Tonight I Burned Myself on the Broil Element of My Oven While Attempting to Bake a Tray of Cupcakes. Here's What That Taught Me About Resiliency in the Workplace

In corporate America, we are constantly confronted with situations where moving too fast causes us to get burned.

My Saturday evening started like any other. I had no plans, so after utilizing the cellar-level gym in my Lower East Side apartment building, I retreated to the galley kitchen in my home to bake. Baking produces a tangible product, so I find it is an ideal way to ensure a day feels productive—even when it has been anything but.

The process began as expected. I mixed together some vanilla cupcake batter in my pistachio green KitchenAid stand mixer and portioned it into cupcake liners. The trouble began when I attempted to place said tray of cupcakes in the oven using only one hand. What was the other hand doing that it could not don an oven mitt and help? It was handling my iPhone, as I attempted to capture footage of the mini cakes entering the oven to post on my Instagram story. So I pressed on with the one-handed entry of my little cakes into the oven.

Unfortunately, without two hands to guide it, the tray landed in a rather awkward position on the oven rack. Worried the cupcakes would not bake evenly if they weren’t centered on the rack, I quickly moved to reposition them. In my haste, my forearm knocked the broil element at the top of the appliance—which had successfully reached 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Interestingly, as the skin on my arm began to bubble, I did not panic. Rather, I quickly and calmly walked to my sink, ran cool water over the wound, and considered how singeing off one’s own arm hair with a broil element is not all too dissimilar from many of the trials one faces each day in the workplace.

In corporate America, we are constantly confronted with situations where moving too fast causes us to get burned. Perhaps we forgot to input a customer order, and now the promised delivery date has come and gone and the customer is demanding answers. Perhaps we used some expletives in a slack channel in a heat of the moment argument, and now HR is getting involved. The important thing to remember in these high-stakes situations is we must not let anxiety cause us to freeze and metaphorically keep our arm in the oven. Rather, we must act fast, remove our flesh from harm’s way, and of course always deny any claims of negligence or wrongdoing when questioned later by family, friends and coworkers on what went wrong. In this way, we protect ourselves from further damage and buy time for our scars to heal before the next, inevitable self-made disaster strikes.

Tonight reminded me that resilience is about more than persevering when the going gets tough. It’s about persevering when the going gets tough and you know that you’re the one to blame. So next time you move too fast at work and cause irreparable damage to shareholder value, remember not to leave your arm in the oven. Act fast, minimize the damage to yourself, and if possible, go home and reward yourself with a nice, homemade vanilla cupcake!