💃Oh good, a curveball – let’s go!

Actor Terry Crews. Just love him.

Adore him as huge hearted Sergeant Terry Jeffords on the show Brooklyn 99. Among all sorts of quirky traits, he has a deep love of yogurt. (Me too!) 

He’s unforgettable as the charismatic, singing, and not-that-bright President Camacho in Idiocracy.  

So, when I heard he was hosting a cooking competition, I was all in.

The show is 100 Cooks on Food Network. And it’s a crazy show.

A hundred home cooks. One kitchen arena. 

There’s a machine called the “Challenge Mixer” that randomly decides who’s cooking next and what they need to quickly whip up to stay in the game. 

The challenges – unpredictable. The amount of people competing in each challenge – unpredictable. Stakes get higher every second. (I was stressed just watching from my couch, eating handfuls of Hippeas.)

Suddenly, cash to take home enters the picture. An oven doesn’t work. Time runs out. Or despite all odds, a dish is perfection.

I can’t stop watching it through my public-speaking-coach lens. I immediately think of the unpredictability my clients face in the days and minutes leading up to their big presentation, when there’s a lot on the line.

Maybe you’ve experienced something like they have:

-while prepping, marketing wants one slide deck, legal wants another, and somehow you’ve got to make it seamlessly come together. 

-during your rehearsal time, tech gets totally wonky and you don’t get the full tech run through you had been counting on.

-for weeks you’ve worked on the timing of your talk so that it’s not over your allotted 40 minutes. And then the day of, the person presenting right before you (who clearly did not practice their timing) goes WAY OVER their time and you suddenly have to cut out sections on the fly.

How do you prepare for any of these things? 

Yes, there are some things you can troubleshoot in advance. 

But for everything else – this is really important –  you can actually train what happens in your body when chaos shows up. And whether it reads a situation as “threat, abort” or “oh good, a curveball, let’s go.” 

That’s the actual skill. Managing your relationship to the unknown.

The cooks on who make it to the end of the show are the ones who don’t collapse when the Challenge Mixer throws them a wacky challenge. Same is true for speakers on a stage.

If any part of your own prep — mindset, content, delivery, the whole messy process — feels like it could use support and strategy, I’m here.

If you’d like to chat to see how coaching could help you, schedule a time to connect HERE.