of identifying opportunities and taking appropriate action. Watson could capitalize on the newly created need for business machines because he had worked in the field for decades. And he gave this kind of luck much credit without feeling that doing so devalued his talent and hard work.

Managerial Lessons from the Show Business: Summary of Leadership from the Director’s Chair

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'Notes on Directing' by Frank Hauser (ISBN 0972425500) Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director’s Chair (2008) explores the parallels between directing the stage and managing projects. The shared themes include ad hoc teams, one-off goals, tight time frames, limited budgets, nebulous chains of command, shared objectives, etc.

Compiled by writer Russell Reich from the notes of British stage director Frank Hauser, this tome contains 130 meditations on casting actors, rehearsing, stage-setting, supervising the production units, and handling critics.

Organized temporally from a director’s initial encounter with the play’s script to its final production, this slim volume is so much more—it’s not just for stage directors.

  • #7: “Learn to love a play you don’t particularly like. You may be asked—or may choose—to direct a play that, for any number of reasons, you don’t think is very good. In such cases it is better to focus and build on the play’s virtues than attempt to repair its inherent problems.” Idea for Impact: Focus on virtues and strengths, not weaknesses. Spend more of their time reinforcing the good performers than dealing with untrainable performers—i.e., you can never remediate grievous weaknesses. Position the person somewhere else where her talents are a better match.
  • #33: “Every scene is a chase scene. Character A wants something from Character B who doesn’t want to give it.” Idea for Impact: Productive relationships with balance and joy call for continuous concession and managing one another’s expectations. Work hard to ensure that all sides feel contented with a negotiated compromise.
  • #73: “Know your actors. Some like a lot of attention; others want to be left alone. Some like written notes; some spoken. Get to know them. It doesn’t have to take long. It’s a good investment that will pay enormous benefits later.” Idea for Impact: Embrace individualized management. No two employees are alike—their temperaments, qualifications, experiences, and backgrounds shape them into thoroughly unique people who’re persuaded, challenged, and inspired in different ways. So why treat them all the same way?

Recommendation: Read Notes on Directing. It’s a worthwhile meditation in managing people, projects, and yourself. Anyone who must get things done through people will find insightful meditations on getting to the core of the narrative, handling people with diplomacy and nuance, and navigating conflict.

Make the Problem Yours

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From a profile of The Gillette Company’s then-CEO Jim Kilts in the 20-Dec-2002 issue of Fortune magazine:

At a meeting with all his division chiefs, Kilts asked for a show of hands: “How many of you think our costs are too high?” Everyone in the room immediately raised his hand. Then he asked, “How many of you think costs are too high in your department?” Not a single hand went up. According to Kilts, it’s a common response among managers of companies in trouble: Everyone knows there’s a problem, it’s just that nobody thinks it’s his problem. And that’s where Kilts comes in: He’ll make it his problem–and yours, if you plan on keeping your job.

Idea for Impact: Make the problem yours. Think and act like an owner.

One of the most underrated skills most employees lack is ownership/stewardship—taking responsibility for results, recognizing when things aren’t working, and getting problems solved.

Plus, teams mirror initiative-takers. When someone starts to take ownership, other people see that, and they’re likely to take ownership of their bits as well.

To Rejuvenate Your Brain, Give it a Break

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Research suggests that once you hit a “plateau of productivity,” the number of hours you work without a break is inversely proportional to how much you’ll accomplish.

Even brief escapes such as a walk in nature or a run around the block can clear your head and rejuvenate the brain. Just leave the phone behind and seek novelty (e.g., noticing something new or taking different paths.) Engage your mind with the world instead of worrying about the work you’re supposedly taking a break from.

Downtime allows the brain to refresh the specific neural network you’ve been using, make new connections, and inspire you to fresh approaches to tasks.

Idea for Impact: Intermittent escapism can be valuable. It distracts the brain from useless worry, helps generate out-of-the-box ideas, and may even restore a sense of wonder.

Novelist Neil Gaiman said it better, “People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped and come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You return to it with skills, weapons, and knowledge you didn’t have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.”

Competitive vs Cooperative Negotiation

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Does a competitive person make a better negotiator than a cooperative person? Wharton professor G. Richard Shell’s insightful Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (2006) contends there isn’t a straightforward answer.

