Reconnecting You to Your Service-Driven Nature.
I help professionals and organizations learn the inner game of customer service so they can tap into the fullest power of the service opportunity.
My name is Stefan Ravalli. I'm a teacher and coach with healthy obsession with service.
It's my mission to show you that you're wired for service. For human beings, it's a natural source of inspiration, strength and growth. Yet it can just as easily feel frustrating, draining and demoralizing.
What's the difference? Mindset.
With the Service Mindset, you're a superhero. You can manage the challenges of the role, turn them into opportunities, show your customers what service really is - and find fulfillment in your work.
Everyone is wired to get true joy and fulfillment from helping others. You just need to be reminded how. A decade and a half in service leadership has revealed to me that truly showing up to the service role can have a transformative effect on everyone around you. However, mastering service is just as much an inner journey, and the standard training focuses mostly on the external duties of job.
I started Serve Conscious to bring people and companies the skills I wish I was taught from day one - the skills that show me how to be the human being I know I can be: genuinely caring and generous to other human beings (especially the ones that don't make it so easy for us).
"A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended."
-Batman in The Dark Knight Rises
Service Superpower Set No. 1 | Well-ness.
"I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy."
-Tagore
Service success is determined by server well-being. Period. It's hard to really serve when your tank is empty. No amount of training will compensate for this.
Getting the mechanical points of good service is important and rewarding, but is that what truly leaves all parties feeling inspired by the service exchange?
Real service feels like the person has plenty to give and genuinely wants to give it. This sense of abundance is developed through practices that mentally and emotionally optimize you for the endless demands of daily service life. Remember: super-powered service is effortless. It's what happens when the well-being of the person serving naturally overflows into helping and inspiring others.
Service Superpower Set No. 2 | One-ness.
If you care, you win. Nothing is more memorable for a customer than someone that brings their fullest, warmest humanity to the service exchange.
More and more, customers are demanding meaning service experiences like this to the places they spend their money. And I say, rightly so: if all human beings are capable of offering warmth, friendliness and understanding to the people they serve, then why expect anything less?
Why can't people just switch this on. The mental and emotional strain of life (inside and out of the workplace) makes it challenging for anyone to consistently show up with this level of presence. The Service Conscious mission is to teach you the simple, service-optimized techniques that restore your natural levels of energy, joy and compassion.
And guess what? Bringing more attention and care to the service role is what will reveal the value of the work. When you build the service mindset, customer and employee happiness accelerate together!
"We are given the opportunity to express the most meaningful use of our lives every time we interact with another sentient being."
-Chris Matakas
Service Superpower Set No. 3 | Yes-ness.
"You’re going to make a difference. A lot of times it won’t be huge, it won’t be visible even. But it will matter just the same."
-Commissioner Gordon in Gotham Central, Book One.
Meaningful service comes from someone that believes in themselves and their value. And knows the power of kindness, generosity and benevolence. Unfortunately, the increasing demand for great service isn't necessarily matched by increasing respect for the people serving. Combined with the daily grind of service challenges, difficult customers can degrade anyone's self-worth - and with it goes the inspiration to be helpful.
Your service game depends on you and your team reconnecting to the power and dignity of the service role. Empowered service professionals are resiliently positive. They can convert a challenging customer into an inspired relationship - without getting beaten down in the process. What if you could give the kind of transformative service that actually causes your customers to respect service again?
Service Superpower Set No. 4 | Now-ness.
What's the magic sauce you find in all great service experiences? Attention. Not just any attention: caring attention.
Attention is precious. It might feel scattered and untamable (thanks to the madness of modern life), but simple mental training practices can turn you into a superweapon of awareness.
Your mind can work against you and buckle under the inevitable distractions, stress, and negative self-talk that plague high-demand service situations. Or, it can work for you and allow you to remain clear, calm and capable. Process more information, make better decisions and truly enjoy your work. The difference is simply found in your mastery of your attention.
"The most practical thing we can achieve in any kind of work is insight into what is happening inside us as we do it."
-Parker Palmer
Transform Your Inner Service Game.
Ask me anything about how I can serve you or your team. (You may have picked this up: I love to serve).
Origin Story | Chapter 1.
Dysfunctional professional/human being.
In the beginning I thought of myself as a people pleaser that lived and breathed the art of service. Let's break that statement down:
- People: Lacked any understanding of how human beings work.
- Pleasing: Doesn't actually happen without people skills (see above).
- Live: Hard to do without practices that restore your sense of, well, being alive.
- Breathe: Generally shallow and panicked. Especially when interacting with other humans.
Like any young, lost, over-thinking creative type, I turned to hospitality work as a holding pattern until I figured out how to survive with an education in film theory (it's basically a degree in having interesting conversations). While I looked for direction, direction found me as I fell in love with hospitality - strange considering how much service was a source of anxiety and trauma for me (Remember? People = confusing and terrifying?).
