by Dan Charnas
When we are “in the shit” of our own life, with a deadline looming, we can’t imagine slowing down. I find it comforting to know that chefs deal with this impulse daily. Are they afraid of failure? Of course. Are they fighting the clock? Absolutely. But the most seasoned among them know that there’s a big difference between hustling and rushing, between a sense of urgency and panicking. They calm their minds and extend time by moving their bodies smoothly, and cover the distance to the finish line by moving them steadily. They work clean with their emotions.
OUT OF THE KITCHEN
When we talk about slowing down, we’ve referred here in large part to physical movement—how we move our legs and arms and hands and fingers. But slowing down can also refer to the cognitive—how we think—and also interpersonal and theoretical realms—how we engage a new project, how we embark on a new relationship, how we invest money and resources.
Outside the kitchen, we can practice and integrate the principle of slowing down to speed up in all its dimensions: physical, mental, and social.
EXERCISES: SKILLS TO LEARN
SLOW AND STEADY MOVEMENTS
Before we can master the swift, we must master the steady, and to master the steady, we must consciously reduce our speed. Here are some useful exercises to master the art of slowing down.
■When you feel the urge to physically rush, elongate your movements instead of quickening your pace. When you are moving your legs, don’t run—just widen your stride. When you are moving your arms, imagine yourself gracefully extending them as a dancer would.
■Practice interval breaths: Get a stopwatch or an app that has an interval timer. Select a task that you do with regularity. For 5 minutes, every 60 seconds, stop what you are doing and take one full and deep breath.
■Whether on the phone or face-to-face, conversation can often induce the kind of impatience that causes us to be more brusque with other people than we’d like. This is a good opportunity to exercise your own speed control. When you hear yourself overtalking or interrupting someone, just begin to talk slower. Chances are it will have a calming effect on you, force your partner to pay attention, and actually let you wrap up the conversation in a way that is genuine, polite, and honest.
■In times of stress our thinking can get hasty. The next time you find your mind spinning, take a piece of paper and begin to write down thoughts as they occur. This “offloading” will slow you down, and you may end up with a “mind map” in front of you that helps you stay calm, gives you some ideas for action, and perhaps helps you solve your problem.
TASK BREAKDOWN
Select one task that you tend to rush—or drag yourself through, or dread, or bungle in some way—and break it down into its component parts.
1.Perform the action once. Let’s say it’s completing a “sales deck” or some other kind of common visual business presentation. Time it from start to finish.
2.Note the time you took to complete it and also jot down the resistance you encountered while making it: Trouble locating images or data, perhaps? Too much time spent formatting?
3.Then list out the steps for the action—being neither too granular nor too broad. Shoot for a number between 5 and 10 steps. Break down the action into discrete sub-actions that stand on their own. So for the sales deck example, it may end up being something like: (a) collect data; (b) write outline; (c) collect images; (d) create the slides; (e) tweak and finish presentation for delivery. Just looking at a task broken down in this way can tell you a lot. Maybe you spend way too much time trying to collect data. Perhaps then you need to allot more time for that step or delegate that work in advance to allow you to focus on other steps. Maybe formatting the slides is a problem because you haven’t been able to take the time to create a style template that would make your workflow go much faster.
4.Where your breakdown tells you to create a process, fix a problem, or train yourself, pause or slow down by scheduling some time for that work.
The point of this exercise is to slow down a nonconscious process by consciously analyzing it so that, with practice, you can streamline it and make it faster. This exercise works like practice on a musical instrument. New York University professor and musicologist Jeff Peretz puts it this way: “For a particularly difficult piece, I tell my students to break the big task into microtasks—to repeat those smaller passages very slowly. Then when they get those microtasks down, they can move their fingers faster. Then you link all those microtasks together and work on the transitions. But you could never have done that long piece so well without breaking it down first.”
Taking the time to slow down and analyze a complex task—even though it may feel like a waste of time and a pain in the ass while you are doing the analysis—will save you time in the long term.
