A Heart-Centered Approach to Building Business Relationships
I’ve discussed hospitality as a way of being before. Being hospitality-centered means thinking about how we make others feel and going above and beyond to make people feel seen, respected, and taken care of. Lately, I’ve been trying to take that a step further by moving from a heart-centered space. Love is not a word that is thrown around the workplace often. To me, love is conducive to compassion and community, with seeing people as human in their purest form. We often hear of standing in a place of love when presented with more than one option. That does not mean to be ‘in love’ like two starry-eyed dreamers, but to choose the path of love over the alternatives. Choosing to be fully open in a world that hurts is tough, but love is a choice. I have found, that choosing love is often conducive to choosing the path of least resistance. When we approach others from an open-hearted space, the context does not even have to be a good one, but the ability to reach a desired outcome happens more softly. When growing my business, I have spent the most energy thinking through how to grow with ease. Ease does not mean without tension or drive, it simply means that the route from here to there is less fraught. Why? Because it makes my life better.
Moving from a space of love also has a massive impact on how effective we are at building relationships. How we nurture internal and external relationships is directly correlated to how well we care for others. Caring for others is personal. This doesn’t mean you have to love every person you meet or work with, rather, you can choose to operate from a space that sees others as a human, regardless of how they make you feel. One of my favorite Charlie Palmer quotes is:
“We love our most challenging guests because they bring out the best in us.”
Even that challenging colleague, the one that makes you dig deep to act from a place of love, what if you were to believe that that person, that relationship was given to you to help you grow into a better version of yourself? Even that one (we all have it!) what a gift that is.
My career in the restaurant business taught me how to care for others at the deepest level. It was never about serving a meal or what wine was paired with, but how I was able to connect with and create rich experiences for our guests. The way I found joy from the repetitive nature of that work was to look at each guest with their unique stories and decide what impact I would like to have on them. Maybe it was small, but if I could make someone's day better, even just by a fraction, they might go out and do something nice for someone else. You have to believe in the ripple effect when you’re repeating the same show, the same repetitive actions day after day. It is the only way to give yourself purpose.
Of course, Acquire exists to help you build deeper relationships, but for me, it is more than that. My goal is to bring the human element to the obligatory to enrich the lives of others. If we can help you operate from a space of ease, of grace, from love, then we have an impact on the world, one engagement at a time.