BREAKFAST WITH STEPHEN
Why I'm adopting the name "Breakfast with Stephen" as a place where food and conversations unveil possibilities. Best suited for seekers and anyone who believes in the power of human connections.
BACKBONE offers a raw, honest take on leading with authenticity and purpose in today’s complex world. This series is about shaping a future grounded in sustainability and integrity, fueled by actionable insights and timeless wisdom from the greatest minds.
“I feel somehow calm. Just being there, in that kitchen, I feel somehow soothed. I love kitchens so much they make me want to cry. The kitchen is the only place in the house where there’s a light on after midnight. The sound of a refrigerator humming, I like the feel of that. I like the smell of gas. I even like the smell of slightly burned toast, and the feel of the floor beneath my bare feet.”
—Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen
Twenty-five square meters, give or take, must have been the size of the kitchen in my family home growing up. We lived on the third floor of a seven-story condominium, which housed twenty-seven families and twenty-seven kitchens. Our kitchen was normal-looking, but the stories we shared transformed it into anything the mind could imagine.
My mother was a nurse and loved being one, but when I was born, she chose an administrative job in human resources, managing nurses and doctors, so she wouldn’t have to work night shifts now that she had two children.
That combination of caring and firmness made her the kind of woman who could sit through your mess and still hold you to a standard, listening without judgment and telling the truth relentlessly.
Growing up, I spent hours at the kitchen table, repeating out loud to my mom the history, chemistry, literature, anatomy, and art history lessons I needed to memorize for school. I believe that’s how I got my gift of the gab, the ability to present my ideas, mediate with purpose, and negotiate with clarity.
My mother would keep cooking while I talked, sewing or cross-stitching without interrupting or correcting me. Here and there she would glance at a TV show in the background, but she always listened to what I said.
When something didn’t make sense, she would ask the most straightforward question, like she was learning with me. From her, I came to understand the art of letting someone find the truth at their time and pace through the power of being seen and heard. She taught me what it means to care for people through patience and presence.
The kitchen was also where she taught me how to cook recipes from the region in Italy where she was born, Emilia-Romagna. I learned how to make fresh pasta for tagliatelle, taglierini, tortellini, and lasagne. Ragù, pomarola, pesto, and béchamel sauce. French fries, chicken cutlets, and cakes of all kinds, almost every day. You learn more about life while cooking with someone you love than you do in a dozen leadership seminars.
Later, when I moved to the U.S., she stayed in Florence, but my friends still visited, drinking coffee in our kitchen, sharing lunch and dinner, sitting with her as if I had never left. A kitchen becomes a home when people share stories.
In the U.S., my love for food and conversation continued when I discovered brunch, diners, and cafés where I could sit, talk, work, eat, and spend time with friends discussing work, love, and everything in between.
These days, when I travel around the world with my partner, we explore the café culture in London, Tokyo, Venice, Paris, Porto, Lisbon, Edinburgh, Seoul, Busan, and many others. If our paths ever cross, you will see two guys seated for hours, writing (me) and drawing (him). Say hello.
In cafés, I am at my happiest reading, working, eating, drinking, meeting, and learning about the people around me. You see students, couples, and people pitching a business idea between cappuccinos.
Cafés are also one of the few places where people do not need a reason to be together. That is rare and vital because human beings need each other more than any other species. If we stop gathering, we lose something essential, we go crazy, and we forget who we are.
It is for all these reasons that I decided to transform Pity Party Over into a place that feels like home, called Breakfast with Stephen, which will take place in my kitchen.
In my kitchen, I write the short stories for Backbone and the fiction for Meatgrinder, and it is from my kitchen and from cafés around the world that I will record the podcast, interviewing scholars, practitioners, and entrepreneurs on how to boost personal agency and lead people effectively for a sustainable, fair, and kind world.
Breakfast with Stephen is a place with a million questions and endless answers. It is a morning ritual for people who are still figuring things out, a space to reflect, restore, and remember how to reclaim your values, desires, and sense of purpose, and help others do the same.
Thank you for coming into my kitchen. We’ll have many stories to share.
PAUSE. LEARN. MOVE ON.
Psychologists call “co-regulation” the quiet, vital way our nervous systems find balance through another human being: the sound of a voice, the steadiness of attention, and the simple grace of presence.
Sociologist Erving Goffman might have called my mom’s kitchen a stage where identity took shape through interaction, a place where I was forming, little by little, becoming myself in the presence of someone else. That is what my mother gave me, without any formula or technique, but by staying near, listening without interruption, and asking just enough.
You see co-regulation between actors, those moments when a performance sharpens because one person’s presence draws out the best in the other, creating something neither could produce alone. It’s woven into dialogue and relationship arcs, where characters shape each other’s emotional states and transform one another’s inner world through presence and attention.
If this opened something in you, subscribe to Breakfast with Stephen, or spend time with ALYGN, where we explore how to move through complexity with intelligence, integrity, and the grace of real conversations.
You can reach Stephen at stephen@alygn.company