KITCHEN PRACTICE: SLOW DOWN
Body calms mind, and for many chefs, a calm body and mind also make for better food. For one meal try making all your moves extra slow, steady, and smooth. Note the effect it has on your performance as a cook, on your food, your mood, and that of your diners.
HABITS: BEHAVIORS TO REPEAT
PROCRASTINATION KILLER
Slowing down to speed up gives us power over procrastination.
Yvette, an accountant, has a list of spreadsheets to prepare for her company’s yearly audit. She has so much work to do that she begins to feel restless after simply opening and looking at the first document. So she clicks over to her Internet browser, to her e-mail—whatever it takes to not feel the weight of that work pressing on her.
Slowing down to speed up suggests another way to be in this moment. When Yvette feels like stopping, instead of distracting herself, she can just make her moves very slow. She can type slowly—one key at a time. If she needs to gather files, she moves very slowly in getting these, smoothly, like a ballet. When she calls someone for information, she dials lazily, even making her own voice relaxed. She opens each motion up. She breathes through each little thing. She still hates it, but now her tasks become more like a game or a moving meditation. The work is still getting done, albeit at a snail’s pace, but the difference is this: (1) She hasn’t given up her control, which is what she’d do if she decided to start browsing the Web; (2) She still has forward momentum, if languid; (3) She gives herself more time to think and be mindful of each action, which is the opposite of freaking out or shutting down in the face of an avalanche of work; and (4) She breaks down her actions into their constituent parts, which, as we did in the above exercise, is a time-tested method of getting large projects done, but not normally how we relate to smaller, more mundane activities like writing an e-mail or preparing for a meeting. But even tasks that are small in terms of labor and time can loom large for us, so using the same breakdown tools for small tasks can penetrate our resistance.
The more the resistance, the slower you move. But don’t disengage. You can use this slow-but-don’t-stop technique for just about anything that you don’t want to do: getting out of bed in the morning (move left leg, move right leg, shift body, feet on floor), washing the dishes (move plate, turn faucet on, soak plate, grab sponge, move hand in a circular motion).
MAKE PANIC AND CRISIS CHECKLISTS
Each of us has triggers that cause us to panic in work or personal situations. If you find yourself in the throes of a crisis that tends to recur, use a variation of the checklist technique we suggested in The Second Ingredient: Arranging Spaces, Perfecting Movements.
Here’s an example: Whenever Fred makes a mistake that annoys his boss, Fred falls apart. His hands shake for the rest of the day, and he forgets things and makes additional mistakes, which makes everything worse. After a few hours, a friend takes Fred aside and calms him down. Why not enshrine that knowledge instead in a little crisis checklist Fred can keep at his workstation?
When the boss yells:
1.Listen to the boss and mirror her complaint.
2.Do not apologize or defend; the boss hates apologies and excuses. She will just say, “
Get it done.” So the only thing to say is “I will get it done.”
3.Calm your body! No matter how urgent the problem, go to a quiet place for 2 minutes and breathe. Touch your toes and stand up and stretch 10 times. Go to the bathroom and splash cold water on your face.
4.Make a quick list of steps to remedy the situation. Determine how long those steps will take.
5.If pressed for time, don’t forget to delegate or request help. Let your crew and your colleagues help you!
6.When the task is done, let the boss know. Say: “I fixed it.”
7.If the task is not yet complete, before the end of the day, give the boss a status report and offer a delivery time estimate.
The checklist response can be effective for relationships at work or home. For example, if certain situations (a boss yelling, a child forgetting her chores) cause you to lose emotional control, you can make yourself a crisis checklist of reminders (breathe, know that it’s not the end of the world, ask calmly for what you need, etc.), something to grab in those situations to reclaim some control.
Think that referring to a checklist in an emotional situation is a ridiculous idea? Then think about this: Pilots train to overcome their emotions when faced with situations much more dire. When an airplane is in trouble, the first thing a pilot grabs is his checklist, because pilots know that emotion can cause all kinds of counterproductive reactions and mistakes that could endanger the flight. The aviation checklist industry exists to save lives in this manner. And when the worst happens, that industry’s employees pore over the flight data recorders to see if they can change processes to save lives in the future.
