In this exciting episode of Mealtime Magic & Mayhem, your host Tricia Clark dives into the realm of creativity with special guest Emily Pasnack-Lapchick, a certified coach and social impact consultant. Tune in as Tricia and Emily explore the power of food and cocktails as catalysts for connection and joy.

🍹 Seeking Unique Cocktails and Unleashing Creativity

Emily shares her love for seeking out interesting cocktails and asking bartenders to create unique drinks not on the menu. However, she was feeling stuck in her life, lacking access to her usual passion and joy. Through working with a coach, Emily realized that creativity brought her energy and joy, leading her to seek new outlets beyond her job.

🍽️ Food as a Creative Playground

While food had always been a way for Emily to play with creativity, she decided to start experimenting with cocktails as well. Tricia and Emily discuss how mealtime can be a universal connector, a catalyst for communication and connection. They share ideas, inspirations, and stories to help listeners experience the magic of mealtime.

🔮 The Chrysalis Exchange: Navigating Transitions and Building Self-Compassion

As the founder of the Chrysalis Exchange, Emily supports nonprofits and socially conscious businesses through transitions. She shares her expertise in navigating burnout, building boundaries, and cultivating self-compassion. Emily's passion for food and optimism makes her the perfect guest to discuss the connections food creates.

🍳 Sheet Pan Meals and Go-To Dishes

Tricia and Emily explore the world of cooking and finding go-to dishes that can be easily modified. They discuss the benefits of sheet pan meals and the opportunity to make small changes to improve previous recipes. The conversation delves into different approaches to cooking, from following recipes closely to intuitive cooking and building a dish as you go.

💡 Navigating Decision Fatigue and ADHD

The speaker, who is an entrepreneur with ADHD, shares their experiences with decision fatigue and finding balance in their love for cooking amidst a busy life. They discuss strategies for getting in the right headspace for cooking and managing the challenges of ADHD. The importance of small adjustments in daily routines, such as cooking, is highlighted as a way to make significant impacts on one's life.

🗝️ Unlock Your Path to Self-Discovery and Transformation

Tricia's guest offers long-term coaching packages and a special half-day visioning session. They emphasize the importance of clarity and self-discovery before embarking on a larger coaching program. Through actionable steps and guided visualizations, clients can envision their future selves and create one, three, and six-month action plans. Allow yourself to dream and visualize your future!

Tune in to this thought-provoking episode of Mealtime, Magic, and Mayhem with Tricia Clark and special guest Emily Pasnack-Lapchick. Get ready to unleash your creativity and explore the incredible connections that food and cocktails bring to our lives. 🍽️🍹

We would love to hear your thoughts on the following questions!

1. Can you relate to the struggle of not being able to exercise their creativity in their job? How do you find ways to express your creativity outside of work?

2. How has food and cooking been a way for you to play with creativity? Do you have any go-to dishes or experimental cooking days?

3. Have you ever experienced decision fatigue when it comes to cooking?

Emily's Links:

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/chrysalis_exchange/

Website - https://chrysalis-exchange.com/

Emily's Lavender Earl Bliss Cocktail:

**Since this mixture takes a bit of preparation,Emily makes it in bulk so she can easily make another round of cocktails. You can adjust the servings as desired!

Ingredients (makes 4 cocktails): 

4 bags Earl Grey Lavender tea (Emily recommends the company TeaLeaves)

⅓ cup fresh squeezed lemon juice (appx 3 lemons)

Large piece of fresh ginger

1/3-1/2 cup honey or agave (depending on how sweet your bourbon is)

1 cup bourbon

Ice

Preparation:

Puree the ginger with a small amount of water in a high-speed blender. Strain. 

Simmer the strained ginger puree with the honey/agave, whisking together until mixed. Let it cool.

Steep Early Grey Lavender Tea. Let it cool.

Juice lemons (can keep or remove pulp depending on your preference)

Once everything has cooled, mix all of the ingredients in a shaker. Pour over ice.

