After French cooking school, I examined Italian, Greek and other cuisines and found my own style. Quality ingredients and don’t mess them up. No frills, peasant cuisine. Hearty stews like I’ll make today and another that was shared yesterday with friends. Summer salads, cold dinners or a really good burger or steak on the grill.
While I speak with my food now, I also have a voice. It took a long time to find it because I’m quite shy (shhh, reader, you’ve only known me for five years) and did not stand up for myself as a child or young adult.
One parent told me I was gifted and wonderful, and the other said I was useless and never did well enough in school, ballet, piano, violin or anything else. Reading was my refuge, also the creek and its forest. I’ve recently framed a photo taken by the head of the local newspaper “back home” that she took in 1982 and gave to me around that time. It brings back so many childhood memories, most very good. RIP AE.
The shyness led to a bit of a “deer in the headlights” phenomenon. I had opinions, just didn’t voice them. It took a long time for me to be able to use my voice to espouse political and other positions, such as animal rights, that I am known for to this day.
Public speaking is still my enemy, whether it’s speaking to a government body or group of strangers. Yet I can teach a cooking class or talk to anyone on the street or in the market.
Jobs were an issue. My main fault was that I let the hirer talk me into working for them without ever asking more than a cursory question. What did that lead to? You got it, bad bosses. One tried to do his old job for me and only let me do grunt work. Another micromanaged to the point I had to leave.
Then I became a consultant as an agent of change. Yes. Imagine any organization that has already gone through a lot of internal strife to agree that it needs change. Not everyone has bought in, however.
The consultant comes in and all looks rosy until the undermining begins, sometimes and often by the organization’s own change agents. I’ve been threatened, duped into fake meetings and had my new car keyed. And this all assumes on-time payments.
I burned out of that career and did a lot of volunteer work and got married and have a new life now. Yes, I do speak out, and write, and take care of my family. And I’ve had wonderful family and work experiences and great bosses.
Slate’s Matthew Yglesias wrote a piece on what makes a great boss. http://www.slate.com I am one, and so is my husband, and we’re both team players so we can live with each other. I can’t excel unless the team is working at its best and I’m working hard to make it easier for them to do their jobs, running interference and solving problems.
Think about running a feral cat spay/neuter clinic that I helped do for six years. The leader of Recovery was quite shy and would rather work with the cats in ICU (a van). Naturally I moved to volunteer coordinator for recovery and it was a one-day stint for volunteers so all needed to be trained. Cage cleaning, tent set-up and take-down, transport, ICU, breathing, release to caretaker. I even purchased a bean bag kitty and had the “ear” folks tip its ear and used it for transport training, and was filmed by the SFSPCA for my excellent training!
In the end volunteers built us tables so we didn’t have to bend down all the time. We changed the position in the traps to prevent accidents. I devised a “wake-up list” for breathers (to make sure the cats are breathing after anaesthesia or rush to ICU) to tell when a cat awakened.
While I cannot speak for the cats as they were asleep and feral, I was an exemplary volunteer leader of 14 projects per month and attended feral cats every month for six years. Servant leadership. We recruited more volunteers and retained them.
The first time I sent myself to a business next door to tell them we’d be using the back parking lot for about six hours, I bought a bottle of juice and they asked what we were doing. Trader Joe’s, about 1/2 hour later, delivered cases of sodas and boxes of cookies for all the volunteers. Now that’s servant leadership! Dee
Cooking with Dee 