We recently connected with Cloyce Martin and have shared our conversation below.
Cloyce , we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
It is definitely important to develop your confidence, ideally as early into your journey as possible. Failure to develop in this one area often creates the most hurdles to success in both the short and long term, preventing people from kickstarting their ideas and building the life they want for themselves.
Confidence is built in a number of ways. The most authentic form of confidence is built with experience and education. Once you’ve invested thousands of hours into developing a skill it becomes quite natural to confidently speak about it and share that knowledge with other people. Applying your skills in the real world and seeing successful results will build your confidence even further. This form of confidence should absolutely be built first before employing other techniques and applies to all areas of life.
Another great way to build your confidence is with a strong support system of close friends, hyper-realists, overwhelming optimists and mentors/trusted advisors. I find this mix of people to be ideal for confidence building, where a perfect mix of sage advice, experience and blind faith all come together to inform your life’s big decisions. Normally if your whole support system is in agreement about something, there’s likely a good reason for it.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I am a young entrepreneur with quite a few irons in the fire. My life’s passion, favorite art form, means of meditation, largest motivator to travel and preferred way of connecting with new and old friends alike lies within the world of the culinary arts. It is the only form of art that exists that you can interact with using all five senses. I started competing in internationally televised cooking competitions when I was 12 years old, got my first restaurant job when I was 14, and began attending a 4 year culinary program that same year. I worked in restaurants for 7 years before transitioning to private events, yacht charters and restaurant consultation. I now run my private events/catering company while developing new food products and building my adventure/travel/lifestyle brand. Because of my consistent focus on being outdoors, whether it be on a yacht cooking, free diving somewhere exotic or hiking through a forest to forage for mushrooms, I am often exposed to the elements and the direct sunlight. I have started developing an outdoor topicals brand, including natural mineral sunscreen, lip balms, daily-use moisturizers etc which will be available as soon as humanly possible.
What I’m most grateful for is that my work takes me far and wide, and I’ve been very fortunate to experience culture and the beauty of the world in many countries with my food-focused travels.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I am a big proponent of becoming well-rounded once you’ve had a chance to fully develop your primary passions. It definitely doesn’t help to simply be average at everything you do, but many opportunities will be missed throughout your life if you’re so overly specialized that you can’t engage with or hold your own in other areas of life as well.
Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?
The 3 most important qualities anyone should develop for a successful and happy life would be networking, insatiable intellectual curiosity, and adaptability.
It is of paramount importance to continuously develop and maintain an ever-growing network. Your net worth is your network, as they say. Your ability to grow and build your life at exponential rates relies greatly on your ability to network by formulating new business relationships, finding new mentors and expanding your opportunities.
Insatiable intellectual curiosity is an important skill to develop because it is absolutely impossible to know everything about anything, and thus there is always something new to learn about your craft. Given the speed of new market trends in competitive environments, if you aren’t progressing, you are actually regressing. Continue to educate yourself and find new strategies for growth and innovation are key when building your life.
I find that the most successful people in my life have been experts at adapting to every situation. In the world of both business and personal life, financial, environmental, and social circumstances are constantly changing, requiring that we too change to fit whatever the atmosphere may be at the time. When COVID was just starting, I was working at the renowned River Cafe in Brooklyn. Eventually the whole staff was furloughed and I decided to move back to California. As the global situation worsened, my restaurant opportunities in California also dried up and I was left with a choice: leave the restaurant world and go into real estate, or adapt and overcome. I found myself doing private events and working on yachts faster than I could blink. That adaptability opened so many new doors and has gotten me where I am today.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://chefcloyce.com/
- Instagram: @chefcloyce.
- Linkedin: https://linktr.ee/chefcloyce
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
