When the hotel industry eventually discovers that human beings are essentially spiritual beings with a spiritual nature; also, that the human body has an energy field, and that everything in our world (including hotels) is made of vibrating energy, hoteliers will have discovered the means to make a revolutionary transformation of the hotel guest experience. Until then though the hotel industry will remain stuck in the rut of obsolete and materialistic tradition.
This website and the book, How to Create Heart-Based Hospitality. The Future of the Hotel Hospitality Experience, are about how to create a spirit of hospitality and a level of guest experience that is impossible with the pervasive standards-based concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction. “SOP” refers to Standards of Performance. I call the level Heart-Based Hospitality because it is created by knowing how to work with human energy, especially with the electromagnetic energy of the heart; by developing the heart’s intelligence; by increasing heart coherence so as to open the heart to experience ever-stronger emotions of love; and by developing spiritual capacity which increases the desire to show love, kindness, heart-warming care, and compassion from the heart to others. These activities and many more enable hotels to transform the emotionless and mechanical SOP-Customer Satisfaction style of hospitality.
The future guest experience will be energetic and spiritual. Hotels in the future will use heart field energy techniques to change the energetic vibration of the hotel staff, the guests, and the spaces. They will also infuse spaces, facilities, and guest accommodations with pleasant-feeling energy through specific meditations. The Training function will change and it will embrace the development of spiritual capacity with the result that hotels will provide their guests with very soft, loving, and compassionate hospitality. Moreover, the energetic and spiritual nature of the guest experience will be the leading area of competition between hotels and hotel groups.
Hoteliers have no idea how wonderful hospitality will become after they have freed themselves from the chains of SOP-Customer Satisfaction, which are like chains around the legs of a bird, and which are preventing the bird from soaring up to the sky.
Heart-Based Hospitality is not a level of hospitality as such. It is a concept and a direction that enables the spirit of hospitality and the guest experience to evolve energetically and spiritually. In comparison, hotels and hotel groups that have made SOP-Customer Satisfaction their guest experience concept, are stuck in the concrete of the SOP-Customer Satisfaction guest experience and cannot evolve.
I have written the book, How to Create Heart-Based Hospitality. The Future of the Guest Experience, in order to bring about a revolution of change in the hotel industry. This revolution will most likely not happen in my lifetime because the whole hotel industry is dominated by a rational and emotionless concept of the guest experience for the foreseeable future.
Conservative and traditional hoteliers may oppose and resist such change, but one day they will have no choice but to adapt to the changes that will come. Nothing stays the same forever. Energetic and spiritual Heart-Based Hospitality will be very difficult for the current generation of corporate hoteliers to accept because it breaks so radically from traditional corporate ideas about service, so I do not expect this generation of hotel industry leaders to show any serious interest. Indeed, none has in the last 15 years.
I am aiming the book at the future generations of hoteliers who will replace the current leaders, and also at hoteliers who have no respect for the status quo and who can see that the traditional, shareholder-oriented service model does not meet mankind’s holistic needs, particularly the emotional, energetic, inspirational, healing, and spiritual needs. It is a great shame that the world will have to wait so long when the revolution of change could start today. I have provided a lot of detail about Heart-Based Hospitality in the book because I hope that it will help future hoteliers to implement change and to develop Heart-Based Hospitality’s limitless possibilities beyond what I can.
Once the current leaders have been replaced by people who can see the business potential and the possibilities offered by creating Heart-Based Hospitality, the chains which are holding back the hotel industry globally will finally be broken and the hotel industry will then focus more and more on creating a loving, kind, caring, compassionate, and energetic guest experience and a “to die for” spirit of hospitality.
The guest experience is currently created essentially by training staff on how to carry out the SOPs, which are described in detail in the operational manuals. The belief is that, if the staff carry out the SOPs correctly and efficiently, the guests will be satisfied with the service. Staff do not need to think much. They just have to carry out their SOPs.
While standards are, of course, important, Heart-Based Hospitality infuses these standards with love and compassion by developing spiritual capacity in the staff, by deepening them in the application and spirit of the essential core values of genuine hospitality, by increasing heart coherence, and by opening their hearts so that love flows out like when a dam breaks. This increases their natural desire to show unconditional love, loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. The process is enhanced by using ancient knowledge about energy, which the New Science has discovered, and by combining the development process with a supporting structure of leadership activities and systems called The 13 Pillars. (Note: These are referred to elsewhere on the website as The 11 Elements.)
