expand your palate
Happy Wednesday! On Monday, I wrote a post about knowing what to look for when surrounding yourself with your tribe. Today’s post will delve into that idea some more because knowing who you mesh with has everything to do with knowing yourself.
Get to know yourself! Take yourself out on dates. Go do things alone. Travel alone! Shoot, I’ve spent the majority of my life dating myself and cultivating a number of interests, and many of the amazing people I’ve met and relationships I’ve formed within and outside of the improv community at this point in my life have come from shared hobbies and similar interests (a proven, repeated track record for my closest friendships).
When I was in San Francisco for my friend’s wedding, I shared an Air B&B with one of my closest friends from college. She is a wonderful cook, which is something I always admired about her. I remember her waking up our apartment mates to watch the Royal Wedding, complete with Mimosas and Scones. While wandering around San Francisco on Friday night, we had cocktails at a bar with a Dr-Seuss-esque menu (I squealed with delight at the rhyming and illustrations), dinner at a place called wheat + flour that was absolutely divine, and pastries that Saturday morning from Tartine Bakery. It was a foodie’s dream, and I was SO into it.
When you’re spending so much time and energy investing in your entrepreneurial pursuits, it’s important to try new things and to remember to have things that you do just for yourself. I’ve written before about staying balanced, but this is slightly different. The way you present yourself to the world is the way the world is going to perceive you. I love and respect myself, so that’s how I always try to treat other people. My Mom Mom always said that whatever you put out into the world you get back tenfold. So, given that my Mom Mom is a person whose memory I continue to look up to, I will continue to give love and respect to the world.
Respecting yourself includes taking care of yourself - staying balanced, setting boundaries, making healthy choices, and staying true to who you are and where you came from. A not-so-well-known fact about me is that I love to cook. I cook almost all my meals at home - about 95% of them - unless I'm feeling like a fun Taco Tuesday or a brunch with friends. I can get pretty experimental in the kitchen, throwing spices and mixing flavors in a dish that sometimes don’t go together. I hardly ever follow recipes, but when I do, I like to follow recipes from places that I know or that I have visited.
I have a few cookbooks in my apartment that I like to pull out on occasion, and I recently purchased a few more for my collection (and by a few more, I mean three from the Tartine collection). Cooking is a creative avenue that can just be that: a hobby. It’s important to have hobbies and to be well-rounded. I mentioned in one of the video snippets from last week that I played a bunch of sports growing up, which enabled me to understand from a young age the importance of self-improvement in order to benefit the greater whole of the team. It also led me to meet some of my greatest friends in Los Angeles, whom I met playing basketball!
Having varied interests means having more subjects you’re knowledgable about in the real world. I feel no need to ever be a Five-Star chef, but I enjoy knowing different kitchen terminology and what foods balance each other out. So, sorry not sorry for the pun, but expand your palate. Try new things, resurrect past hobbies that have taken a back seat in life, and work to better yourself to be a more well-rounded, whole person. All the things you love doing that feed your soul will only serve to make you happier in life. And I truly want people to be happy, to respect and love themselves, and to love and respect each other.
Thank you so much for reading, and, as always, if you have any pressing questions or if you want to discuss something further with me, feel free to subscribe below or reach out to me on the “contact” page. I’m so grateful you're here and that I’ve been getting a lot of really challenging questions and even better feedback from a community all over the world. I couldn’t do this without you! So THANK YOU! I’m here for you, and I love hearing from you, too! You’re the best, and you have everything you need inside of you! Please believe it! Starve your ego, feed your soul - and follow your heart!