5 reasons why the best hospitality training for you starts with knowing yourself
Written by: Julia Rogers
Written by: Julia Rogers5 reasons why the best hospitality training for you starts with knowing yourself
From carrying plates with aplomb to creating a perfectly balanced cocktail and delivering silver service in style, there are many technical skills that need to be mastered to ensure your guests receive exceptional service. Granted, these are all important, and it’s great to have the butler accreditations and GUEST certificates to prove it. But a happy and high-performing team will have mastered more than the technicalities. Here are five reasons why the best hospitality training starts with knowing yourself.
Discover whether your ‘why’ is aligned with your ‘what’
One of the joys of self development is taking the time to uncover your true purpose in life. What is it that gets you out of bed every morning? What drives and motivates you? What leaves you feeling truly alive and inspired? What do you love? And most importantly, is this aligned with what you’re doing each day? It’s easy to find yourself going through life on autopilot for years – sometimes even decades – without asking yourself these questions. If you love what you do, you will be good at it.
But the best training encourages you to explore the real ‘why’ behind why you have chosen your particular career. You will either return to your work with a renewed sense of purpose and energy or consider finding a new role that’s more aligned with your inherent strengths and talents, and purpose.
Ultimately, whatever the outcome, you, your team, and your guests will all benefit from you taking the time to invest in knowing yourself better.
Build trust through authenticity
Before trust can be nurtured within a team, each individual needs to be at peace with who they are. The path to fully accepting yourself starts with self-knowledge – celebrating the strengths and natural talents you already have, identifying the areas for growth and aligning them with your life skills.
There is no shame in acknowledging your challenges – we all have them and unless they’re brought to the fore, there’s a chance they’ll continue to cause distress and conflict – to ourselves and everyone around us – especially in stressful situations.
As we begin to become more curious about understanding and accepting ourselves and others, we create space for our true authentic self to shine. The best training helps to develop a greater depth of understanding between colleagues, which naturally fosters feelings of empathy as they gain insight into their colleagues’ behaviour. This helps to build rapport, which leads to trust – the most important foundation in creating high-performing teams.
Developing emotional intelligence builds resilience
As we are all aware within this industry, life upon the ocean waves can be stressful and highly pressurised. From spending long times away from friends and family to handling the demands and expectations of a variety of guests, your crew must be able to cope with a unique set of challenges. It’s extremely important for you and your crew to develop emotional intelligence because it helps them to become more resilient.
When you invest time in knowing yourself, you develop a deeper understanding of the activities and situations that allow you to thrive and that you find challenging.
As you become better at recognising your own emotions and how to regulate them, you also develop a sixth sense for other people’s emotional triggers and situations. This can help you to intervene earlier, in situations that have the potential to spiral out of control. Some people have a more innate grasp of emotional intelligence. But the best training will encourage people to develop it because it’s imperative for dealing with stressful and highly-charged situations.
Develops altruism
Sometimes, industry leaders express concern that self-development’s strong focus on the individual will detract from team performance or encourage them to be more self-involved. We believe the opposite. We believe that knowing yourself helps you to become more outward-looking and altruistic.
Because they’re less concerned or distracted by other people’s behaviour, they’ll start to look outside of themselves more frequently and develop a greater attention to detail. They get better at scanning the environment, anticipating problematic situations and discerning whether or not a guest is displeased or unhappy.
Increases confidence
From eye contact to stature and presence, your guests subconsciously look for indicators of confidence in your crew. It’s evident not only in their body language but in the way they deliver silver service and handle tricky situations.
Whether the food is late or ten more guests have unexpectedly arrived, a confident member of crew will remain calm in the face of adversity, no matter the chaos that may be unfolding onboard.
When you continue to get better at recognising and managing your own, and other people’s emotions, you naturally become more confident. This has a positive impact on your team and your guests because it helps you make better decisions in the heat of the moment and handle clients more professionally.
Self-knowledge improves your personal life
I know we only said five, but there’s a sixth too – knowing yourself also helps to improve your personal life!
As LH founder Peter Vogel says: “We encourage and help people to implement what they’ve learnt across all areas of life. I often receive phone calls from people telling me that our training has transformed not only their professional relationships but their personal ones too.”
Find out more about our self-discovery exercise here or book an informal chat with myself or Lynne to find out what we can do for you.