Tricia's Links:

🔗 Click here to join Trish's Cook Connect & Conquer Club! : https://triciasbitesoflife.com/connectcookconquer

Connect with Trish Free Strategy Call: https://link.feacreate.com/widget/bookings/connectwithtrish

Facebook Profile: https://www.facebook.com/tricia.clark.161

Website:triciasbitesoflife.com

Her YouTube channel is launching here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmGEincPtA74cyPzpggzMZw

Grab Your Free Guide to Bringing Fun Back to Mealtime Here:

https://triciasbitesoflife.com/bring-back-fun

Looking for fun conversation starters like the icebreaker question? You can find them here: https://amzn.to/45i2vTO

Looking for some fun recipes to kickstart your magic in the kitchen?

Summer Flavors: https://bit.ly/inspiredsummerflavors

Fall Flavors: https://bit.ly/inspiredfallflavors

**As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases

Tricia:

This is the Mealtime, Magic, and Mayhem podcast. I'm Tricia Clark, your host, cooking coach, and kitchen mentor. We're here to talk about all things food, wine, travel, cocktails, and mealtime memories. So many memories are made around the table. We all know mealtime can be stressful, full of chaos and mayhem, but it's also the universal connector, a catalyst for communication and connection, and a time to create magic and memories. So many of our memories are tied to food, and I can't wait to share some of those stories with you here. I'm here to share ideas, inspiration, and stories to help you experience mealtime. With a dash of magic and just a sprinkle of mayhem, you can expect new episodes weekly, including a mixture of interviews, personal stories, and some fun conversations about our adventures and misadventures in the kitchen and around the table. I hope you walk away feeling inspired to try something new in your kitchen or around your table to create more connection with your friends, family, and beyond. Thanks for being here. All right, welcome to another episode of Mealtime, Magic and Mayhem. I'm your host, Tricia Clark, and my guest today is the fabulous Emily. Is it Lap chick? Did I get that right? Yeah.

Emily:

Perfect.

Tricia:

I've been working on that one. This is where I get tongue tied, is on names quite frequently. So, Emily, she runs the Chrysalis Exchange as a certified coach and a social impact consultant. She's worked in human rights, philanthropy, academia, where she's helped to create, launch, and redesign several programs. Her coaching specialties include navigating transitions, shifting from burnout to boundaries, and helping clients turn down the volume on self doubt and turn up the volume on self compassion. Emily supports nonprofits and socially conscious businesses through transitions, facilitating human centered design, strategic planning processes, program design, and more. We connected in another group over a shared love of food and I would say optimism. She's ever the optimist and loves to find everyday moments of joy, even from the time she was young. She loves to cook, was raised vegetarian, and eventually became vegan, which we've had a lot. I seem to be bringing a lot of vegans into my world, and vegan cooking is certainly not my specialty. So I'm super excited to have you here to talk about food, all things food and the connections that we make through them. So welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Emily:

Thank you. I'm excited to be here, and food is one of my favorite things to talk about, so I was very excited to connect with you.

Tricia:

It is definitely my love language. And I talk all the time probably so much that people get tired of me talking about the attitude and the energy that we approach. Cooking our food, planning our food, cooking our food and even bringing it to the table has everything to do with the experience that we have around the table. And so, so much of my business is about shifting that so that people can really connect when they get to the table and feel that love through the food instead of the angst and energy of just throwing it on the table because you've been stressed about it the whole day or five minutes of the day. So I love finding fellow foodies, that's one of my very favorite things. But before we get started with interview questions, I love to start with a fun icebreaker question. I love to encourage people to use these around the dinner table as well. I've been known to pack these cards on girls trips, take them out on dates, just keeps the conversation interesting and different and not about the weather or school or work, the mundane things that we usually talk about. So your question today is if you could only take one CD for a cross country road trip, which would you choose?

Emily:

Tricia:

Childhood, oh my gosh, that's a great one. We quote a lot of movies in our family and both of my children are musicians. I bring that up to say. Soundtracks have been a huge part of our lives since I mean, my daughter has been obsessed with soundtracks since she was probably three. And so knowing those words to the Disney songs or whatever musical was going on, one of my favorite stories from her as a child, she was obsessed with that movie Spirit. Are you familiar with that one from.

Emily:

Oh, yeah, I loved horses growing up.

