Tag Archives: motivation

Leadership

All the Motivation You Need to Finish the Year!

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I know how you feel… it is the beginning of December, you have had a pretty busy and challenging eleven months behind you, and you are on the right track, but it feels like you have yet to accomplish so much to successfully finish the year.  I mentioned in my previous post The Only Way to Succeed that ‘success does not come without efforts and suffering, success comes with sweat, blood and tears – victory then tastes so much better’, and this is true whenever you want to accomplish something that’s great, and not accept average.

With final projects pending and waiting to be completed before the end of the year, you will need to put in all the energy for one more push to succeed. But where should you get the motivation from?

… nothing is more motivating than Al Pacino’s speech in ‘Any Given Sunday’ – enjoy watching

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Leadership

What You Must Know Before Training Your Employees

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I attended a training this week with focus on rooms (front desk and housekeeping) operations within the hotel industry, and was amazed by what I learned. It was not so much the knowledge and expertise shared by the instructors, but the way how it was shared with the group. We had over 80 attendees in the training, and the instructors would divide the group into smaller teams of five to ten participants maximum and rotate them from one exercise to the next, so that the training would be much more intimate and personal, and everyone could try hands on what was discussed and learned just a moment ago. Continue reading What You Must Know Before Training Your Employees →

Guest Services, Leadership

Forget About Who’s Getting The Credit!

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President Truman once said that ‘it is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit’, and it captures one of the main challenges within any industry – we hesitate to take ownership and go the extra mile, if we feel that others are not stepping up to the plate as well and that we do not get the proper credit for our efforts.

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We want to do great and go beyond, but it’s important for us that everyone else does the exactly same thing too. How often do we complain about having too much on our plate, if the person next to us works as dedicated as we do? We usually don’t! We mostly complain that others are doing less than we do, and that this is not fair. Why should we do more than others? Continue reading Forget About Who’s Getting The Credit! →

Development, Leadership

Steve Jobs’ Most Memorable Speech

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Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment of failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

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Above is a taste of Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address and one of the Top 10 Commencement Speeches of all times. It’s also most motivating and encouraging when having to face the uncomfortable situations in life and when having to make the tough decisions that really matter and make a difference. Watch the full speech by clicking on video below.

Continue reading Steve Jobs’ Most Memorable Speech →

Development

My Take on SoulCycle

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I just returned from my first SoulCycle experience at Soul West Village and have to admit that I feel great, absolutely exhausted, but great! While striving to achieve a healthy work-life balance, I was always looking to workout more often (who doesn’t, right?), and more importantly on a consistent basis. I would never come up with the energy to workout by myself.

So a couple of months ago I discovered the Niketown Running Club and would run in Central Park twice a week. I was fascinated by the encouraging feeling of running in a group, and by being pushed to do more by the fellow runners. I recently moved from Midtown to West Village, further away from Niketown, and with it the original excitement to commit myself to run weekly started fading away.

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Continue reading My Take on SoulCycle →

Development, Leadership

The Power of ‘Thank You’

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I first heard about the power of frequently writing ‘thank you’ notes a couple of weeks ago at a training about leadership. The instructor of the training made a point of highlighting the power of saying thank you for a job well done, and how effective ‘thank you’ notes are for appreciation and recognition.

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Motivated and inspired by the training I started writing these notes for a couple of days until my excitement started fading away, and I just stopped doing it. I felt that it really wasn’t that important, and that people wouldn’t care anyway. Until last weekend… Continue reading The Power of ‘Thank You’ →

Development, Leadership

212° the extra degree

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At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, water starts boiling. With boiling water comes steam, and with steam you can power a locomotive. It is that one extra degree that makes all the difference, and it is that one extra degree that separates the good from the great!

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Image courtesy of Victor Habbick at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How often did you have the feeling of frustration and lost motivation because you couldn’t seem to achieve your goals, and that no matter how much efforts you put in and how hard you tried, nothing was going to change? … chances are that you were sitting right at 211 degrees, and all it would have taken for you to succeed was that one extra degree.

Much too often we give up right before that moment when we would have accomplished everything what we strived for, and we just needed to keep trying. If you want to get ahead, become great at what you do and be successful in achieving your goals you’ll need to keep going when it seems to be the toughest and not turn around.

How To

How to make your guests happy with effective service recovery

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People can make mistakes and things can go wrong, and when they do go wrong and our guests’ stay with us is affected by the service breakdown, it’s up to us to get it right and turn them around. A guest who experienced a problem and it got resolved to her satisfaction is more likely to return compared to a guest who just had an average stay without having experienced any ‘glitches’.

Service recovery is not rocket science (just takes a lot of practice), but it’s important to keep in mind that you want to solve the right problem, that you solve it to the guest satisfaction and not yours, and that you choose the right form of recovery/compensation.

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Image courtesy by Salvatore Vuono at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In my first year of working in a hotel, I was a housekeeping supervisor and we had a guest complaining about the room cleanliness during my shift. The guest was out for dinner and I was on a mission to not only getting it right, but also to ‘roll out the red carpet’ for the guest. I just transferred from cross-training in our room service department and remembered the beautiful cheese plate amenity and chose to have it arranged in the room with a bottle of our house red wine and an apology note. I ensured that the turn down was done perfectly and that everything looked sparkling. I left the hotel that evening with a good feeling of heroic accomplishment and I was sure to have turned an upset guest around into a loyal customer. Continue reading How to make your guests happy with effective service recovery →