This is quite in contrast to the globally pervasive, corporate concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction, which by nature is a rather robotic and emotionless concept of service. The feelings you can create in the employees as you implement the concept of Heart-Based Hospitality are like when you are in love. It can feel that wonderful. This in turn makes them want to show more unconditional love, loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. The guest experience is very different as a result.
Heart-Based Hospitality opens the doors to limitless and far more evolved hospitality by taking advantage of ancient knowledge and the new scientific discoveries about energy; knowledge about spiritual development, the heart, and energy that you find in the texts of religious traditions; scientific discoveries about the field of energy that surrounds and permeates everything; and scientific research into thought energy and heart energy.
Hotels could use this knowledge to change the energy of the staff, guests, and the physical environment of the hotel. I have not even mentioned in this book how the work of Dr. William Tiller can be used to change the energy of hotels. His work creates immensely significant applications. If all this knowledge was used the hotel guest experience could be revolutionised.
Paradigm-shattering experiments published in leading-edge, peer-reviewed journals have revealed that we are bathed in a field of intelligent energy, which fills what people think is empty space. Discoveries show beyond any reasonable doubt that this field responds to us – indeed it rearranges itself – according to our heart-based feelings and beliefs. Are the hotel industry’s leaders really not aware of this and/or unable to fathom the possibilities it provides for the guest experience?
It is time for hoteliers around the world to stop copying the big hotel groups because their concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction is based on an obsolete worldview, which dates back to the time of Sir Isaac Newton over 300 years ago. I do not think that the hotel corporate offices realise this. Corporate hoteliers would benefit by studying the New Science and its implications.
The hotel industry is stuck in the deep Rut of Tradition. But who in the hotel industry will dare to question the nature of this rut when all of the major hotel groups are in it; enjoying being in it; and encouraging everyone to join them in it? Who will dare to be like the little boy in the fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, and say that something is fundamentally wrong? To do so would put a hotelier in danger of becoming an outcast and a rebel, and like me, you would not be able to speak at the major hotel conferences. But the hotel industry needs rebels to point out the true nature of this rut and to invite hoteliers to climb out of it and into the light of immense possibilities.
It is time for the hotel industry to undergo a revolution. When the winds of change blow, I doubt if the largest hotel groups in the world will survive in their current form because they are too big and too stuck in their traditional ways to be able to change in time. Indeed, I think that many will refuse to change because their corporate offices will confuse past success with future success.
The Newtonian worldview used by the hotel industry is a major problem for the industry because the New Science has discovered that the laws that Newton put into place include two false assumptions about the world around us. The first assumption is that the space between things is empty. The belief is that whether we are looking at an electron orbiting the nucleus of an atom, or if we are looking at the space between the stars or between people when we see nothing in the space it means that it is truly empty space. We now know that this is false.
“By choosing your thoughts and by selecting which emotional currents you will release and which you will reinforce, you determine the quality of your Light. You determine the effects that you will have upon others and the nature of the experiences of your life.” Gary Zukav
The second false assumption is that our inner experiences of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and beliefs have no effect on the world around us because, if the space is empty, then there is no conduit to carry them from our body to anywhere else. Now we know that both of these assumptions are absolutely false. However, the hotel industry continues to uphold a service concept that is based on these two assumptions, and I cannot see corporate hoteliers caring the least about this as their focus seems to be mainly on shareholder value.
New Science has found that there is a field of intelligent energy that occupies what we previously thought of as empty space, and people are giving it different names while scientists continue to explore it. Some are calling it the Quantum Hologram, the Mind of God, the Field, the Matrix, Consciousness, and the Divine Matrix, which are all names for a field of energy that peer-reviewed research papers now agree exists.
Unfortunately, hotel groups continue to base their service concept on Newton’s mechanistic worldview in which everything is made up of parts and is predictable. To them, as long as there is an
SOP for absolutely everything that can happen in a hotel; that the systems and SOPs are neatly in place; and that the staff are performing the SOPs perfectly with the aid of technology, then the resulting customer service will satisfy the guests and the hotel operation will run correctly. The staff just have to carry out their SOPs. More and more technology is now being introduced to reinforce this mechanical and emotionless guest experience. It is a great shame that hospitality has been shackled.