Tricia:

She did too. And her imaginary friend was Spirit. She had imaginary horse on the playground. I'm going to try not to digress and make this a story about me and my daughter, but as we think about those nostalgic songs, right, those are great for road trips. But I remember being in the car with her and she was like, no mom, I want to hear the song where he's in the train car being shipped off, it's sad, it's snowing. And I'm like flipping through the CD trying to find the right song and she was like, no, it's not that one. And she was getting so mad at me because she knew exactly where that song was supposed to be in the movie and knew exactly what, but she didn't know the name of it, couldn't tell me how to find it. And so I say that because soundtracks like disney songs or for a long time, our family road trip soundtrack was the musical The Last Five Years with Anna Kendrick. Did you ever watch that one?

Emily:

Oh, no, I don't know that one.

Tricia:

It's fabulous. But the songs are catchy and I mean, that would always get played on full blast on our road trips. Wasn't necessarily my choice, but it became the CD of voice that we listened to. A. So yeah, Disney songs are such great sing along.

Emily:

Are they are, at least for me. I can't not be happy listening to those songs or, I mean, sometimes angry too. I love the scar. The scar song from The Lion King growing up too. It's a fun, kind of scary, spooky song to sing.

Tricia:

I feel like we could have a whole conversation about sing along songs from so, I mean, we've already discovered we have a lot in common and I think really when it comes to how we enjoy food and think about food and our approach to cocktails. So I'm going to dive right in and I'm curious. We're going to start with cocktails. What sparked your interest in creating interesting cocktails?

Emily:

Yeah. So I, for a while now, have really loved seeking out really interesting cocktails and love going to places where I can ask whoever is Bartending, is there something you can make that isn't on the menu? If it's kind of a standard cocktail list and just seeing what people come up with because there's so much creativity behind it. And a couple of years ago, I was kind of at a place in my life where I was feeling a little bit stuck and not able to access that passion and joy that I normally approach life with. And I was working with the first coach that I ever worked with and one of the things that we were talking about were the things that brought me energy, the things that brought me joy and that I enjoyed doing. And creativity came up as this theme and I was realizing that in my day to day work, I was not able to exercise my creativity that much and I just didn't have a place to fuel it within my job. So I was thinking, what are some of the other areas where I could play with creativity? And food had always been that for me. I always loved experimenting with different flavors, different textures. But with this interest in cocktails, I decided to kind of convert that and start to experiment with that. So that's where that initial idea came from.

Tricia:

So do you have a couple of favorite cocktails that you like to share with us?

Emily:

Yes. So one of my favorites that I spent a while kind of messing with and eventually came to was So. I also really love tea. And there's this tea company I found that makes a lavender Earl Grey tea and the nice soothing of the lavender plus the little caffeine bump from the Earl Grey. So it's the Earl Grey lavender tea, and then fresh squeezed lemon juice, fresh pureed ginger that's then strained, and then either some honey or agave mixed with bourbon.

Tricia:

Oh, my God, that sounds amazing.

Emily:

Yeah.

Tricia:

Of using Earl Gray. What's funny is the podcast interview that I'm doing tomorrow, she is an expert on tea, so I'm going to have to send you the link to that one because her big thing is infusing tea into everything, like your cooking and baking. I'm super excited to talk to her about that, but I'll definitely have to share that link with you. And for anybody who's listening, keep your eye out for that one because we're going to link these two episodes in topics, and I think that's going to be really fun.

Emily:

Oh, yes, I love that. I can't wait. I love tea, so I'm very excited for that, too.

Tricia:

I love to play with lavender, so I love to make a lavender Earl Gray simple syrup. And that's how I incorporate a lot of flavor through simple syrup. And then my husband likes to keep it low carb, so I do a lot of simple syrups with alulose so that it's sugar free. So here you talk about the lavender and the Earl Grey. Like, those are ones that are near and dear to my heart, for sure.

Emily:

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, so that's like, one of my more complex ones. I have to make a bunch of stuff in advance, generally. Otherwise it's pretty intense to make one cocktail with all of those things prepped.

Tricia:

We'll be sure to drop that recipe in the show notes, though, because I'm really excited to try it, and I've never even thought about pureeing, fresh ginger and then straining it, so okay, tell.