Chapter 2.
Service & leadership struggles.
The knowledge and enthusiasm I brought to my job quickly propelled me to leadership roles in the restaurant and bar industry around the world.
But I never felt right about how I served. I struggled with stress, getting scattered in high pressure situations, not feeling good enough, fearing that my co-workers or customers viewed me as deficient in some way. I began to burn out and develop a perception of service that was as negative as my perception of myself. I lost the confidence to even take on management roles and worked simply as a bartender.
That's just how it is, right? Service sucks, I'm a mess. Let's just get through the day and hope people are nice.
Chapter 3.
Game-changers.
Well, it turns out that everything is changeable when you have the right tools. When I learned meditation and began practicing every day, I realized that I was in the driver seat of my own life.
Simply from doing this, everything positive in my life that felt stuck accelerated:
- Health & well-being.
- Confidence & capability.
- Interpersonal skills.
- Career success.
- Capacity for growth and learning.
- New abilities I didn't even know mattered.
But something was still not quite in place: fulfillment in the work I did. I was thriving as a service leader, but it didn't feel like something that fit into my life of joy and purpose. I felt that truly meaningful work would be found in teaching this practice that had so completely transformed my life. So I left hospitality at the peak of my career to travel to India to become a meditation teacher. I returned to a full-time career as a teacher, focusing my attention on sharing "healthy, mindful, life-affirming" knowledge, far away from the "dirty, ugly" pressures of the service industry.
After awhile, something still felt like it was out of place. I felt like I wasn't living on the ground level of reality like I used to, and wasn't really testing my resilience in challenging enough environments.
Chapter 4.
Fusion reaction.
I had to get back out there into the world. So I re-entered the service industry and almost immediately, I felt myself growing and learning in ways I never thought possible doing a humble job I was so familiar with.
It all soon became clear: service is a sacred ritual that when connected to fully, will transform and elevate everyone involved as much as any meditation practice. No matter what kind of environment, the simplest of service exchanges can be profound.
But then I looked around and saw that no one else had that same connection to their work. No one was sharing or experiencing the joy I felt. They got diminished and defeated by rude customers, moody coworkers and the small daily mishaps of work life. They did not have the capacity I had to thrive and grow when things were tough (or even when they were pleasant).
And I thought, "Why would they?" This mindset is, after all, a learned skill - and who in their professional lives, was teaching it? At no point in my career did anyone in my industry provide me with the tools that allowed the necessary energy, calm, self-awareness, connection to others, and ability to see the value of service work. I had to learn techniques from mindfulness teachers and other resources from outside of the service world and spend about a decade trying to jam them into the day-to-day challenges of my work like.
Eventually I figured out how to make my service life a meaningful one, but man was that a grind getting there. I realized my mission had to be to show others how to apply the techniques I learned to quickly up-level their relationship to service work. So So I founded Serve Conscious in 2018, where I can now dedicate myself to helping others develop the one thing that change their service game: themselves.
Join the Movement.
Access FREE live monthly Service Superpower Workshops. Meet the non-stop demands of the service role with power, purpose and resilience.
FAQ.
Something you're born with? Maybe a "talent with people" or a "selfless nature"? Or perhaps someone with "nurturing tendencies" can be a service superhero? The only honest answer: they're skills you practice and develop that reveal the very super aspects of your basic humanity.
The 5-day mini-course you get access to upon subscribing will take you through the four main categories of service superpowers along with simple practices that get you into the habit of being your superhero self.
Free Workshops: Each month, we gather on a live interactive call to explore a theme that taps into the power of the service mindset. You'll learn the aspects of the inner service game - tools, techniques, principles - that I've found professionals most urgently need that month. Join the movement here!
Paid Programs: I intimately work with you and your team and provide you with the specific tools that you need to next-level your inner service game and connect with your particular customer profile in more meaningful ways. This can be covered in a one-off that we extensively develop and prepare for - or progressively over a period of weekly sessions. Reach out here with further questions on these possibilities.
Firstly, I started Serve Conscious because I saw how much performance was determined by your own wellness as a professional (your state of well-being, after all, one of the four main service superpowers). Teaching professionals to be self-sufficient keepers of their wellness is certainly a part of the training - but just a part. Because by this logic, I could justify any wellness offering, i.e. "I'll come in and give you and your team massages since you'll give better service after," but I wanted to focus on wellness practices that are specific antidotes to the challenges of service.
The answer to whether this program is practical is a resounding "yes." It focuses on service technique, just with an understanding that it's inseparable from wellness. And it focuses on wellness with the understanding that its truly powerful when driven by the aim of true service.
8 or fewer benefits from being more intimate, but larger groups of course offer a wider impact. There are no limits to group size, I'll simply suggest the ideal sizes with you based on your learning goals.
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