It’s not surprising, then, that some business literature refers to this kind of learning from failure as “black box thinking.”
THE CLEANING REFLEX
In times of stress or panic, clean your workstation—your desk and/ or your computer—so that your visual field is clear. Put things where they belong. Close apps. Keep your hands moving, slow, slower. Now take another breath and look around. Think about the next thing you need to do. Chain your tasks together, chain your movements together. Now resume, slowly, steadily, smoothly. Keep breathing beautifully.
A chef’s reprise: Velocity’s cost
Sosa became a trusted lieutenant in Vongerichten’s expanding culinary empire before leaving to stage in Europe and, thereafter, opening his own restaurant back in New York. But he continued to learn about the costs of speed.
When Angelo Sosa’s child was born with a debilitating genetic condition, he figured it was time to slow his career climb a bit. But in the midst of his son’s recuperation from heart surgery, he was pursued by the producers of Bravo’s reality program Top Chef. He turned them down; they courted him some more. Sosa’s competitive instincts kicked in, and he relented.
Oh, the irony of that very first “quickfire” challenge: a mise-en-place speed drill. In a finish that would have made Jean-Georges proud, Sosa came in second for speed, but won the overall challenge for his finesse. He cooked all the way until the last episode when—utterly spent—he was felled by a stomach virus. Hallucinating, Sosa oversalted his dish. After a season in which he cooked well but was portrayed in the narrative as a cutthroat—the kind of guy willing to wander off base for a head start—Sosa lost again later that year in the all-stars competition.
The young chef took stock of the costs of velocity. He had lept forward in name recognition but lost the subtlety of the real person behind the TV character.
Sosa took a breath, slowed down, and began again. You can find him at one of his three restaurants in New York, where the food is fabulous and the pace is relaxed.
Recipe for Success
Commit to working smoothly and steadily. Use physical order to restore mental order. Don’t rush.
THE SEVENTH INGREDIENT
OPEN EYES AND EARS
A chef’s story: The hungry cook
From the start, no one wanted Elizabeth Briggs in the kitchen.
Her mother didn’t. Briggs grew up poor, in New England. Whenever the young Elizabeth tried to watch her mother cooking, she’d get shooed out of the room.
Her first culinary teacher didn’t. Briggs’s instructor at a vocational school told Briggs that she would “never amount to anything” in the industry.
Her first chefs didn’t. Briggs found a job at the Mountain View House in Whitefield, New Hampshire, in the 1970s, where she and a 69-year-old cook named Florence were relegated to working in a tiny room outside the main kitchen because—in the common manner of European-style operations of the day—women weren’t allowed to cook on the “hot line.”
This practice of deliberate exclusion continued when she became garde-manger at The Balsams—the famed luxury resort in New Hampshire—and then at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, Florida, where she worked for a hostile French chef.
“He did everything he could to make it impossible for me,” Briggs recalls.
While the men of the culinary world had the opportunity to apprentice at the right and left hands of their chef-mentors, women like Briggs were often kept at arm’s length. Briggs had to steal her education like baseball players steal signs from an opposing team. She did this by developing an acute sense of hearing and seeing.
The one preparation that the chef didn’t allow anybody in the Everglades Club kitchen to observe was his pâté. He shielded the recipe and wouldn’t let any of his cooks near him while he made it. But Briggs kept her eyes open. On the chef’s day off, Briggs stepped into the walk-in refrigerator where he kept his ingredients. She measured everything carefully and wrote it all down. On her own she was able to successfully reproduce his precious pâté.
For Briggs the ability to see and hear things in the kitchen sprang from a hunger to pry open its secrets. Decades later as a chef-instructor for the CIA, Briggs teaches a generation of students for whom the culinary world arrives as an open book. Recipes and techniques abound online. With the abundance of information at their fingertips, it’s no wonder that new students don’t have to exert as much effort with their eyes and ears to get what they need. Briggs is the person who must teach them how.
