One Encounter, One Opportunity. Make service meaningful. Be Your customer's hero.

Stress Mastery | Understanding Stress & How to Release It | Ep. 109

There are so many misunderstandings about how stress works that result in misguided approaches to managing it. Know the real impact of stress on your service success – and actually effective ways of breaking its grip on you.

Emerge victorious in a world of “Emotional Labor”, where service professionals are feeling crushed by expectations to look happy when they’re feeling like crap.

What being “selfless” service really means – you might be surprised how many “selfish” decisions are required to really be of service.

Powerful new perspectives on communication and leadership practices, brought to you from the intersection of business strategy and piloting a commercial airplane.

Your service role will become elevated when you remember to simply pull away from those stories that diminish your worth and notice the abundance of evidence of how valuable you are.

Learn some of the ways that I broke out of emotional illiteracy – connecting with your customers is simpler than you think.

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness blog – to which I am a regular contributor. It’s hard to boil down a practice as rich as mindfulness to just a few words…however it’s fun to try. Actually, here’s one single word: “curiosity”. To what extent can you plunge your attention into everything with […]

An inspiring discussion with Kass Thomas, entrepreneur, coach and communication expert. Learn how to discover and pursue what lights you up.

Ken Starr discusses his book Religious Liberty in Crisis: Exercising Your Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, calling us to champion a diversity of belief systems in our society.

How to kill the service-killing belief “I am looked down upon and not respected in this role.”

Unbelievably inspirational discussion with authors and transformational coaches Mark Victor Hansen & Crystal Dwyer Hansen about their new book “Ask! The Bridge from Your Dreams to Your Destiny.”

For this milestone episode, I share some love for you my listeners, my inspiration for creating this podcast, and some powerful tools for you to connect with others like a great interviewer.

An eye-opening conversation with Dr. John Demartini, human behavior specialist who’s authored over 40 books on living and working to your fullest potential.

Communication is everything, right? So how come more people don’t learn how to really be THERE for it? Dan Huston is the O.G. mindful communication educator and has so much profound wisdom to share.

High-octane approaches to living with appreciation so that we serve from a place of fullness and achieve true success.

Conversation with Ron Kaufman exploring how organizations can humanize their service game, help their customers feel truly seen, and get on the vanguard of our inevitable service-driven future.

This is a short guided practice that I consider to be martial arts training for emotional resilience. Exercise attention and feeling capacity as though it’s a muscle.

We continue to explore the learnability of service and the (perhaps unexpected) methods you can you to develop the service mindset.

Service is natural and yet every aspect of it is learnable. Understand the mindset that assures success, growth and fulfillment in service.

My quest to understand the state of mind that leads to a love of service is fed by questions like this… What does it consist of? Where does draw its energy from? How can it be acquired by others? What makes it resilient? What disrupts it? What kinds of mental conditioning prevent someone’s receptivity to it? […]

This superpower will allow you to resonate with and skillfully communicate with others. It does this by changing how you habitually respond to people when they are “being difficult”. Develop emotional intelligence, resilience, compassion, understanding, and even joy in the face of your greatest interpersonal challenges.

What happens when you collect information openly, fearlessly – and with the beginner’s mind.

Mindful leadership coach and service champion Clifton Carmody tells us what happens when you shake off fear-based management styles that and tap into the possibility and profitability of conscious business principles in the service sector. We also reveal important strategies for service professionals that have been locked out of their sectors by COVID and are struggling to find work (hint: it has to do with the power and universality of service).

Strategy and quick practice to consistently drop into greater self-awareness throughout the day – have more calm, focus and authority over your emotions throughout the day. This is basically the essentials of mindfulness packed into 10 minutes or so.

Why are beautifully-recovered service experiences often considered the best ones? Because service isn’t technical, it’s emotional. Learn how to recover well and use disasters to build customer loyalty and happiness in surprising ways.

Originally published here for the Institute for Organizational Mindfulness. All service roles require trust, but not in the way you might think. It’s the kind of trust that keeps you both emotionally clean and connected to the true value of your work. In dealing with customers and clients, you can bring your best, most professional, […]

A game-changing in-the-moment mindfulness practice that will allow us to meet the reactions we have with the kindness and support of a good friend.

A guided practice that will set up your service mindset to meet the challenges of work and life with more energy, patience and capability.

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness (IOM). For both your own fulfillment, and the people you serve, what’s a better service trait than the love of making others happy? Well, the first mistake you can make with this is a tendency towards “outcome-orientation”: the frustration from things not turning out how you […]

Learn how our self-sacrificing tendencies can ultimately compromise our service game. This episode hopes to disrupt the myth that good service somehow needs to involve a constant outward flow of our energy into “helping” others. Bring care to yourself that truly fills your service tank – starting from the moment you open your eyes.

