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

The Future is Service | feat. Ron Kaufman | Ep. 96

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 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.

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 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 […]

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.

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: […]

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).

In this episode you’ll learn about how common it can be to experience shame in the service experience and techniques that determine whether it will be a great ally or a terrible enemy.

Mindful service allows you to take place in social change advancing it bit by bit through service that seeks to create the world you’d want to live in.

Reclaim your understanding of love as something that is always a factor in serving in a mindful, empowered way – and the way towards racial healing.

Everything you’ve been trying to do more effectively along your mindful service journey – listening, openness, compassion, healing, avoiding righteousness, catching reactivity – is a skill that can be applied to participating in the racially just world you want to live in.

About the service skills you most need but aren’t taught. Ones I’ve gathered from years of learning and travel and my upcoming course that will distill them into practices and principles that any service-oriented person can use.

Part two of two of my epic discussion with service design visionary Joel Bailey who is who is working with large companies, institutions and public services and proving that you can bring humanity and consciousness back to service in a way that is sustainable and scalable. This is someone that understands the essence and power of service – as well as how much we’ve lost contact with it as a culture.

The first half of a sweeping two-part discussion about the radical ways designer Joel Bailey is shifting large-scale service providers from an outdated industrial age model of service-as-product into an organizational that is truly connected to the people they service – a mission made especially urgent by the COVID crisis.

Hear about how the Coronavirus opened up surprising opportunities for Tico & Susan to successfully serve their community how they’ve always wanted to through their Kombucha and fermented food company, Radiate.

I speak with Albert Bitton about his project that provides healthy meals to overworked medical professionals across about a dozen of New York’s crowded hospitals. Our conversation was a deeply inspiring look at how one service industry can provide something so important to another.

See how easy it is to dismiss or condemn people’s tendency to be preoccupied with their own “nonsense” – especially as you become more aware and present throughout your mindful service journey. But the way forward is compassion and understanding – no matter how preoccupied people are, how much that is disrupting what you need from them, and no matter how rude they are being in the process.

Break the conditioning you may have that the service role is lowly and unimportant and see the power you have to make a positive impact.

Realize how moments of crisis like are something you’ve been training your whole life for – through every opportunity you’ve taken to pay attention, be compassionate, understand things better, and choose to de-escalate rather than react.

Strategies for managing situations where you are confronted with people that are not making it easy to be served. And mindsets for managing the most important person in that equation: you.

Service (and all activities in life) is not so much about what you’re doing, but the intention behind it. And that intention can be positive without feeling artificial, strained or anything but authentic. Learn an internal practice that you can apply to the simplest activities that will totally transform your quality of life and relationships.

Happy 2020! The podcast is starting off the year with a very special interview on the transformative power of mindful communication. Truly listening, understanding, and speaking to what’s really needed can make the humblest of interactions feel truly alive. And my discussion with Oren Jay Sofer, the subject’s most definitive voice, was bursting with such aliveness at every moment. So many insights. So much value.

Witness the power of compassion as a skill, not some kind of pious state that only the saintly are gifted with – learn the awareness practices that make you better at negotiation, handling challenging people and finding satisfaction in any work you do that involves other people.

Needs don’t need to be cured like they’re some kind of disease or exploited in some sort of relationship of exchange. Learn to navigate them as a powerful vehicle for you to truly connect to the people you serve.

Originally published here on Ram Dass’ Be Here Now Network. Service Can Give or It Can Take…It’s Your Choice. When we think of service, we often consider it to be a type of job you can have. Years and years in the trenches of the restaurant and bar industry resulted in me seeing only this […]

The customer is always right…and so are you (if you’re present, attentive, and truly serving). But you’re never right if you have something to prove. Learn how to let go of the beliefs that are holding you back from truly connecting to the people you serve.

Have a non-attached relationship to your expectations of the people your serve, while avoiding indifference and maintaining your preferences, priorities and principles.

Cultivate the warrior-like resilience that service demands. This means coming to terms with some hard truths of life as a human being. And learning the tools to hack what seems like a grim reality.

Conversation with Rebecca Shafir, speech pathologist, mindful communication and business coach and author of Zen of Listening (a very important book for me). We discuss communication techniques, pitfalls and mindful living.

We look at an emotional mastery system that allows you to work with your most “unwanted” emotions to master yourself, live mindfully and be an absolute service Jedi.

Industry-leader Dushan Zaric discusses the responsibility we have to serve with care and presence; powerful insights forged from a life of passion, deep self-exploration and hardship.

I try to not be a hypocrite while teaching about the power of listening by speaking uninterrupted for over an hour. I discuss how challenges you experience in listening actually come from a disconnection from yourself.

This article stands alone, but also serves as an extension of themes discussed in of part I. The Case of the Two-Faced Server. One of the most prominent bits of restaurant industry lore concerns an idea that the servers that are the most gracious, sweet and beloved by their guests are the vile once they […]

Discussion on the art of mindful conflict resolution. The Yogic path of self-understanding meets mediation in powerful ways.

Interview with Greg Clowminzer about mindful communication, understanding the nature of thought and the self-knowledge you acquire from seeing through it.

Humanity as the new spirituality! Talk with Jonni Pollard about his book The Golden Sequence, a total guide to conscious living as a participant in society. Self-development is worth much unless you’re of service!

An interview with the co-founder of the KYO App discussing the power of journaling and asking yourself the right questions to improve your life

Master identifying needs, get what you want through compassion, and break the subtle conditioning that keeps us from communicating honestly.

At any moment we have the power to initiate a teacher-student dynamic. Discusses the important and delicate nuances of this dynamic and how to respect them.

Powerful Ways The Service Environment Reveals & Tests Our Ability to Be Our Authentic Selves Probably the most played out bit of wisdom we get from people of all positions and disciplines is encouragement to “just be you” rather than whatever you think people expect of you. It’s something we always do well to be […]

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