Emily:

Us about the next when. So I made that one a lot. Like, I used to live in New York City, and especially I drank bourbon a lot there because it was colder. Now I live in Florida, so if I want something more refreshing, I love muddling, usually cucumber as the base vegetable, but then any sort of herbs, whether that's basil, even parsley, mint, of course, cilantro. And then I also love citrus, so lime and lemon would be my favorite, but sometimes playing with grapefruit as well, and a little bit of gin with that, and sometimes sparkling water. Or if you have enough juice from everything else, then sometimes it's enough just to have that. So that's one of my favorite. And again, like, whatever you have at home, just throw it in there. Jalapeno, too. I love spicy stuff, so throwing that in there is also really good.

Tricia:

I feel like rosemary would be delicious. That would be really nice with that gin and the grapefruit, that would be lovely. I would definitely, yeah. And I think that's one of the things about cocktails is the craft cocktail trend is so hot right now, and there are so many fabulous complex cocktails out there, but it almost makes it become this seem like this unattainable thing. Right. And I think what you're showing is that you can easily do things with stuff you already have at home that you cook with, and you can make delicious cocktails with those. It really is just about playing and using what you have. And if you don't like it, so what? You wasted 2oz of gin. Big deal, right? Try again with a different flavor.

Emily:

Yeah.

Tricia:

And so I love to hear somebody else come on and talk about how they play with it because that's a lot about how I approach cocktails. I love to take the classic cocktails and then make a different simple syrup to mix up the flavor or try a different bitter. Have you ever had a Trinidad sour?

Emily:

No.

Tricia:

It's one of my favorites. It's bourbon. It's primarily bitters, quite honestly, like store bitters and then you add like a half ounce of bourbon and a splash of lemon juice, but it's mostly bitters. And I'll drop this recipe in the show notes, too, but I was playing with it a couple of weeks ago and I named it the Roxanne because I used peshad's bitters and it came out bright red. And all I could think of was that song from the Police roxanne, you don't turn on the red light. That's what it reminded me of. But I used cognac instead of bourbon, and I used peshad's bitters instead of angostura with a little bitters as well, just playing around. And it was so good I'll have to drop down. But that was one of those where I'm like, I already know a recipe. But what if I change bourbon for cognac? Change the flavor of bitters? There's so many different bitters out there. Lavender bitters could be. I wouldn't make a whole cocktail with lavender bitters if you too floral. But the world's your oyster, right? You can find all kinds of different bitter flavors out there to play with.

Emily:

Yeah, I have a cardamom bitters that I love too.

Tricia:

Oh, that one's lovely. I put that in a gin and tonic the other day. It was really nice.

Emily:

Oh, nice.

Tricia:

So we've talked a little bit about cocktails, but tell me a little bit about your routine, if you have one, and what sets the stage for you to get in the mood or to put you in the right headspace to create in the kitchen, whether it's food or cocktails.

Emily:

Yeah, this really depends on the day for me. Sometimes kind of unleashing and cooking can be decompressing, and sometimes it also feels totally draining just depending on how my day has gone. So sometimes it's really calming for me to follow a recipe and have everything thought through for me and I don't have to think too much. And I can make slight adjustments based on a flavor preference that I have, but I can also I heard you talk about this with another guest. Go down very deep. Rabbit holes in recipes, trying to choose one. So some days it also just looks like building as I go. So I think about a base that I want and then little by little, this tends to be my larger tendency, just adding things or like opening the fridge and looking at what sauces or what we might be able to incorporate into it. And there's kind of I think that's a nice way to decompress where I'm not thinking about it too much. I'm really following my intuition and trying to get into a flow but not having to really think things through. And there's kind of a joke in our house that sometimes I'll say, I'm just going to make something simple, and then once I'm alone in the kitchen, it ends up being four sides because I also like combining things in different flavors but being able to taste them on their own too. So, yeah, it really depends on my day. And then more and more I'm trying to come up with kind of go to things that we can swap out a few things for just to make it a little bit easier to get started.