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. “Never let ‘em see you sweat.” I have very distinct memories of one of my mentors telling me this and urging me to laugh at myself more. Thanks to a terrifying combination of clumsiness and perfectionism, I was a young service professional that was prone to […]

The Celebration Mindset Pt. 1 – Taking Resilience to the Next Level

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. A true person of service lives and works in constant readiness for celebration. I can see this principal getting misinterpreted by my former bar and restaurant colleagues as something to the effect of bartenders doing shots with the clientele. But you’re onto something here: real success […]

The Best Way To Handle Mistakes in Service? Be Your Own Yoda

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. Service is full of mistakes. You’re dealing with endless highly-individual needs, unpredictable particularities, a minefield of emotional triggers that clients will readily punish you for ever-so-slightly feathering an insecurity of theirs. You’re also juggling technical demands and chances are you have the precision of a flesh […]

The Power of Asking “What is this really costing me?”

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. No service professional likes being run around. We retrace the same task for people who asked for one thing but needed another, we get absorbed by the endless questions of anxious clientele that aren’t even willing to listen to the answers. We carry the water of […]

Mindful Sales is Service At The Same Time

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. Having worked in the restaurant industry for most of my professional life, I’ve taken for granted how unusual it is. Even though its product has a certain universality to it (facilitating some of the most fundamental human needs like food, comfort, and social connection), there are […]

When You’re Selling Transformation, You’re Serving

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. Many that find success and fulfillment in the sales role probably know that they are doing a lot more than selling. On its own, the word “sales” mainly implies a simple monetary exchange: provide a product/service to a customer in exchange for money. What makes that […]

Heroic Acts of Service

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. Periods of great difficulty are always a great time to reflect on what service means to us and the ideas we may have accumulated about it that may need to be revisited. I’m thinking back to an inspiring discussion I recently had with restaurant-owner Albert Bitton […]

Good service requires the people serving to feel valued, engaged and, well, like dignified human beings. And to always have opportunities to practice service on each other. This is a very important discussion with service coach and author Neal Woodson. Service professionals looking to bring more mindfulness and inspiration to their work and leaders that want to elevate their team’s culture and effectiveness are sure to gain a lot from his wisdom.

Principles To Re-Inspire How We Approach Modern Service

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. Ichi-go Ichi-e is a Japanese parable translating to One Encounter, One Opportunity. It’s become the slogan of the practice of tea ceremony, which for many Asian cultures is the quintessential means of practicing mindfulness through action. It reveals how doing a simple daily ritual with […]

Customer Service Rockstars Make Friends with Repetitive Tasks

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. A new job or role might start out as a love affair. But so often after the first few months, it loses its lustre. We begin to feel deadened by the repetition of seemingly menial tasks. Why does repetition do this and can we change […]

Helping Difficult Customers With Non-Attachment and Compassion

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. Start paying close attention to how you serve, and you may notice things that you don’t like so much – like how little other people pay attention. It’s easy to get frustrated, which is why two other skills are key ingredients here: Try Some Non-Attachment: […]

Mindful Service Is An Inside-Out Game

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. Expand Your Communication Skills Have you ever gone to eat somewhere and everything is “perfect”? The person serving you recommends a wine pairing with a sniper’s precision. It arrives with surgically-executed food, both of which are timed like a Swiss monorail. And yet the experience was […]

Originally published here for the Institute of Organizational Mindfulness. Charity work is so attractive because of how gratifying it feels to help people who truly need it. The problem with most of the service contexts we face in our professional lives is that we’re not necessarily helping people who seem to “need” it. And sometimes […]

Think you love “making people happy”? Well, that good intention isn’t always what you think it is. Learn the more mindful, skillful approach to bringing out the best in others. And, actually, take the pressure off of yourself and expand your idea of what “making your customers happy” needs to look like.

What personal practices and mindsets prepare you to meet the challenges of service life, prevent burnout and brave all the other challenges ahead? Hospitality torchbearer, self-cultivation wizard and generally rad dude Dushan Zaric shares more of his wisdom, plus some impactful hits from the very special live service course he’s running.

Learn how mindfulness, self-development, and our success at doing almost anything are matters of emotional mastery. And this doesn’t mean learning to feel our preferred emotions, but having the capacity for the uncomfortable ones. This episode looks at powerful techniques for observing where and how emotions are actually happening and how to support ourselves like a friend would (rather than an adversary).

How can you get the most out of your meditation and mindfulness practice? Is it just about technique or can you look at your whole relationship to your program – and you life…

What if fulfillment wasn’t some huge “ultimate aspiration”, but a natural emotional state that we can tap into at any time – all we need is the right tools. This “fulfilled mindset” can transform your relationship to your work and the effectiveness with which you do what you do.

How to find meaning in your work in a socioeconomic structure that doesn’t honor and respect your role. We look at how the service role has been tainted by society’s tendency to take advantage of the people serving them – whether it’s your clientele or your employers – and how to drop this baggage and reconnect to the growth potential that the role offers us.

All Posts by Stefan Ravalli