But the New Science, in particular the subtle energy sciences, are showing us that we have the ability to create conditions inside our body through our feelings and emotions to influence the world around us in ways that we are only beginning to understand. This knowledge should have relegated the concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction to the Museum of Hospitality because now we know that we can use energy to influence the energy field and feelings of the staff and guests; to change the energy of the hotel environment; and also to change the feeling of the guest experience.
Moreover, the more that hotels develop the spiritual capacity of their staff, their heart coherence, and heart intelligence, the more the staff can change this energy in ways that enhance the loving, kind, and caring nature of the guest experience. It makes it possible to take hospitality to levels, which we can only imagine.
Our most cherished spiritual traditions have always told us in non-scientific terms that this interconnected relationship between the individual and the world around us exists, and we simply did not believe them until the 20th century.
The photograph above shows a woman radiating energy which is pink in the actual film. The energy that she radiates is stronger on the out-breath than when she inhales. So many experiments have been carried out over previous decades to show and measure our ability to radiate energy in order to affect people, cities, murder rates, traffic accident rates, and general events even when the energy is sent at huge distances, including from an Apollo spacecraft on its way back from the Moon, and I refer to some of them in the book. Why do hotel corporate offices ignore the research? Are they really that afraid of change?
Now the wisdom of our past and current quantum science is showing us that we can be the powerful architects of our lives and of our reality if we choose to speak the nonverbal language based on the human heart – the language of feeling and emotion. This is interesting because what our science has finally evolved into is where ancient traditions began. For the ancients, this knowledge was given. They knew that everything is energetically connected, that we are a part of it and that we can influence the world around us through our thoughts and feelings.
In contrast, hotel corporate offices see staff as being a bit like robots and unable to influence the guest experience except to the extent that they perform the SOPs correctly and efficiently. The hotel industry needs to accept and work from the new quantum worldview that we are all connected energetically to each other and that we truly have the ability to influence the world around us by means of the nonverbal language of feeling and emotion which is based in the human heart. By developing spiritual capacity, we can change the nature of our feelings and emotions in beautiful ways.
One of the first things that the Western mind will ask is, “How can feelings in our bodies possibly influence the physical world around us?” We know that the world around us is made up of energy with electrical and magnetic fields everywhere. What science has found is that the human heart is the strongest generator of electrical fields within the human body. So, when we create a feeling in our heart the way the ancients told us to do so – by creating feelings of appreciation, gratitude, healing, love, or compassion – what we are really doing is creating very powerful waves of electrical and magnetic energy inside our heart, which then flood our body energetically.
At the same time, this energy extends beyond our body and the body’s energy field into the world around us, and that is how we influence the physical world around us. We can literally rearrange the atoms of physical matter through these fields if we learn to focus and hone this language. The radiating energy can change the spirit of hospitality in a way that will increase the hotel’s revenue and repeat business.
What is important here is that both electrical energy and magnetic energy have the power to change the energy of atoms, and we create both types of energy through our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and beliefs. When we form heart-centred beliefs within our bodies, in the language of physics we are creating the electrical and magnetic expression of them as waves of energy, which are not confined to our hearts or limited by the physical barrier of our skin and bones.
We are “speaking” to the world around us in each moment of every day through a language that has no words, namely, through the feeling waves and belief waves of our hearts. In addition to pumping the blood of life within our bodies, the heart converts our feelings and beliefs into the coded language of waves that communicates with and influences the world beyond our bodies.
A growing number of mainstream scientists are now suggesting that the universe, the world around us, and our bodies, work like a computer. Rather than being based on electronic circuits, it is a computer based on consciousness. We know that for a computer to work and do things for us, it has to have programmes. In the “consciousness” computer of the universe and our world, our beliefs are those programmes. When we believe something in our hearts, and I am defining beliefs now as the certainty of something that we experience in our minds coupled with the acceptance of the feeling that we have far more ability to affect the world around us than we are aware of.
There is a direct relationship between the world around us and the world within us, what we expect to happen and what we believe. 5,000 years of spiritual traditions have told us that this is the way things work, and we have always kept that understanding somehow separate from our world of science. But in 1909 scientists began finding that their expectations – their feelings about an experiment that was about to take place or was taking place – actually influenced how that experiment turned out, and they began realizing that the role of consciousness in the world cannot be discounted. I am referring here to the famous Double-Split Experiment where the expectations of the observing scientists influenced whether light behaved as particles or waves.