Tricia:

Sheet pan meals are great for that. Yeah, I think that's one of the easiest you can easily start, especially if you're somebody who's used to following a recipe to a T. Right? I know a lot of people. It's like the Bible. You got to follow it step by step, and if it doesn't turn out, then they messed up somehow. And the truth, sometimes recipes are just bad recipes. Yeah, but sheet panels are a great place to start, I think, in terms of change out one ingredient and see what you think from a recipe you've already tried that maybe you didn't love. But I think it's really interesting to hear your approach of, like, depending on how you're feeling is how you enter the kitchen and how you think about what you're going to cook. Mine is much more like I go into the kitchen, I pour myself a glass of wine, and I turn on the music that I need to hear to spark my mood. So, like, I need to chill and I turn on Frank Sinatra or maybe I need some motivation and I turn on something like pink. Right? It just depends. That's how I sort of set the stage and I get my ingredients out for whatever I'm planning to cook and organize everything. That whole meas and plots, which is just a fancy word for get your shit together. But that's my transition in the day and that rarely changes. It's the music that changes.

Emily:

It's really interesting hearing you say that, because now that I'm thinking about it, if I know I'm going to be following a recipe, I like getting everything out because I might just leave something out if it's not in front of me. And also the music does play a big component as well. So my partner loves to watch sports, so sometimes he's I'll watch them sometimes with him, but sometimes he's in the living room, and he loves to cook, too. But if we're doing our own things, then I will put on whether it's a soundtrack or I love Ella Fitzgerald, so I'll listen to Ella Fitzgerald a lot and have that like you said, that either soothing or also that more upbeat. So yeah, I hadn't thought about that as part of my process, but it definitely is.

Tricia:

Yeah. I find that I lean towards something more upbeat when I'm going to try something new right. New recipe or a new cuisine or then I need a little bit of that, umph right. To kind of get the creative spark going. Because I've discovered for me that following a recipe I'll follow a recipe to a T the first time I make it and then decide what I want to change and I find any more. Because I've been cooking so long at this point that I'm disappointed in the results when I go back. And I'm like, I should have done this this way because I know that's what works instead of following what they said. I think it would have tasted better. And I still catch myself doing that. It's so funny that perfectionist tendency still rears her ugly head on a regular basis. I can't pretend ever completely goes away. Right?

Emily:

Yeah. I mean, one thing I know for sure that I will always add, I like double or triple is garlic. That's a given. And then if it has any component of spice, we usually increase the spiciness, too, because we both well, at least if it's just my partner and I, we make things a little bit more spicy.

Tricia:

My husband would love for you to cook for him because I'm a spice wimp. Medium is my Max, and he could drink hot sauce. I mean, he wants to sweat, and I'm like, no, thank you. So I always try to scoop out a portion and be like, here, spice that up as much as you want to. Because I can't even ask him, is it too spicy for me? Because he can't even tell me anymore. He's like, no, that's not spicy at all. And I take a bite. I'm like, I'm choking. Eyes are watering. I'm like, I can't ask you anymore. I don't even know why I asked you that to begin with.

Emily:

Yeah, sometimes, I mean, I like spicy, but my partner and his dad are a whole other level. And sometimes when his dad is visiting, I'll just make a spicy salsa for them on the side that they can just add to whatever. And I intend it to be long lasting, but it's gone by whatever meal we're eating, it's gone by the end of it.

Tricia:

All right, so we've kind of already touched on this well before I move on to the next question. I just want to say to anybody who's listening, I hope kind of what you're picking up from this is it's not about there being one right way to do any of it. It's not one person's routine or process. It's really about experimenting and figuring out what feels good to you, what helps you get in that right headspace. Is it getting the ingredients out? Is it turning on music? Is it five minutes of meditation before you get started? Or is it just kind of perusing in the pantry and picking out a few things that you know you want to use, find whatever that is that puts you in that right space because it really does change everything. So we've touched on this a little bit, but as a fellow entrepreneur with ADHD, how do you juggle your cooking love with the whirlwind of being a business ninja and dealing with the quirky ways of ADHD. You've talked a little bit about what your routine like. You kind of have a balance between having a plan and winging it depending on your mood. But are there other ways that you felt like you've used to overcome some of the ways that ADHD can rear its ugly head? And it's not always ugly, but it can add stressing points or add complexity. And what are some of those things you found that work for you?

