Serve Conscious

Learn what mindset really is and how it can (and must) be applied beyond just learning and performance. It was actually inspired by Stanford psychologist Dr. Alia Crum's study of hotel workers that revealed how an instantaneous perspective shift can occur from a simple suggestion. You'll be amazed at the profound impact that the team's new mindset had on the physiological level - and hopefully become inspired to try planting similar seeds with your service team.

We discuss...

• The unexpected ways that mindset is influenced in your organization.
• How the simple ways in which you listen and ask questions can effect mindset.
• The gradual and instantaneous ways that unhealthy mindsets can be shifted.
• General praise-filled announcements aren't enough - understand the importance of individual connection in positively influencing your team members' mindsets.
• The role of mindset in creating a culture of true safety where everyone feels inspired to share mistakes, struggles and differing opinions.

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It seems like there's a lot that can go wrong when implementing something like mindfulness, coaching,  or any mental wellness modality into your workplace culture. You might be thinking, "What if everyone thinks it's weird ?" or "What if they don't like the facilitator?" or "What if they're tired of trainings and just don't wanna show up?"

This episode answers all of these questions, and more, discussing creative (and sometimes surprising) solutions to these common uncertainties. We explore things like...

• How to have a remote program for team members that are burnt out of Zoom.
• The role of discomfort in practice, well, anything providing mental wellness.
• How to evaluate whether a problem with the program is actually a problem.
• The value of culture-matching your facilitators.
• How to make mental wellness less serious and, potentially, more fun.

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Do you do a one-off workshop or offer continuous support? Do you offer mindfulness, coaching or some other brain-tweaking modality? Do you bring in a third party or give your team the training to build an in-house program?
 
If you're looking to begin a mental wellness program in your organization, these are good questions to be asking. Each organization has a unique culture with its own wellness needs so knowing determining the right fit for you is the name of the game.

• Why should you even bother doing this in the first place? Good question. We explore the importance of articulating your mental wellness mission before initiating your program.
• The right kind of space to create so that your team will get the most benefit out of the program.
• How far into wellness do you need to go to get real results? We explore how to easily (and affordably) make it part of your culture. 
• How to extract the most benefit from any third party teacher or coach that enters your organization.

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We live in a time where it never feels like there's enough mental energy to go around. A big part of my mission is certainly to help people build more of this energy so that can be happier, healthier and more successful. But on the other side of this equation is the importance of acknowledging the limited inner resources of others. You can make an extraordinary difference in your relationship with a team member or customer by acknowledging the effort put into simple every day tasks.

This episode gets into the powerful strategies you can use to build a service culture, retain your best players and ultimately provide a smoother experience for your customers. All from simply accounting for the fact that we humans have limited time on this earth and how we spend it actually matters.

Highlights:

• People are drawn to other people and experiences that: 1) demand less energy from them 2) appreciate the energy that they do put in.
• The existential crises that your older team members might be facing and how you can prevent them from thinking you're the reason for it.
• How TV's Ted Lasso can teach us how to influence through kindness and validation
• How generosity pays off in the long run.
• The Serve Conscious mission is re-focusing its mission on only organizational challenges (not individual professional challenges - stay tuned for the Professional People Pleaser Podcast, which will focus solely on those areas).

Go Deeper Into the Mindful Service Movement:

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Maybe you say "yes" to too much, or pick up the slack of negligent co-workers, or get pushed around by customers or managers. Feelings of resentment are probably one of the most common experiences in the workplace that nobody wants to deal with. Why? Maybe we don't like our resentful selves. We'd rather not feel so petty, grumpy and victimized as it concerns our daily commitments. 

But what happens when we don't like a feeling? You guessed it: we avoid it! It doesn't get the attention and healing it needs and it continues to fester. So I wanted to dedicate this episode to the specific tendencies we have to perform tasks resentfully and work on them using our mindful self-coaching skills. You might learn...

•  Resentment is a spectacular opportunity to learn about our values, relational tendencies, communication habits, and general sense of freedom.
• The feeling of resentment isn't necessarily the problem as much as the STORY that comes with it - so we'll learn just how to deal with such mental stories.
• Game-changing ways of saying no, making requests and dealing with what appear to be unavoidable demands.

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I think this is the perfect holiday practice and also has a profound impact on the people-management skills you need for true  service (AKA: the part that really counts). I challenge you to practice it using the person in your life that you find most different from you, most difficult to understand, or just straight-up most annoying.