In contrast, Newtonian science leaves us right out of the equation. It leaves out consciousness and our relationship to the world around us. As a result, for over 300 years we have believed that we are separate from our world and that we have no influence on the world around us. Now all that is changing. However, when is the hotel industry going to listen to the New Science?
Quantum science has shown that we are all connected on an energetic level through a field of energy. Studies have found that only a small number of people are needed to influence the world in very positive ways. So, when people in one location are feeling the feeling of peace in their hearts (not merely thinking it in their minds), studies have found that the peace affects a broad geographic area in ways that scientists have found statistically significant. In other words, it is not an accident.
In the International Peace Project that was carried out in the Middle East in the early 1980s during the first Israeli-Lebanese war, 200 researchers were trained to feel peace in their hearts while believing that it was already present within them, rather than simply thinking about it in their minds or praying for it to occur. For this particular experiment, those involved used a form of meditation known as Transcendental Meditation to achieve that feeling.
At certain times on specific days of the month, these people were positioned throughout the war-torn areas of the Middle East. During the period of time when they were feeling peace, terrorist activities ceased, the rate of crimes against people went down, the number of emergency room visits declined, and the incidence of traffic accidents dropped. When the participants’ feelings changed, the statistics were reversed. This study confirmed the earlier findings that when a small percentage of the population achieved peace within themselves, it was reflected in the world around them.
The experiments took into account the days of the week, holidays, and even lunar cycles; and the data was so consistent that the researchers were able to identify how many people are needed to share the experience of peace before it is reflected in their part of the world. The number is the square root of one percent of the population.
This formula produces figures that are smaller than we might expect. For example, in a city of one million people, the number is about 100. In a world of 7 billion people, it is just under 8,367 people. This calculation represents only the minimum needed to begin the process. The more people are involved in feeling peace, the faster the effect is created. The study became known as the International Peace Project in the Middle East, and the results were eventually published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1988. Since that time that effect has been accepted and explored in many empowering ways throughout the world.
But the key in the Western world is for people to recognise the difference between having a feeling in their heart and just thinking about something in their mind. I think that this is one of the great challenges of our times because we have been conditioned to be a very thought-based society. It is essential to teach this difference to hotel staff, and the ability to create feelings in the heart has to be developed to create Heart-Based Hospitality.
The indigenous, ancient traditions have acknowledged that thoughts are powerful, but that feelings are more important. Because our heart is 100 times stronger electrically and 5,000 times stronger magnetically than our brain, we can actually get things done much quicker with much less effort, if we learn the language of feeling in the heart rather than trying to think our way into healing or into peace or compassion, abundance, or the perfect relationship, or whatever it is. We just need to acknowledge the very powerful language of heart intelligence and heart-based feelings.
There is a pioneering organization in northern California called the Institute of HeartMath, which is studying the power of the human heart. They have found and published in accredited, mainstream, medical, scientific, and technical journals proof that our heart has its own intelligence. The heart actually has brain-like neural tissue that allows it to have its own intelligence and to create effects inside and outside our bodies.
The Institute of HeartMath has pioneered a new project called the Global Coherence Project. What they have found is that there is a layer in the atmosphere above the Earth called the ionosphere, which pulses in the same range of frequencies that our heart pulses in when we are in a coherent state. In short, when a large number of people around the world change the way that they feel in their hearts that layer of the atmosphere changes, and when that layer changes, everyone hooked up to that layer is affected.
This connection between the heart and the planet has become evident on several occasions, such as at the time the planes hit the World Trade Centre and when Princess Diana died in a car crash. On these two occasions, the outburst of emotion around the world affected the electromagnetic field of the planet in a strikingly measurable way.
The Global Coherence Project is the first science-based initiative that is now investigating this connection. The scientists at HeartMath are building a series of global sensors that enable them to measure this layer of the atmosphere. They post the readings in real-time on a website so that at any time, at any moment on any day, we can go and see what this layer of the atmosphere is telling us.
The Project has shown that when a significant number of people create a feeling of coherence in their hearts in a moment of time, it influences that layer of the atmosphere. The Project has shown that because every human on the Earth is to some degree tuned into that layer when a large number of people around the world create coherence in their hearts by creating feelings of love and peace inside their hearts, they can affect the whole of mankind.
