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

Break the Grip of Unhealthy Beliefs

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.

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 […]

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? […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]