How Personal Development is like Pizza Dough
Posted on April 03, 2024 by Daniel Olexa, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
What does your growth process have to do with pizza? The elasticity of gluten!
Read on to learn from the dough!
A general life story in 3 sentences:
1. You have a dream.
2. You work on achieving it.
3. Things don’t go as planned, so you give up, complain about how difficult life is, and go back to being you.
Sound familiar?
I feel it too. You’re not alone.
As I sit here typing this morning, I am also thinking forward to Friday night Pizza Night in our house. Homemade pizza from fresh dough with fresh toppings! Yum!
If you’ve ever made pizza from fresh dough, you’ve experienced the wonderfulness of gluten.
Gluten is the protein chain in wheat that gives bread its chewiness, and gives pizza dough its ability to stretch without breaking.
Is this sounding like a metaphor yet?
A general pizza story in 5 sentences.
1. A chef has a dream of pizza
2. The ball of dough is kneaded, stretched, rolled.
3. The dough stretches and retracts.
4. The chef keeps working, allowing the dough to continue to take its new form
5. Ultimately, it is flattened, topped, baked, and becomes a pizza.
Lessons in the Dough
There is only one small difference between the general life story and the pizza story above: Allowance for what is happening without judgement.
The chef does not judge the dough’s retraction energy. It is just part of its evolving form.
The dough’s resistance to being shaped isn’t personal. It’s just is. It is part of its nature.
Each time the dough is stretched a bit further toward its ultimate pizza shape, the protein chains in the gluten retract back toward its former shape.
It is worth noting here that each time it is stretched, it does not fall all the way back to its original ball shape, it retains a bit of its previous form.
That’s what we do too, as we stretch toward our dreams.
Unfortunately, our ideas about how things should be wind up creating obstacles and sabotage our process toward our dreams.
Stretching
When we’re inspired to grow, we get told to ‘stretch our limits,’ ‘stretch our boundaries,’ and not only create goals, but create ‘stretch goals’ to take us a bit further.
And, each time we stretch, there is a level of discomfort as we enter the unfamiliar, the unknown.
In those uncomfortable feelings and thoughts, we tend to look for refuge in the familiar and known: we retract back to our old selves because they’re comfortable.
Then judgement starts to pile on: the shame of feeling like a failure, the self-ridicule of dreaming big (who do you think you are?), the projections of what we think others are saying about us, and so many others.
That’s your ego-self. It’s who you’ve learned to become.
It’s what Timothy Gallwey calls “Self 1” in The Inner Game of Tennis.
Ultimately, it’s a limiting experience of who you really are.
To stretch the pizza metaphor (no pun intended), I’ll call it the Retractive Self.
The Retractive Self
Your experiences in life have structured your beliefs and stories about what you think you deserve, how worthy you are, and who you think that you are.
These stories create a mental framework of how you think about yourself, how you think about others, and how you take action (or not).
The Retractive Self is focused on judgement, not on growth.
It focuses on the gap, the perceived failure, and the discomfort.
Rather than embracing growth, the Retractive Self says, “That’s too hard,” “You can’t do that,” “It’ll cost to much,” “There’s no money in doing that,” “Damn. It didn’t work. Why did I bother?” and “We failed once. There’s no point in trying again.”
It does its very best to stay a ball of dough. That sphere is its natural form, the path of least resistance; it requires the least amount of effort to maintain.
But…If the retractive self is so comfortable NOT changing, what is the catalyst in you for desiring change? Who is the chef?
The Expansive Self
The Expansive Self has a deep inner knowing. It dreams, calls us forward to live bigger lives, and it does not judge; it observes.
When you feel a calling to living your purpose or to dream of a better life, you are noticing your Expansive Self.
It is an intrinsic part of you, in fact, it is more likely to BE the real you than the Retractive Self.
This chef provides us with dreams of our pizza life and helps us to grow through experiences that shape our being into new forms of success.
The Expansive Self notices movement and progress, without judgement.
When your Retractive Self shrinks back, your Expansive Self sees that you retained some of the experience of being stretched, just like the dough.
It keeps working on you, asking you to stretch beyond your comfort, to experience discomfort in your growth, and become new.
Why does it do this? Because it knows your real potential and capacity for change.
Who do you choose to be?
Are you a ball of dough, following the path of least resistance in life?
Are you the dough that complains at every pull, push, and stretch?
Are you the chef, who sees the potential of pizza in the ball of dough?
Are you the pizza, formed and actualized?
The answer is: You are all of them, and you are none of them…until you choose to be.
Who am I?
Consider me to be the Gordon Ramsey to your inner chef.
My purpose is to bring your Expansive Self forward so you can live your dream.
I also have a tendency to swear like Gordon. I’ll challenge your Retractive Self’s limitations so they stop interfering with your growth and satisfaction in life.
It’s pizza time!
Join me in the kitchen!
