01 Aug The Secret Sauce
When lists of best restaurants in Phoenix are published, Pizzeria Bianco is often at the top. The six wood-fired pizzas offered on the menu are simple and uncluttered; a few toppings carefully combined on top of a hand-shaped and slightly charred crust.
This week, I was flipping through a local magazine and read an interview where Pizzeria Bianco’s famous Chef, Chris Bianco, described his approach to making his famous pizzas. The interviewer pressed him for his secrets—was it an ingredient, a spice perhaps? Bianco was firm in his reply. He said there were no secret ingredients. He explained his method of cooking as the art of restraint: starting with good ingredients and trying not to mess them up.
He compared cooking to the game Jenga, telling the interviewer that sometimes the most important ingredient is what you leave out. He gave the example of sauce, often considered a key ingredient of pizza, and challenged this notion, saying, “Does a pizza need red sauce or green sauce or whatever sauce? Does it really need it? That’s the secret to great pizza. Understanding what it needs more than what you want to give it.”
When I am talking with teams about the skills to become more effective communicators, it’s common for learners to get caught up in the techniques. People want to know how to use the component skills in the most perfect way and do everything all at once:
I think I should have reflected that.
Should I have summarized there?
Wouldn’t that have been an opportunity for an affirmation?
Wait, was there change talk in that statement that I should have asked for elaboration?
There are certainly skills that can be improved through practice and there are always ways to improve conversations. Yet, being overly consumed with the mental process of trying to figure out the very best technical way to respond to every utterance can distract us from being intentionally present and available to the other person’s experience.
So how do we best stay engaged and attend to the people we are talking with?
Like Bianco’s approach to pizza, clear your mind and start with what effective communication needs more than what you want to give it: Bring a willingness to listen in an emotionally aware, thoughtful and responsive manner. Do your best to remove distractions inside and outside of the conversation. Make a choice to be intentionally present and approach with empathy and genuineness.
It’s the human qualities that make all the difference. As Carl Jung said, “Know all the theories and master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul…be just another human soul.”
It shows confidence to keep things simple and not try to be fancy in our pizza making or our words.
An uncluttered mind, like an uncluttered pizza, is the secret sauce.