Hospitality Foundation Program

Over the past thirty years we have learned how to make the hospitality understanding available to those who are open to seeing their lives and businesses in a fresh way – to recognize the source of true hospitality and be able to bring that into their businesses.

The first step in this process is what we call the Hospitality Foundation Program, a week-long orientation and awakening. This is very different from anything you ever attended before in that it does not teach content. The primary purpose of the Hospitality Foundation Program is to introduce principles which lead to individual insights -- those "Aha" moments that result in lasting personal change.

People often ask why the Foundation Program is five days long. For some, being away from the job that long seems like an unreasonable amount of time to learn what we describe as a simple set of principles. There is a reason we do it that way, of course, although it can be elusive. To illustrate, consider these questions:

• If and when you take a day or two off, how long does it take you to quiet down, get your business out of your head, and become reflective?
• How about on a week's vacation? How many days before the end of the vacation do you notice yourself ramping up for the return to work?
• When you look at it this way, do you ever really get away from the business and truly take time for yourself?

The sad truth is that time away from the job happens all too infrequently and when it does, it may rest the body but it rarely provides any rest for the brain. Your thinking is not likely to change until you allow yourself time to reflect and open yourself up to fresh insights.

The structure of the Foundation Program takes all this into consideration. We'll spend at least a day discussing the ins and outs of the "A Place of Hospitality" system. A portion of the five days is necessary to assist participants in becoming more open to the astonishing possibilities of the system itself ... but that is not what makes A Place of Hospitality possible.

The system itself only seeks to minimize the distractions that may keep an operator from maintaining that calm presence and warm sense of caring that make both staff and guests feel welcomed and appreciated. The “magic” that makes it possible to infuse a business with the spirit of hospitality comes from the work we do in the Hospitality Foundation Program.

Quite simply we are doing our best to present an evolutionary understanding about three principles that create our personal reality. Because this perspective is exactly opposite to what the vast majority of people embrace, it takes time to be willing to consider its implications and gain some personal recognition of this fresh view. That depth of understanding is totally dependent upon your grasp of the underlying principles.

Intellectual concepts simply will not be effective because they usually result in "good ideas," "shoulds" and "beliefs". To achieve any of the amazing results we have seen over the past 30 years, the principles must come alive and feel real to you. This is realization – the moment when the obvious dawns on us.

So the learning we seek in an inside-out process that comes from personal insight. A true insight is most often life-changing. At the very least an insight opens our thinking to new ways of understanding life and what really makes people tick. All we ask that you show up free of distractions, open to new possibilities, and willing to experience your own common sense. Like hospitality, you'll know it when you feel it.

The decision to set out in this direction will likely require a leap of faith. I can only tell you that I took that leap thirty years ago and it had a profound impact on both my professional effectiveness and my personal well-being. I was honestly able to get results in six months that I would have been thrilled to have accomplished in six years by any standard I ever had ... and I had pretty high standards!

Better yet, I was able to do it working half the hours I had ever put into any previous foodservice job. The staff was happy, the guests were happy and I actually had a life. It seemed too good to be true!

I am grateful every day for the elegantly simple understanding that has guided me in a fresh, more creative and enduring direction in working with people. As futurist Arthur C. Clarke wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

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