Competitive people don’t mind interpersonal friction and thus initially have the upper hand over less aggressive personalities with little appetite for friction. However, competitive people generally lack skills in managing relationships, which gives cooperative people an advantage in situations where interpersonal trust over the long term is crucial. It’s easier to negotiate against someone who has a similar personality. Negotiation gets dicier when different personality types mix.

How to improve your results? Practice. Prepare through information-gathering and setting achievable but optimistic targets for the negotiation process.

Why You May Be Overlooking Your Best Talent

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Many organizations have a hard time articulating their culture. They can’t explain what they mean when they evoke the phrase “culture fit.” Sometimes it’s just an excuse to engage employees better whom managers feel they can personally relate.

Affinity bias is a common tendency to evaluate people like us more positively than others. This bias often affects who gets hired, promoted, or picked for job opportunities. Employees who look like those already in leadership roles are more likely to be recognized for career development, resulting in a lack of representation in senior positions.

This affinity for people who are like ourselves is hard-wired into our brains. Outlawing bias is doomed to fail.

Idea for Impact: If you want to avoid missing your top talent, become conscious of implicit biases. Don’t overlook any preference for like-minded people.

For any role, create a profile that encompasses which combination of hard and soft skills will matter for the role and on the team. Determine what matters and focus on the traits and skills you need.

Focus on Achieving Your Highest Priorities

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Wriggle yourself out of the mindset that you have to “get through” the day. Adopt the attitude that the coming hours are filled with open-ended potential to do the best work of your life and take action that can change your life forever.

This attitude shift can help you see things differently and focus on making life better. Ruthless prioritization means working on the very best of the ideas—not just the very good ideas, but also the ones that constitute the most important thing you could be doing.

Make a list of people, activities, and things that rate the highest level of importance in your life. Think about what you value most and rank them in order of importance. Then, spend as many waking moments as possible using your best skills on causes you deeply care about.

That’s indeed the best way to live life.

Idea for Impact: The key to performing at your best is freeing up your mind to do your most productive and creative work. Decide your highest priorities and have the discipline to say no to other things.

When it’s time to reflect on the week, day, or hour ahead, ask, “Which of my activities drive the biggest results?”

Refocus and make progress, not react.

Don’t Be Deceived by Others’ Success

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Imitating successful competitors is a leading pathway to business innovation. Benchmarking can offer meaningful insights into comparative performance and help discover learnings for improvement. However, adopting others’ best practices can be surprisingly misleading and ineffective.

Four perception biases that come with benchmarking other companies can fail to make yours any better.

Many companies luck into success.

As I’ve noted before, you can’t reproduce others’ luck. Successful companies tend to significantly overvalue the effect of their leaders’ deliberate decisions on their performance and understate the role of chance—being at the right time, at the right place, with the right people. Alas, what worked in their circumstances may not work in yours.

The set-up-to-fail syndrome.

Benchmarking can be remarkably misleading when you make oversimplified comparisons to superstars who may not represent your situation. You could sink your business if you blindly copy celebrity leaders’playbooks in the wrong context, product, strategy, or market.

Companies that benchmark Apple and Steve Jobs and sidestep market research often disappoint themselves when their product launches fail. The leaders of these companies neither have Jobs’s brilliant intuition nor his extraordinarily talented creative team to build what customers want but didn’t know they wanted yet.

In the same way, companies that imitate the 20-70-10 “rank and yank” processes from Jack Welch’s playbook often fail to realize that several factors contributed to their success at General Electric. Welch had a robust organizational culture that insisted on regular and candid employee feedback and robust personnel processes for recognizing and developing the best talent within the company.

Corporate culture is a tricky business.

Your company’s culture—the prevailing way your people feel, think, behave, and relate to one another—cannot be changed easily. One industrial company aborted trying to imitate Google’s culture. This company couldn’t get its managers and employees to be more autonomous and innovative because the company’s and the industry’s ingrained culture did not lend itself to experimentation, risk-taking, and the celebration of fast failure.

Benchmarks look backward, not forwards.

In a competitive, ever so fast-changing world, what has succeeded in the past ten years may not necessarily do so in the next 10. The management guru Tom Peters once warned, “Benchmarking is stupid! Because we pick the current industry leader, and then we launch a five-year program, the goal of which is to be as good as whoever was best five years ago, five years from now.”

A strong focus on “quick wins” can turn out long-term losers.

Benchmarking can make short-term gains but have adverse long-term effects that may not manifest until many years later. By imitating an industry leader, a capital goods company decided to boost efficiency by outsourcing design to its suppliers. Years later, it discovered the debilitating effects of the loss of vital technical knowledge.