This is a practice that uses visualization and intention-setting to prepare your mind for whatever all the crazy humans in your life might throw at you, making you better at automatically responding in a more compassionate, patient and understanding way. it works wonders for healing difficult relationships and for managing difficult customers. Although the full practice (minus the brief and de-brief in this recording) is around 10 minutes, you can shorten it to mean your time constraints.

Go Deeper Into the Mindful Service Movement:

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The holidays provide an opportunity to connect to the aspects of service that are truly meaningful to you. And this is the key to really serving to your highest potential: doing what makes YOU feel good (not just what you think you have to do). This episode shows you how to go beyond just the transactional job requirements of service and access your natural motivation to serve REGARDLESS of what you're getting out of it.

Also discussed...

• How to respect your customer's/client's individuality while still attempting to guide them towards their best interests.
• How to make a REAL new year's resolution (that will also lead to sustainable change to your life of service).
• How make service feel more meaningful.
• How pride in your work can lead to snobby mindsets that alienate you from your customers.
• How inner resentment of your customers can affect them even if it's bottled up.
• Why you need to become an expert on your own life and how that will help you serve others (especially those that appear to make the worst possible decisions for themselves).

Next episode:

A guided "Just Like Me" practice that preps your mind to connect to almost anyone - even if you seem to have nothing in common - and allows you to get more out of serving them.


Go Deeper Into the Mindful Service Movement:

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If a customer or colleague is being unkind, why do we insist on feeling personally attacked by it? Well, we're designed to. We can try as hard as we want to not take things personally, but we all know that never works. So what do we do? You're going to learn a much different approach to keeping your sense of self from getting affected by someone else's foul mood so you can continue to perform and enjoy your service-oriented work.

We'll learn...

• Why most of the advice your friends/colleagues/bosses give you after you've been attacked by a customer simply doesn't work - and what you need to do instead.
• Communication skills that get you out of your own head and into understanding where the attacks are coming from in the first place.
• How to stop missing opportunities to raise your self-worth and become more resilient to challenging interactions.
• Ways you need to start being your own support system.
• How to embrace taking something personally in a way that actually totally defuses its intensity.

Goes Well With...

How to Let Things Go
Mindful Communication w/ Oren Jay Sofer

Go Deeper Into the Mindful Service Movement:

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Do you find yourself making assumptions, criticisms or unfair evaluations of the people you serve or work with? These ideas may just float by your mind and remain internal, or they'll slip out at the wrong time and wound a relationship. Either way, being judgmental might feel like it really gets in the way of your success and happiness. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode  since you're going to be left with powerfully simple methods to master your judgmental mind. Expect to learn:

• That you can't control judgment, and trying to stop it can be counterproductive (I know, I know, I answer all those, "What the heck do I do instead?!" questions, don't worry).
• How awareness is your most powerful ally and how you can start building proper awareness skills.
• How mistaken judgments can be used to your advantage.
• The key to have the best relationship to your thoughts - even the really unhelpful ones.
• How judgmental tendencies make you more self-critical - and what to do about it.
• How judgmental thinking isn't just about being overly negative about someone. (Wait, can you actually be too positive? We'll talk about).

Goes Well With...

How "what" questions can often be more useful than "why" questions.

Self-Worth, Gratitude & How to Make Service Feel Like A Privilege | Ep. 102

Go Deeper Into the Mindful Service Movement:

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Loved having a dialogue-style session with my homie Neal Woodson, who was kind enough to return to jam out on some of our mutually-beloved topics like empathy/compassion, service cultures, dealing with difficult humans, and how to help professionals feel empowered to serve to their highest potential.

Other questions we chewed on...

• Are we getting more empathetic/compassionate as a society?
• How has COVID made us better at understanding the people we serve?
• How can “seeing the iceberg” transform your ability to service people that are suffering?
• Why should you be grateful when you’re stuck in traffic?
• Why are people inspired to work at Disney (sometimes unconditionally)?
• Should a company be customer first or employee first? (Spoiler alert: you’re asking the wrong question).

Find Neal here one his website.

Go Deeper Into the Mindful Service Movement:

Subscribe/Review on i-Tunes
Get Access to the live workshops and master the service mindset
Join the Facebook Community
Follow Me on Instagram
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Check out my partnership with The Institute for Organizational Mindfulness