When we have coherence in our body, we think better, we solve problems better, we are less aggressive, our immune system is enhanced, and our cognitive abilities increase. All of these things happen when we are in coherence with that layer of the atmosphere. So, when relatively few people feel the feelings, which create that coherence, they can actually influence that layer and the whole of mankind benefits from that.
The Global Coherence Project is showing that we can influence the world around us with our feelings. This is very relevant to the hotel industry and it shows the value of developing spiritual capacity and teaching hotel staff how to feel the feelings of the core values of Heart-Based Hospitality, namely unconditional love, loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. By doing so with increasing intensity, the staff can affect the feelings of their colleagues and the guests, as well as the spirit of hospitality in the guest experience. In addition to explaining some of the science that hoteliers must know before they start to create a Heart-Based Hospitality guest experience, this book also provides guidance about how to create it.
A part of the process of creating a Heart-Based Hospitality guest experience is the implementation of the 13 Pillars. They are essential because without them the guest experience will not become energetically stronger in a continuous way. I am certain that other Pillars will be added over time as hotel groups and hotels experiment with the concept. Generally, I think that the additional Pillars will be other energy techniques, especially techniques that focus on the Chakras; healing techniques; Reiki; etc., and other deepening materials. For example, one hotel has added the Five Tibetans and an energy healing technique called The Healing Codes, which eradicates negative cellular memories. Perhaps pranic healing techniques will become another Pillar one day.
I think that in the future, hotels will not just be places where you stay and sleep. They will also become places where you go to become energetically stronger, and for healing and rejuvenation. Their role will change and will extend beyond the current understanding of wellness. But at the moment, the hotel industry is dominated by the large Western hotel groups, which are interested in an obsolete concept of the guest experience, which facilitates the cloning of an energetically weak, corporate template that makes it easy to amass more rooms and hotels for the sake of the shareholders. Does this sound too harsh a comment? I do not think so.
The 13 Pillars are as follows, and they are explained in the book:
1. The Mission and Vision Statement
2. The Daily Planner
3. The Vision Statement Deepening Manual
4. The Vision Statement Deepening Stories
5. Heart-Based Hospitality Workshop Follow-up Deepening Briefings
6. The Meditation Room. (This includes several heart energy and coherence techniques.)
7. Heart-Based Positive Emotion Enhancement Techniques
8. Skills Training That Combines the Skill and the Core Values
9. The Use of Visualisation in Reinforcing the Core Values
10. Using Coaching to Deepen About the Core Values
11. The 7 Questions
12. Personalised Career Development Planning
13. The Emotional Freedom Techniques
The starting point is for the hotel to create a mission and vision statement, which is very different to a typical SOP-Customer Satisfaction mission and vision statement, and which focuses on creating a guest experience that is strong in unconditional love, loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. This should be followed by workshops, which start the process of opening the heart and developing spiritual capacity and heart coherence. The workshops should include a focus on energy and on showing how energy works and how it can be used in a way that makes people happier. They should also teach energy techniques; touch the hearts of the participants; and create in them the desire to infuse the guest experience with unconditional love, loving-kindness, compassion, and heart-warming care. A typical, corporate-style “Service Care” workshop is not the same and is only useful in maintaining the obsolete concept of SOP-Customer Satisfaction.
The other Pillars can then be implemented in any order, though starting off with the Daily Planner and the three, vision statement-related, deepening Pillars would be advantageous as these are effective in starting off the daily process of increasing the desire to show love to the guests and to colleagues.
Does Heart-Based Hospitality transform hospitality? … Absolutely! But the hotel must use the reinforcement programme, the13 Pillars, continuously and the senior management team must support the new concept.
I hope that you will consider implementing Heart-Based Hospitality. It is easier than you may think. You just have to do things differently. The staff will be happier because they can be their true, authentic, loving, kind, and caring selves, and because their job will change from carrying out SOPs robotically to opening the gates of their heart as wide as possible so as to let their love flow out without asking if too much is flowing out. As they become more loving, compassionate, kind, and caring, the guests will also feel happier, the hotel will feel energetically different, the hotel will become more profitable, and if Heart-Based Hospitality spreads globally which I believe it will, the dinosaur-like Age of SOP-Customer Satisfaction will finally come to an end.