Emily:

Tricia:

I love hearing you talk about this. I honestly have suspected for, I don't know, probably three or four years that I have it, but I was actually only officially diagnosed about a month ago. Oh, wow. Yeah. And what pushed me to go and get diagnosed was I was learning more and more out here in this online space about the triggers of it and what it looked like and I was like, oh my gosh, that really could be me. But I don't know, nobody's ever said anything about it my whole life. And so I was diagnosed and I even given my job like, I love cooking, this is what I do, right. I help people streamline and create processes and habits that work for them. And what's been so close to my soul is finding out what works for you because everybody's different. Hearing you talk about the decision fatigue and some of the not being able to eat the same thing over and over again, I resonate with that so much and never realized that that was part of it. Right. I just thought that that was just me. And so then somebody would say, well, you're supposed to be the person that helps us keep it all together. And I'm like, I mean, most of the time I can, but there's still some days where just too tired to make a decision.

Emily:

Yeah, absolutely.

Tricia:

That decision fatigue has been a really interesting piece of it to learn and kind of learn where that stems from. So I love your ideas a meal plan for me consists of, like, four or five recipes, four or five meals that we're going to have throughout the week. And I always keep a couple of things from, like, Schwann's or something from Trader Joe's if you have one of those local that's easier for me to pop in the oven or the microwave for those nights of decision fatigue or, like you said, keeping your kitchen stock with those things that you know, that you use over and over again. But I keep that list, and I don't plan, like, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday because I'm too moody for that. I'm either too tired or that doesn't sound good to me. Right. Yeah. And so I keep a list of these are the things I have to choose from throughout the week, knowing that not only if I'm exhausted, decision, fatigue, whatever, I can also just have my husband grab something out of the freezer. Or having a plan B and a plan C, quite honestly, I guess, is my biggest word of wisdom for anyone. And pick and choose from Emily's or from mine.

Emily:

Yeah, I love that idea, and I think that's one of the reasons when I think about meal planning, I have my hands up in the air because I am moody. That's the exact word I'm like. I don't want that right now.

Tricia:

I wish I could come up with another word for meal planning, because the words meal planning are, like, almost borderline triggering for people. Right?

Emily:

Yeah.

Tricia:

What's another way?

Emily:

I kind of think about, like, this is so random, but if you're at a bowling alley, you have bumpers, like, here's the boundaries that you work within, but you can go all the way to the right or all the way to the left or straight down the middle, like, wherever you want to go. And I think that's what we found that works really well is, like, what are those things that are really adaptable to a lot of different flavors but have the same kind of standard core ingredients that you can have? And Trader Joe's is a great example. We recently found they have a Mexican style cauliflower rice.

Tricia:

Been in my freezer right now.

Emily:

Have you tried it?

Tricia:

No.

Emily:

Okay. Well, I'm so curious to hear what you think, because it's one of the very few things we don't season at all. And the first time I made it, my partner didn't know. He didn't know what it was, and he thought that I had flavored it. I'm like, no, this is just how it comes, and it's great. You can just add black beans. We have vegan beef crumbles. We add to it sometimes corn. You don't need to add that much to it. And that is one of our go to things that we have now.

Tricia:

Now I'm so excited to try it.

Emily:

I'm excited for you.

Tricia:

I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but I'm married to meat and potatoes, man. But. I prefer the veggies and the sides. I know I need protein. And so I'm excited to learn more about vegan cooking. I just bought a couple of vegan cookbooks, actually, to level up my skills there a little bit, because, again, I keep bringing vegans into my world. And I think that's because if you haven't grown up vegan, it seems very intimidating to make the switch. Right. And so I think meal planning and cooking is already overwhelming enough, and then you add that to it and it becomes, I think, harder for some to find those options or those trusted resources right. That aren't salad all the time or whatever. Learn more about vegan cooking. I'm going to be hitting you up for some ideas.

Emily:

Yeah, absolutely. And I would actually say I think one of the reasons why I have so much creativity in the kitchen is being raised vegetarian. We had to be creative and do things, but I think there's so much food you're eating every day that is vegetarian or is vegan, but you're not thinking about it, so it's not as intimidating as it necessarily needs to be.

Tricia:

All right, so traveling and food go together like peanut butter and jelly, right. So any wild stories about discovering offbeat dishes during your travels that made you go like, whoa, I didn't see that coming, or things that you had to come back home from travels and say, I have to figure out how to make them.

