From the Kitchen to Life: How Cooking Teaches Teens About Overcoming Failure & Achieving Their Goals

Have you ever wondered how whipping up your favourite batch of cookies could teach you about more than just flavours and recipes? Believe it or not, your adventures in the kitchen are also lessons in setting and achieving goals.

When you decide to make chocolate chip cookies, you're not just choosing a cookie recipe. You're setting a goal: delicious, home-baked cookies. You need to gather ingredients, follow specific steps, and manage your time—just like setting and achieving any goal in life.

Without giving it much thought, you are applying the concept of SMART goals (specific, measureable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) to your baking. For instance, you may say "I want to bake chocolate chip cookies by Sunday using the recipe from my favourite cookbook." From there begins the planning and preparation of the recipe, no different than when we set goals in our life.

When we are ready to make those cookies, we need to demonstrate patience and follow through with the steps and process. Inevitably we might make a mistake. Perhaps we are short an ingredient, didn't measure an ingredient correctly or burnt the cookies, but this is how we learn. We experiment, try again and with time, master the baking process.

Setting and achieving goals is no different. We break down life's goals in smaller steps and along the journey are bound to incur challenges and obstacles that we overcome to reach success. It's okay to make mistakes in both baking and in life. We learn from it and continue moving forward.

Cooking can be a fun a practical way for teens to learn valuable life skills like setting and achieving goals. Encourage your child to get into the kitchen not just to make food, but to learn lessons that extend beyond cooking. Let them know that they aren't just learning how to bake cookies, but also stirring up some essential life skills. So preheat the oven and get ready to achieve some tasty goals.