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How to make your guests feel happierFeb 27, 09 | 1:59 am
This article is for hoteliers who want to create a guest experience that is fresh, completely new, and which reflects some of the unlimited capacity that we all have to create beauty in our lives and in those of the hotel staff and the guests. It is about how to help your staff and yourself experience the kind of happiness that you feel when you are in love, and at the same time make your guests feel happier. The technique is very simple, and it is one of the many ways to use the discoveries about the body's energy field and thought energy to create unknown levels of guest experience. As I have written before, the body's energy field and the discoveries of science about thought energy represent the new frontier for the hotel industry. I think that the hotel industry needs a severe shake-up, a new direction, and an infusion of new ideas. Moreover, the industry needs hoteliers who have the courage to challenge what is considered politically correct in the industry, and to admit that the spirit of the typical 5-star hotel guest experience bears a scant relationship to what human capacity can create for the guests. Indeed, the era of the guest experience based on SOP manuals and left brain development approaches will soon be swept away because it no longer meets the needs of guests and staff, and eventually even the shareholders will desert its proponents. Before I describe the technique you have to understand that we are made of vibrating energy. Everything is, in fact. This has simply huge implications for the hotel industry, if hoteliers could free themselves from the alluring spell cast by the Sirens of tradition. Our thoughts are energy and the body has its own electromagnetic field that reflects the energy of our thoughts. These are scientific facts. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." The electromagnetic field of the heart is measurable five or more feet away from the body and constantly sends out energy and vibrations to people you come in contact with, and beyond. This thought energy technique will enable hotel staff to create and send out the kind of vibrations that will make them feel like they are in love and the guests feel much happier. Using your thoughts to make yourself feel in love is very simple, and just takes a little practice. This exercise serves to get you started. I learned it years ago from Klaus Joehle, and once I had practiced it for about 2 weeks I was able to make myself feel like I was in love in just a few minutes. Just think what the guest experience could be like if your guest-contact staff were feeling like this rather than seeing themselves as being on SOP-Customer Satisfaction duty! You first have to open your heart and surround yourself with love. I do this by lying down or sitting back in a comfortable chair. If possible, I will turn on some beautiful spa music to help me to relax and to let go of all my thoughts and concerns about the things that I need to do today. Breathe in very slowly and deeply through your nose and out through your mouth. This has a very calming effect throughout the body. Continue breathing slowly and deeply. As you breathe, focus on listening to the peace and quiet that is inside you. Continue to do this for as long as you like. Next, imagine that there is a very bright light in the middle of your chest, like a very large brilliant diamond or ball glowing as bright and yellow as the sun. Use your imagination any way you like. See this glowing light as love. You can see it as other colours and shapes, if you wish. Just focus on the fact that it is love. Now allow this love that is glowing from your heart to become brighter and larger. Use your inner senses to increase the size and bring it out and beyond your body so that you are becoming a small sun glowing and radiating with love. Feel yourself being filled with love, as you become more radiant. Notice how every cell in your body is absorbing this love and becoming radiant with love. Feel this love, feel how you are now surrounded and radiant with love. Notice how your hands and feet are radiating with love. You are glowing with love. As you breathe in, you can feel your lungs filling with love and even more love circulating through your body. Continue to feel this as much as possible. In your imagination, see how radiant you have become with love. See how everything that you touch receives this love. Anyone who comes near you receives the love that you radiate. Continue to see and feel yourself becoming even more radiant, constantly increasing the love each time you breathe, becoming brighter and more radiant with love each breath. Feel the joy that is bubbling up from inside you. As you become more and more radiant, you are becoming magnetic and drawing more love to you, attracting people, happiness, and joy. See how everyone who comes close to you receives the love you are radiating. You are so filled with love that you are radiating love into the world. Continue to increase the sensation and feelings of love. You may notice warmth in your chest area. Keep breathing slowly and deeply, opening your heart even more. Become even more radiant with love, filling your entire body and mind with love. Notice how your thoughts are changing, and how you are becoming more loving and understanding. Stay there as long as you want. You can do this as many times a day as you like. Even do it during the daily briefing or a meeting. The more you do this, the more radiant with love you will become and the more love and joy and good things you will attract to yourself. People and animals will want to be near you. As you become more radiant with love, the more you will radiate to others the energy and vibrations of love. It is a gift beyond words. There are different ways you can send love to other people. For example:
What is important is that sending love works, and that the results are beautiful. To send love energy, open your heart and surround yourself with love. Then imagine a beam of love coming from that glowing heart centre in your chest, moving upwards to your mind and head centre. Now see a beautiful yellow or golden beam of love going from your eyes directly to the eyes of the other person. Continue with this and at the same time see another beautiful golden beam of love coming from your heart and going directly to the person's heart. Be still and continue this for as long as you like. You can also do this at any time of the day and as many times as you like. There are many ways to apply this to a hotel. You can send this love energy to colleagues and guests. You can also fill your work area, guest rooms, restaurants, public areas, and the whole property with love. A Room Attendant can send the energy to the guest rooms on his/her floor. Restaurant staff can fill their restaurant with the energy or send it to all the guests. I once met a spa therapist who sends love energy to her clients as she massages them. She commented that her clients sometimes remark on the feelings created. The list is endless. If it comes to your mind, send it love. You have an endless supply of love to give. As you practice opening your heart and sending love energy you will begin to experience more and more the feelings of being in love. As this happens, you will become happier and the desire to show love, compassion, warmth, care, and empathy to others will increase. Just imagine if all of the staff in your hotel practiced this every day. You do not have to be at the hotel either to send love energy to the hotel or your guests. Numerous experiments have been conducted to show that distance is not a barrier. For example, experiments have been carried out where blood cells are taken from someone and transported hundreds or thousands of miles away, then both the cells and the person are connected to an energy-measuring device. At exactly the same time that the person thinks about the cells, both devices record the thought energy. There are many applications for this, in fact. Some people use thought energy to increase the yield of crops. Others use it for distance healing. Masaru Emoto has shown how you can use the energy of thoughts and words to change the broken structure of polluted and dirty water into beautiful hexagonal crystals. Now hotels can use it to create unknown levels of guest experience. Try it out. Teach it to your spouse or lover, to your colleagues, and to your staff. Make sending love a part of the daily briefing and breaks even. There are many other energy-related techniques like this one that hotels can implement to increase the intensity of the spiritual values of hospitality in the guest experience and thereby create a completely fresh and new spirit of service. Some can be used to remove extremely quickly the causes of a lack of self-esteem, inhibitions to showing love, fear of upselling, fear of opening oneself up to giving and receiving love, etc. They do this by removing the negative energy in the body's meridiens (energy pathways) that are the cause. Perhaps more importantly, they can be used to intensify the spirit of loving-kindness continuously and without limit. Using an analogy, if the warmth of the spirit of service today is 50 degrees Celcius, the more you use the techniques, the greater the desire to show love becomes and the higher the temperature becomes. There is no limit to how warm it can become. 1,000 degrees Celcius is as possible as 5,000 degrees Celcius as human capacity is unlimited. The traditional systems and methods currently used by so many hotels and proliferated around the world by the corporate offices of the international chains cannot intensify the spiritual aspect of the guest experience. They are not set up to do this. Their approach focuses on the efficiency and quality in which SOPs are carried out, and on satisfying guest needs, and there is a ceiling of 100% efficiency that they cannot pass beyond. They are therefore forced to develop the material side of the experience, which does not create the same feelings. The unknown levels of guest experience, which are easily accessible by using techniques such as the one described in this article, and which should be the domain of the 7-star hotels, lie above that ceiling. Why on earth would a hotel want to adopt a traditional approach that by its very nature cannot intensify the spiritual aspect of hospitality, which is also where the money will be made more and more over the coming years? But they do because people copy blindly what the chains are doing. But to transform the spirit of the hotel's guest experience more is required than merely teaching your staff how to send love because so many hotels have organized themselves perfectly through their HR systems, vision statement, policies, procedures, leadership style, etc., to create a traditional SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience. Their internal organization needs to be realigned; otherwise there will be internal forces that prevent the spirit changing. Hospitality is not about cloning an SOP-Customer Satisfaction experience. It is about creating a guest experience where the guests "breathe in the sweet scents of loving-kindness from the garden of your heart." By breaking away from traditional ideas and methods, and by applying thought energy techniques such as sending love, the guest experience can reflect more and more intensively the spirit in the following quotation that I use as the minimum standard in role plays on service: "Be kind to all peoples; care for every person; do all ye can to purify the hearts and minds of men; strive ye to gladden every soul. To every meadow be a shower of grace, to every tree the water of life; be as sweet musk to the sense of humankind, and to the ailing be a fresh, restoring breeze. Be pleasing waters to all those who thirst, a careful guide to all who have lost their way; be father and mother to the orphan, be loving sons and daughters to the old, be an abundant treasure to the poor." Baha'i Writings
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