Emily:

So many things. So when I travel places, I don't know if anyone uses a CTR on Google Maps where you can save places that you want to go. So I'll make a whole kind of list so that, especially when you have food restrictions, I have a lot of friends who are gluten free, too, or have different food allergies. It's a really easy way, no matter where you are in a city that you're exploring or a place that you're exploring, to have places saved, where you know there's going to be an option for you, or where you just know there's good food. So that's one of my approaches to travel and food. So if we've come to a neighborhood for a different type of attraction, we can pull that up and see that there's three different restaurants and pick the one we want to go to. It's hard to choose and we haven't recreated it yet, but last year we went to Chicago, and the food in Chicago, first of all, is just incredible.

Tricia:

It is.

Emily:

It was hard to narrow down the restaurants we wanted to go to, and we had so much good food there. But one of the places that we went, every single thing that we ate was unique and different to anything we had had before, and I think it was entirely vegan and it might have also been gluten free, which we didn't know when we went there. And they actually run another restaurant that's not but they care a lot about the environment and decided to open this one. And they had Nepal schnitzel on their menu. And Nepal is like cactus and is often it's like a very common vegetarian or vegan taco ingredient that's used. But they had the whole Nepal, and then they had obviously taken the skin off and then battered it in breading, and they had I don't remember what the sauce was, but that was so ingenious and new and unique. And again, everything we had at that restaurant was amazing, but that was something that we thought, wow, we want to come home and make that. And Nepal tacos are actually one of the first things my partner ever cooked for me. So it's something that we just love in general. But that was a really cool whoa. I didn't see that coming.

Tricia:

Oh, I can't wait for you to share that recipe when you get that one figured out. What? We're almost out of time, and I feel like we could talk forever. In fact, I feel like we need to have around two so we can go through the rest of the questions that I had planned, because this has just been so much fun, so much fun. But I want to leave a few minutes for you to tell people about who you are, I mean, outside of your bio, what you do and how they can get in touch with you, and what are you promoting right now? What do you want people to get in touch with you for?

Emily:

Yeah, thanks so much for and I'm down for round two. And this has been such a fun conversation. It's just flown by. So actually, the first question you asked me was about creating cocktails, and I mentioned at that time I had been working with a coach. And part of that experience was, again, I was feeling a little bit, like, disconnected from myself, and I really didn't recognize myself at that time. And working with a coach was such a transformative experience for me where I really felt like I returned to myself. I got clear on what was important to me, my values, and I changed the whole orientation of my life as a result of that. Over time wasn't like a complete switch. But by getting clear on the things that were important to me, I was able to make decisions around and start to dream again around what I really wanted my life to look like. And I realized at that time that there were so many ways in which I was delaying happiness. I was thinking about, I want to advance really far in my career. And that's why we're staying in New York City. And once we get to this certain point where we're successful and we can live anywhere, then we'll move back to Florida, where both my partner and I love the warm weather. First of all, the beach, and then our families lived here and we really wanted to be closer to our families as well. So just kind of these moments where that question of like, why are we delaying our happiness? Came up. And I think there's so many narratives that people live, unfortunately live by around, work really hard and save for retirement, and then once you're retired, you can rest and play and laugh and all of these things. But it became really important to me at that time to shift in my own career to hold space for other people to reconnect with themselves, to interrogate some of the narratives and assumptions that are placed on us by society and by also well meaning people who love us, like our parents and teachers and coworkers. So that's a lot of what I support people to do is understand what do you value most? How do you want to be spending your time? What's the impact that you want to have in your community or in the world? How do you also want to be taking care of yourself in that process? So something working in nonprofits for a lot of my life, I spent a lot of years just burning out over and over and over again. So that's why the burnout to boundaries is also something that I work on and now layer on ADHD, also realizing that we're very prone to burnout as well. So that's part of the space that I hold for people is to take a step back, to shake off some of the assumptions and expectations of others and get really clear on what it is that you want. What? It is that you value, what it is that you desire and then make decisions from that place in a way that's in alignment with what you care about, who you care about, what you want to spend your time doing.

Tricia:

I do that both reasons we ended up coming together. Yes. Very similar. Very similar there. Keep going. Sorry. I was like, this is why we came together.