Idea for Impact: Best practices only add value when applied in the proper context

Applying best practices in the wrong context is a sure-fire way to hold your company back.

Pay attention to all ideas, mull them over, test what makes sense, adopt what works, and discard what doesn’t.

Sure, help yourself to great ideas wherever you can get them, but be mindful of the context. Try to understand how the top performers’ circumstances and culture may be causing their success. Think through the long-term consequences of any decision you take or any practice you adopt.

Life Coaching: What You Need To Know And If It Is The Career For You

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Most successful people in the world share something in common. They had a mentor or a life coach that helped them along the way, guiding them as they grew as a person in their career.

Being a coach, you can mentor others in your area of expertise. With your years of experience and expertise, which you have fine-tuned, you can share them with others as you help to train them to succeed.

One of the best aspects of coaching is coaching others in almost all areas of life. There are endless, valuable reasons to become a life coach. The value is not just for others, they are also for you.

The Role Of A Life Coach

Being a life coach is like being a mentor. You coach and help others by encouraging them and showing them areas of their life where they could improve or view things from a different perspective. A life coach helps others do more of what is the most important to them but do them better.

Becoming a life coach will be a rewarding experience. You can help someone improve their lives. Along the way, you will also help yourself. You can guide someone as they work towards achieving their set goals, especially the targets that they believed were impossible. As a life coach, you will help people discover their limiting beliefs and support them as they remove the strains holding them back throughout the years.

Type Of Life Coaching

Similar to the different types of sports coaches, there are various types of life coaches. To decide what type you could be, ask yourself what you are good at doing? What would you like to help others succeed at in their life? After answering those questions, you can help yourself choose the kind of life coach you want to be.

  • Personal Life Coach – Those who seek the guidance of a personal life coach want them to help with their life. Additionally, they want the support to be successful in their career. All of which is what a personal life coach aims to achieve. A personal life coach aims to help others achieve their targets as they work to overcome the setbacks and obstacles that fall on their path. Being able to help people move on from the things that have held them back for so long can be extremely rewarding. There is great satisfaction in being able to help some who might be struggling. They help them to realize things about themselves. In turn, this will help you to learn qualities about yourself. As a personal life coach, you will also be helping yourself to succeed – doubling the reward!
  • Business Life Coach – Businesses coaches will show others how to bring in more income for the business. They will teach others how to improve their ability to make good decisions that will help in the growth of the business. Additionally, business coaches can create owner accountability and build actionable plans. They can help others to succeed in areas of business where they had previously struggled.
  • Career Life Coach – Not to be confused with a business life coach, career life coaches focus on a particular industry. Often it is one where coaching is needed. Since they have experience in a specific industry, career life coaches will have a deep understanding of the language used, the mentality and other factors to help someone succeed in the sector. With their in-depth knowledge and understanding, combined with the experience, career life coaches can identify areas where people have struggled with and help them to breakthrough and succeed.

How To Become A Life Coach

After deciding to pursue a career as a life coach, next comes understanding how to become one. Whilst becoming a life coach does sound like a daunting career path, it does not have to be. There are various choices available that you can make, all of which will push you forward towards a career as a life coach. During your time as a life coach, you will have an impact on the lives of so many individuals. You will support them in improving their own life.

Before you set out on your journey, have a clear understanding of what you are aiming to achieve. Know exactly what it is you want to do to help others accomplish their own goals. Take time to decide what it is that you want to accomplish in your career. Understand what you have to offer others and why you are the best qualified to offer it.

With this clear understanding of what it is you want to and the goals you want to achieve, you can begin to look at ways to become a life coach. Here are some of the steps that you can take to help you begin your career.

Online Courses Available

Participating in an online training program is one of the best, most flexible options for those looking to become a life coach. You can coordinate your learning schedule around your current timetable. Due to the course being online only, it sometimes will be cheaper than attending a course in person.

You can undergo an NLP training course, which will provide you with valuable skills that will help you in your pursuit of becoming a life coach. It allows you to harness the power of language, which can help to break down the mental barriers many of us create for ourselves without realizing it. Being a life coach, means harnessing the power of language. The power of language is crucial to succeeding and helping others to also succeed.

