Brewing Confidence: How Coffee Skills Boost Your Life

In this episode, I dive into the psychological aspects of coffee brewing and how developing confidence in your brewing skills can positively impact other areas of your life. I explore how becoming skilled at something you're passionate about—like coffee—gives you a sense of belonging and excitement that professional obligations often don't provide.

I discuss the journey of understanding coffee brewing, from the struggles and experimentation to the satisfaction of bringing out the best flavors in a roast. I share personal insights about how pushing beyond your comfort zone, whether through content creation or coffee clubs, leads to continuous growth. Listeners will learn about the value of practice, curiosity, and how the daily ritual of coffee brewing provides unique opportunities to perfect your craft and build confidence that extends beyond your morning cup.

Chapters

• 0:00 Coffee Brewing as Psychology
• 1:03 Confidence in Coffee and Life
• 1:49 Finding Passion in Unexpected Places
• 3:40 The Joy of Coffee Mastery
• 5:05 Testing and Exploration
• 5:55 Pushing Past Your Comfort Zone
• 7:10 The Journey of Continuous Growth
• 8:20 The Daily Practice Advantage
• 9:34 Coffee Skills Transferring to Other Areas

Transcript

[00:00:00] Okay, we synced and everything is going real well.

[00:00:06] We doing this big dog. We live right now. Today is April 12, 2025, and we're doing pretty good right now.

[00:00:26] I hope that you're doing pretty good right now. This is going to be... You know whenever I come on here talk about coffee, I didn't realize that it's more than just brewing and analyzing. It's kind of like that, but you'll get what I'm talking about. I don't realize how much of a psychological type of situation it is a lot of times when we talk about coffee brewing, or making coffee in general, and how we go about enjoying it and what that makes us feel inside.

[00:01:03] Like I said, I talk about some random stuff and I'm glad that I'm able to expand as much as I can when it comes to coffee. In this case, I think the interesting thing that we're gonna be talking about is confidence—confidence in coffee brewing and how that really helps boost your life and in letting you know that you're good at something. Because as we are all working professionals or whatnot or striving to be that way, what we think? It wasn't a long walk, about three and a half miles.

[00:01:49] In life we tend to get good at things and at times we're good at things that we don't care to be good at. Some of us pass life and everything—engineering, project management. Really good at that. I'm really good at understanding a project, seeing it through, knowing that it's not project management, it's people management and the way that you go about getting things done. That's more so where you're at with a lot of this stuff, but it's something that I don't really care about, something that doesn't really drive me to perfection. It doesn't give me that sense of belonging. It doesn't give me that sense of being. It doesn't give me that sense of excitement as this coffee thing does.

[00:02:45] Again, I know that you probably go through that quite a bit too in whatever that you may be doing. But it's pretty cool to realize that we can get good at this coffee thing. We can get to the place of where we understand what we're really trying to do when it comes to coffee and enjoying coffee, providing it, preparing it for ourselves, preparing it for others, giving people knowledge of understanding that this is what you can do with coffee.

[00:03:15] It's pretty cool that we get to practice, we get to play, we get to experiment with coffee every day, sometimes once a day, others more times than normal. It's really cool to be in a place of curiosity and wonder, to really get into a field to where you are seeing it through.

[00:03:40] Going through the struggles, you're going through all the pains, the anguish—is it these beans or is it yourself or is it the way you actually brew a cup of coffee? Those are some of the things that you constantly think about. But when you have it, when you understand it to the teeth and you can really just bring the best out of this coffee the way that this roaster has roasted it, that's a pretty good feeling. You beat yourself like, "Yeah, I did that stuff."

[00:04:15] Because you figured out the best way for yourself to drink that coffee, to enjoy it. And then at times what happens is that you start to understand it from other people's point of view, and you're able to give them something that's probably not more so your style, but something that they will enjoy and figure out and understand and get to a place to where they're pretty happy.

