I saw an inspir­ing movie this evening about a young woman who feels stuck in an unre­ward­ing job and decides to cook her way through Julia Child’s “Mas­ter­ing the Art of French Cook­ing” and blog about it. It made me want to find my mother’s copy of Julia’s mas­ter­piece, break out the but­ter, dig out my whisks, and cook some­thing that would make my friends and fam­ily exclaim “Yum!”

As I watched the movie, I was struck that “Julie & Julia”—aside from being a delight­fully enter­tain­ing film—is about tran­scend­ing one­self. At Impact Learn­ing Sys­tems, Tran­scend­ing Your­self is one of the five cus­tomer ser­vice prin­ci­ples of The Heart Model™, which is an inte­gral part of all of our train­ing pro­grams.

Tran­scend­ing is about per­sonal growth and starts with set­ting achiev­able goals. Ok, so Julie’s goal of cook­ing 524 recipes in 365 days wasn’t exactly a small goal but it was appar­ently some­thing she thought was achiev­able. The idea is to grow, do some­thing you couldn’t do before. For Julia Child it was learn­ing to cook. She could barely boil an egg when, at 40, she started at Le Cor­don Bleu in Paris. Per­son­ally, this gives me a lot of hope as I attempt to tran­scend myself by learn­ing more about social media or how to build bet­ter branch­ing inter­ac­tions in webi­nars or how to write a rel­e­vant blog.

Tran­scend­ing is also about tak­ing incre­men­tal steps for per­for­mance improve­ment and grow­ing from your mis­takes. Julia Child mas­tered flip­ping an omelet but not with­out a lot of egg on the floor. She tried her best. She didn’t mean to flip it on to the floor but, as she’d say, “C’est la vie.” The same can be said for clos­ing a sale, help­ing a dis­grun­tled cus­tomer or resolv­ing a tech­ni­cal prob­lem on the first call. You may not be able to achieve your goal the first time but you try your best, learn from the expe­ri­ence, and try again on the next call until you do achieve your goal.

It took Julie sev­eral tries and ulti­mately the help of two other peo­ple to prop­erly poach an egg but she didn’t give up. She was inspired because Julia Child didn’t give up either—even when she was told she was a ter­ri­ble cook.

So how are you going to tran­scend yourself?

With a back­ground in per­for­mance improve­ment and instruc­tional design, Mon­ica Postell works with Impact Learn­ing Sys­tems in design­ing and deploy­ing train­ing and devel­op­ment pro­grams that fos­ter real cus­tomer loyalty.

Mon­ica Postell

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