Today, Briggs shoos her flock of novice students around her kitchen like a mother hen.
“Okay, stand out of the way. Out of the way. Stand out of the way.”
The newbies look like chicks, too, all baby fat and wide eyes, bursting out of their stiff, newly issued, too-bright whites. Clustered in the narrow area between the entrance and the ovens, they don’t move much upon her commands; they shift their weight from foot to foot like baby penguins, pushing each other around. They don’t seem to understand language yet; why else would Chef Briggs have to repeat almost everything she says several times?
“Now, here’s what a sanitor needs to do every day . . . ” Chef Briggs looks around her and fixes her gaze on a student named Elena. “You! Walk out the door for a minute. Look down the hall. Walk down the hall, both ways.” Elena pushes past the swinging front doors of kitchen K-7, turns to the right, and disappears.
“She’s gonna come back,” Briggs continues. “Stand out of her way, stand out of her way. Watch, watch.”
But Elena doesn’t return.
“Tell her to come back now. Where’d she go?” Briggs asks another student. “Oh, I hope she didn’t go home. Tell her to come back. Just yell out, ‘Come back!’”
A male student pokes his head out of the door and says, “Come back?”—more question than command.
Elena does not hear him call. She’s down at the end of the hallway, confused by the chef’s conflicting instructions to “look down the hall” and “walk down the hall.”
“Okay, stand back out of the way so she can look down the aisle. Out of the way. Out of the way. Let her look down the aisle when she comes. Pull the bucket around. Pull the bucket.”
Another student calls out: “She just went the other way.”
“Oh my God, she’s killing me,” says Chef Briggs.
The student pokes her head out of the double doors: “Elena, come back!”
Within a moment, Elena is back in the kitchen, unsure of what to do. Chef Briggs directs her attention to the aisle on the right side of the room. “Now take a look.”
Elena sees something she didn’t see before she left: The kitchen is a complete mess. Nothing changed since Elena left the kitchen a few minutes ago except her perspective.
“When you leave the kitchen, it clears you of all the stuff going on, right?” Briggs says. “Because there’s so much going on, you can’t think or see. You go out, you stand at the door for a minute. You don’t have to run to Poughkeepsie next time, all right? But you go out and you clear your head. You come back and you’re like, ‘Whoooh, what happened?’”
Chef Briggs has been teaching first-day students in this way for 28 years at the CIA. She’s demonstrating the same mise-en-place principles as the other instructors, like preparation, arranging your station, and cleaning as you go. But the skill that’s the hardest to teach—the one she’s struggling with now, the one that’s so fundamental to a cook’s ability to execute all the other principles—is listening and seeing.
WHAT CHEFS DO, WHAT CHEFS KNOW
Chefs balance internal and external awareness
A chef’s work requires concentration. Some chefs tell you that their work induces a meditative state so deep that it shuts out the chaos around them: the clatter, the heat, the movement, the shouting.
Yet in that tumult are signals that need to be heard and seen: voices making requests and issuing commands; printers clacking and spitting; bodies gesturing, moving, and prodding; pots of water boiling; pans making a certain sizzling sound indicating their contents’ degree of doneness. In the kitchen, during the heat of service, new cooks can become so focused on the skills they’ve learned with their hands that they forget the other half of the job, which is to be a part of a functioning organism, responding not only to messages from people but from physical signals around them. The reverie of cooking is antithetical to the awareness that a cook needs to execute her job, a behavior that some call kitchen awareness, maintaining a constant consciousness of all five senses: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch. We’ve discussed presence as one of three key values in the kitchen: Be here now. But cooking requires the cook to be in two places at once: in her head, and in the room. In essence we are talking about achieving two kinds of presence simultaneously, internal and external. Experienced cooks develop an ability that is perhaps one of the most enviable in modern society: to be focused and at the same time aware on multiple levels. For our purposes—cultivating a similar kind of awareness outside the kitchen—we’ll call this behavior open eyes and ears.