[00:04:38] It's interesting, and I think that's the thing that we have to realize—that's the path that we're really going on is a sense of perfection. But I don't know if perfection is the right word. I would think that you're just getting better. You're understanding things a lot better, understanding coffee, understanding yourself even more, understanding your brewers, understanding your water chemistry.

[00:05:05] You may add something here and there to the whole lineup as you go about understanding and drinking your coffee, but at the end of the day, you're testing things out. I think that's the biggest thing really—you have to test and explore and see what other people are talking about, see how you can go about understanding even more so of all the things that you're trying to do in this whole thing.

[00:05:30] I think I was talking to a friend about this—I think by me having this YouTube podcasting type of situation or setup is that it's pushed me to a place to where it's either I like it or maybe something other people may like, or people may give me suggestions.

[00:05:55] I'm not saying that you need to have a YouTube channel or a podcast type of situation in order to explore coffee. You can explore it in your house. You can either have your own notebook, you can have friends that you talk to, you have coffee clubs and all that stuff that you go about doing things.

[00:06:19] Those are some of the ways that you can actually push yourself past your comfort zone. Those are some of the more things that I'm talking about here. You can subscribe to other people who talk about coffee who's into your own interest. But at the end of the day, the biggest takeaway here is that you're pushing, that you're exploring, and that you see that there's an endless amount of growth and the way you prepare coffee, the way you go about drinking it and enjoying it. We just walked, so I'll have to be quiet for a little bit.

[00:07:10] My dog is great, but she's had a long walk. She's 85 pounds. She needs a bath and all that good stuff. But like I said, something about the journey and wanting to do more and just exploring, and when you get good at something, you know it.

[00:07:28] I'm not saying that I'm like the baddest dude ever when it comes to making coffee, but I do know how to make a good cup of coffee at least for myself, for my wife, and for friends, whoever I have entertaining. I hope that you are there too. And if you're not, that's fine because that's the beauty of all this, right? The beauty of all this is that it's a journey and it's a lot of fun, and it's something that I look forward to each and every day.

[00:08:01] I think yesterday I made like three or four cups just trying different things. I got a new gadget. I'll be talking about more and talking about this whole state of gadgets 2025 and how many do you need and all that good stuff. But again, it's fun because you get to test ideas instantly, and you can enjoy it or not enjoy it, figure out things for the time being, and you move on with your day.

[00:08:30] But something that you're really good at, that you know your stuff—and the cool thing about coffee, at least to me, is that you can be really good at it because of the amount of experience that you put yourself through, the amount of repetitions and reps that you get into the tank, and the amount of times that you actually get to drink and enjoy and understand what you're doing. That's the cool part about it.

[00:09:00] I'll give you another example before we leave off today. I do a lot of other things, and one of the things that I do is I smoke meat—brisket, sausage, pulled pork. I kind of do it differently, got a little secret on that. But a couple weeks ago, I went ahead and made some sausage. You know, everybody loves the Texas style jalapeño cheddar sausage, and I kind of did it a little differently this time. I did it with spinach and different spices. Sometimes I didn't have a spice or two, so I improvised and just used whatever I could.

[00:09:34] When it came time to actually stuffing the sausage, I was nervous because I haven't stuffed sausage in about six or seven months. But when I prepared and prepped everything and got everything going, this process was a lot better. This process was a lot easier compared to the first two times that I've actually done the stuffing of the sausage, and it sounds really weird when I say it all the time like this.

[00:10:23] But I guess what I'm saying here is that I'm getting better in that just simply because of the reps in the tank. I don't do it as much, and again, that's the cool thing about coffee. That's something that we can really gravitate to all the time because we can make it—we make it every day.

[00:10:40] So realize that and take advantage of that and just be happy that we are able to get better at our craft, at our passions, but we can also enjoy it. So this is me, Okie do everyday beans signing off, and this is just me talking about building confidence in coffee and how when you build confidence in coffee, I think it does spread to other areas of your life. But more importantly, you know at the bare minimum you can make a good damn cup of coffee. So see you on the other side. Talk to you later. Bye.