Create Memorable Experiences

When giving a lecture, ensure that you create one that is memorable and can help in transforming a person’s mindset. Most lectures often go unforgotten. If nothing is engaging or disciplines offered that are memorable, they will likely be forgotten in the days following the lecture. Those that do not apply any of the lessons that they learned immediately, then they are most likely to forget about them.

The Qualities Of A Great Life Coach

Knowing what type of life coach, you want to become, as well as the ways to become one, is only part of the journey. To be a successful life coach, one that can have a positive impact on the lives of their clients, they need to possess certain qualities. These qualities can make the difference between a good life coach and a great one. Here are a few of the qualities that great life coaches possess.

  • Help To Identify Emotional Blocks – A great life coach can help their audiences to identify their emotional blocks. The obstacles in their life have inhibited them from moving forward to become the best possible version of themselves or achieve their career goals. Having the ability to help your audience identify their emotional blocks, you can support them as they look to move past them. In turn, it will enable them to achieve real and lasting results.
  • Challenges Their Clients – Some of the best coaches in the industry will challenge their clients to gain a deeper understanding of their issues. A great coach will challenge their clients in a manner that will cause them to have to face the reality surrounding them with focus, honesty, and clarity.
  • Hold No Judgments – Everyone has their opinions. There are people in this world who have an opinion you do not agree with. However, in their view of the world, these opinions might be accurate. With every client, a great coach will create a safe space where their client can feel comfortable to speak about their thoughts without feeling judged. In doing so, they can both be transparent and find ways to achieve the targets set.
  • Maintains A Positive Attitude – Life coaches are some of the biggest supporters of their clients. They want to see them succeed. Life coaches have a desire to watch them free themselves of their past limitations and reach their goals. There will be times where both parties will experience setbacks. Moments where you are struggling with finding ways to succeed. In these challenging times, it is crucial to maintain a positive attitude. Having a positive attitude will help to inspire your clients, motivating them to believe in themselves.

The Benefits Of Becoming A Life Coach

You know how to become a life coach. Know about each type of coach you can become, and the qualities needed to be a great coach. The last thing is the benefits of becoming a life coach. Most of the benefits are some of the main reasons why people become life coaches. Some of the reasons you might already know, others might be new. Regardless, here are a few of the benefits you can reap should you choose to move forward and become a life coach.

Develop A New Sense Of Listening

As a life coach, you will tap into a newfound sense of listening. Throughout your career, you will interact with a diverse range of people. You will begin to listen to each of your clients in profounds ways, which over time will grow your ability to listen in an innovative way tremendously. Aside from hearing what they are saying, you will also notice exterior clues. For instance, as your client is speaking, you may see a change in their body language when discussing particular topics.

In addition to this, you will be more attuned to their passions and hear their wants and desires in life. By listening to all of these hidden factors, you can provide them with more personalized support. The tailored support is what you know could work well for them.

Impact Your Own Life

The purpose of a life coach is to help others. You will listen to their desires and wants. Then you will work in collaboration to support them as they work towards achieving these targets. Alongside their growth, you will also be part of this journey. You will be a co-writer in their life story, watching their adventures unfold before your eyes. Additionally, you will provide a safe space where they can identify their challenges. When they reach their goals, you will be on the side-line cheering on them.

As you support people in their journey, you will become an expert in your own life. You will share stories and experiences that you have had, which could be beneficial in helping your client reaching their next set goal.

Be Your Boss

By being a life coach, you can become your boss. A boss that you have always wanted to work for and once dreamed of becoming. Transitioning into a role of a life coach, you will become an entrepreneur. You will start to promote yourself, share your passions and strengths with your clients.

The additional perk of being your boss is that you can set your schedule. You can schedule more time to spend with loved ones. If you have the travel bug, you may consider offering your services regionally or nationally, compared to just staying local. It will provide you with the chance of exploring new avenues whilst widening your client base.

The Bottom Line

Undoubtedly, becoming a life coach will be a transformative experience. There will be an abundance of opportunities to interact with a diverse range of people. Your skills will become more refined. Your experiences and knowledge will expand tremendously in a short period.

A career as a life coach is a rewarding role. If you are someone who possesses the willingness and courage to take on a unique position and move in this direction, you can anticipate that your life will change forever. Throughout your career, you will have opportunities to help clients navigate their way through their optimal levels of functioning. You will accelerate holding their vision for the future. In addition to this, you will work collaboratively to develop new strategies for achievement. Ultimately, you will be changing the lives of others and also your own.