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

Your Customers & Team Are Mortal, So Respect Their Energy | Ep. 119

How appreciating the time and energy of your team (and customers) is a key strategy for building a service culture, retaining your best players and ultimately providing a smoother experience for your customers.

When we perform a task resentfully, it’s not a behavior we tend like about ourselves, but is a spectacular opportunity to learn about our values, relational tendencies, communication habits, and general sense of freedom. Learn how to understand and heal this all-too-common feeling that arises in the workplace (and beyond).

How to your keep sense of self from getting affected by someone else’s foul mood so you can continue to perform and enjoy your service-oriented work.

Do you find yourself making assumptions, criticisms or unfair evaluations of the people you serve or work with. Trying to stop judgmental thinking can be counterproductive so we explore surprising ways to master your judgy mind.

A dialogue style “interview” with service coach and culture-shifter Neal Woodson where we cover topics like compassion, service cultures, dealing with difficult humans, and how to help professionals feel empowered to serve to their highest potential.

Purpose is better looked at as a feeling (not an objective…or even a reason), so we look at how to connect with the most visceral (AKA: meaningful) drivers of the work you do so you can create maximum impact, happiness and fulfillment.

Fellow service superhero, Molly Bruttomesso of Wunderkind, discusses organizational culture, professional growth, and true customer support – and how that all gets bolstered by honoring each team members’ individuality.

Activation of your very best qualities before service or a big moment you want to feel super prepared for

Good service outcomes are unreliable and it’s painful when we invest a lot of love into a service scenario that doesn’t bear fruit. How do we let go of outcomes without losing our service spark?

Do we really need stress to perform? And how do we lessen the time and degree that it impacts us? Listen for some valuable techniques and principles for improving your relationship to stress.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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 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 […]

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 […]

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.

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.

How to take advantage of this time in isolation to re-pattern your thinking and next-level how you serve.

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.

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.

In this new podcast series I’m getting field reports from amazing minds in the world(s) of service about lockdown living and the challenges and opportunities it offers service-minded people. I talk to cocktail bar industry leader Dushan Zaric about self-awareness, growth and transformation, and the power and strength found in setting a positive example.

True Service: “Important Work” is a Matter of Conditioning

One problem is that so many people think that their life truly begins after their service job ends. Their service job is a state of purgatory where they’re waiting for their real professional lives in some more noble industry to truly materialize. In a previous post, I mentioned the many people I’ve met that have […]

When You Really Serve, Every Skill Implemented is Universal

The resulting experience of each meditation doesn’t matter nearly as much as your mindset around your experiences. Meditation is not a state you reach, but an attitude you maintain.

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.

Serve Others, But Be Your Only Source of Self-Worth

The resulting experience of each meditation doesn’t matter nearly as much as your mindset around your experiences. Meditation is not a state you reach, but an attitude you maintain.

I discuss how times like this are powerful opportunities to explore what really matters in our lives. And to understand the essence of how it is we wish to serve in this life. It doesn’t matter what it is you’re doing, it matters how you’re doing it and the person you’re practicing as while doing it.

What if we could live a life where every moment is meaningful and every action, big or small, sweet or sour, is in service of something infinitely crucial? All it takes is a simple shift of mindset into a Yogic one.

Learn gratitude practices to start your day and also apply to challenging situations. They will transform how you experience life.

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.

Equal opportunity and quality of life are such bigger issues in the restaurant industry than you think they are. I speak with hospitality leader and social servant John Debary about his organization RWCF and his mission to help restaurants nationwide shift into caring organizations with the capacity to improve the lives of their workers.

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 […]

Break conditioning you have around “being obligated” to do anything and watch your life improve. Own your decisions and experience more empowerment, gratitude, and opportunity.

Self-worth is not a function of how much you think you deserve. Shed this old conditioning, hack feelings of non-acceptance and take your service game to the next level. Final part in a series to help you develop strength, grit and self-sufficiency by reconciling with the tough realities of service life.

Understand what power truly is and how service is the perfect place to cultivate it. However, really tapping into its transformative power requires more humility than we are usually willing.

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