Emily:

Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. That's absolutely why we came together. And it's a really big passion of mine to have people be able to live life on their terms. And then once you have that vision, supporting folks to create those actionable steps to, okay, how do I get from where I am today to where I want to be in a month from now or a year from now? And even sometimes the small adjustments in our everyday simple routines like what you're talking about, how do we approach food and the dinner, I mean, that can create such day to day shifts that have really big impacts in our lives. So some of the main ways I offer coaching is for some longer term partnerships with both, like six month coaching packages. And then there's also something I've been piloting with a few of my current clients that I'm ready to release to the world, which is a half day visioning session where I customize some both pre work and post work for you and also customize a guided visualization for you to envision where you want to be a year from now. And that's aligned. The visualization is customized to how you want to feel, where you want to be. So it opens with that visualization practice and then from there, there's a series of questions to just unpack. Okay, in that future version of yourself, what are the things that that person believes? What are the values that they have? What do they wake up and think about every day and really crystallizing that? And then towards the end of that session, starting to make those one, three and six month action plans to move towards that. So that's something, if you're not ready for a long term relationship, can be a really powerful way just to think about and visualize your future and get to play and dream a little bit, which sometimes as adults we stop doing because life's really busy and moves really fast. But it's important to stop and give ourselves that space and that time and that gift.

Tricia:

I mean, that's a lot in a half day. That is a powerful half day. And I think that is actually really necessary because there are so many long term coaching programs out there and they're amazing. But when you're first starting out, you don't know what you don't know. And sometimes you think you know what you want, but really getting clear on a day like that and then being able to sit with it and really feel into does this feel right before you go down this long, expensive road of building a business? I think it's even about more than just are you ready for a longer term? I think it's a great first step to understand are you even on the right path or does that need to pivot before you invest right into that larger coaching program? I think that's a fabulous offer, especially for those who are new. Sure. I meet so many women in these networking groups that are like, I don't really know what my offer is yet, or I don't really know who my ideal client is yet. Right. And it takes a while to figure that out. But the process you're talking about helps you get crystal clear on that in a different way. Maybe not in the client avatar way, so to speak. But that's important work that you don't always know needs to be done till you're already further down the road. Or at least for me.

Emily:

Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes we can get so caught up in what the endpoint is, but taking the time I mean, one of the things that I love about guided visualizations is part of the process is tapping into your five senses, and your brain actually doesn't know the difference between if you're saying something that has actually happened or it's happened in real life. So when you do a guided visualization and you see yourself in this future state where you're feeling whatever it is, more at ease, more confidence, you're feeling strong. A lot of people in the visualization see themselves as taller.

Tricia:

Interesting.

Emily:

Just very interesting. So there's so much you could unpack beneath that, but when you're able to see that, it also taps into our subconscious. So even if you're not like, intentional action, of course, is important, but even if you don't follow through on all those actions, people still see the shifts happening in their life and they're seeing new opportunities that might have been there before, but their eyes weren't open to them. So it's a really powerful exercise that can have short and long term benefits.

Tricia:

Yeah, beautiful. Well, tell everybody where they can get in touch with you and we'll be sure to put all the links in the show notes as well. But tell everybody where they can follow you, get in touch with you, and then we'll sign off for round one.

Emily:

Yes. So I am on both LinkedIn and Instagram. On LinkedIn, Emily Pasnak lapchick and on Instagram, it's at Chrysalischange and also on my website Chrysalisxchange.com. You can find information more about me, about the services that I offer, as well as stories from some of the folks that I've worked with. So those are three different areas you can engage with me and feel free to reach out on any of them and with any questions you have, or just even ideas that you have, or insights that you had from listening to this conversation.

Tricia:

Thank you so much and we will talk again soon. For all of you listening, thank you for being here again for another episode of Mealtime Magic and Mayhem. It's been a super fun conversation and whether you feel called to reach out to Emily or you need help figuring out what your habits and processes need to be and really what you want meal time to be, I'm just a phone call and an email away. Talk to you on the next episode. Thanks so much for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode, please go hit that follow button. Subscribe. Leave us a review, and if you're ready to change what mealtime looks like for you, breaking that cycle of chaos and having more fun in the kitchen, build some confidence and discover your love of cooking. Schedule your free dish with Trish. Call at the link in the show notes. We'll chat a few minutes and you'll walk away with personalized strategies to take your mealtime routine, from tired to inspired. See you next time.