Gratitude - the glue that binds it all together
+ Hospitality News, Jingle Bell Kindness, and tips to help max out your credit card!
We Canadians celebrated Thanksgiving over a month ago. Americans celebrate it this week. But this post isn’t about Thanksgiving. It’s not about killing big birds, overeating, and shopping.
As Canadian born and raised, let me start by apologising to my subscribers. It’s been over a month since I last infiltrated your inbox.
Yes, I had sepsis and was hospitalised for a week. That’s not an excuse for my lack of productivity. I wrote three posts about that surreal ordeal.
My absence was a combination of writer’s block and laziness. Mostly the latter. The former is just jargon us literary types use as a synonym for our idleness.
I know some readers will be too lazy to read all three posts. Some will also be too lazy to click the pic. Spoiler alert: I survived the sepsis.
I’m grateful to be alive.
More Gratitude
If you received this by email, I’m grateful that you haven’t changed your email address. According to this article in Forbes, Google’s email decision means you should.
I’m grateful for all the new subscribers who have joined the Always Care Community! Despite my lack of posting, 18 new subscribers have joined in the past 30 days. Thank you!
I’m grateful to Betty Carlson, a longtime subscriber who reached out while I wasn’t posting and asked if I was OK. Here’s a link to Betty’s newsletter, France In Between, superb stories and insights about small French towns.
I’m grateful to everyone, 125 and counting, who liked this anecdote in Notes. It’s my first almost viral note! It’s called “I like you because you have no ego”.
(Click the pic to view the note.)
Gratitude in an uncertain world
The way the world is changing has many of my friends wondering what they have to be grateful for. How can we be grateful if Europe is threatened by war? How can we be grateful that a convicted felon will soon be President of the United States? How can we be grateful as climate change threatens our way of life?
I’m a big picture guy. My entire corporate career was built around trying to understand what was going on in the world and how and where it would impact our hotels.
When the big picture is unclear or frightening, we can still appreciate the little things.
In 2014, when life in Eastern Ukraine was threatened by war, I called our hotel in Donetsk daily. One day, the General Manager, who was Turkish, told me he was grateful for the opportunity to experience the resilience of the Ukrainian people first-hand.
Erdem told me about a group of elderly women who tended to the flower beds in a park across the street from the hotel. He told me about his staff who diligently focused on operating the hotel according to the brand standards. Despite chaos and danger all around them, he said people found purpose and promise by focusing on the little things that remained in their control.
Gratitude is the same. There are always things we wish would be different. That doesn’t mean we can’t be grateful for other aspects of our life.
Gratitude is the first feeling I have every morning. Even on these cold, dark November mornings. As my eyes slowly grow accustomed to the dark, I roll my head to the right, and there she is. Seeing my wife silently sleeping fills me with gratitude. I’m grateful to have her as my partner. No matter the challenges we face, she fills me with love and hope. How could I not be grateful?
Although I stopped drinking coffee when I was preparing for my operation, I still tiptoe along the frozen floor to the kitchen every morning. In dark silence, I fill the coffeemaker with water and unmeasured spoonfuls of Costco’s finest dark roast.
Even after 25 years, Kirsten is still genuinely grateful for her morning coffee.
With construction workers on lifts and cranes across the street, I’m confident they are grateful that I prepare the coffee in darkness. Their days would not be the same if I hit the switch to illuminate the room and give them a clear view of me in my birthday suit.
Genuine gratitude is a powerful emotion that begins with our mindset. It starts with acknowledging the good in our lives and grows into a helpful, soothing feeling that evolves into an expression of thanks.
A public expression of thanks is meaningless if it doesn’t stem from that deep, internal feeling of gratitude we acknowledge within ourselves.
Hospitality Update
There’s something rotten in Denmark
In recent weeks, the Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden all informed their citizens to prepare for war. When I arrived in Norway in 1978, war was still a nightmare people had lived. Interestingly, insurance company Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection ranks both Norway and Denmark in their top ten safest countries list. Perhaps they should base their list on risks the countries themselves see rather than simply surveying travellers about how they feel.
Unfortunately for those travellers, Scandinavian hotel companies are still embracing trees instead of preparing for the crises their governments are sending advice out on. Hotel websites are all about protecting the planet. They say little about protecting the people who stay in their hotels.
Sustainable Hospitality News
The Sustainable Hospitality Alliance (SHA) recently announced the launch of universal sustainability KPIs for the hospitality industry. It’s being applauded as a game-changer. The devil is in the details, however. Will hotels be able to accurately and affordably be able to calculate their performance? The KPIs are all based on environmental considerations: Greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, energy consumption, and waste management. When will organizations like SHA understand that crisis preparedness is a critical component of sustainability? One thing is reducing our usage of water and energy, another is preparing for the days when water and energy are unavailable.
Jingle Bell Kindness is coming
The Kindness Games (TKG) is a movement started by corporate security executives, Lee Oughton and Tim Wenzel. It started during the started as a way to counter the disruption, hate, and discontent that engulfed our world during the pandemic and the ensuing spike of racial tensions and civil unrest. Tim and Lee challenged each other to give shoutouts of gratitude to people who had supported them professionally and personally. The challenge: Post 30 shoutouts in 30 days on LinkedIn. Soon, others jumped in on the challenge. I was #13 to complete 30 posts.
Jingle Bell Kindness is a TKG-overtime game. People to use the days between US Thanksgiving and Christmas to publicly acknowledge acts of kindness they’ve received. On December 31, TKG’ers run 24 Hours of Kindness. A shoutout video is posted for each timezone at midnight as it enters the new year.
Follow #JingleBellKindness on LinkedIn to see the uplifting posts.
The Kindness Games Book was published by How2Conquer last year. I highly recommend it as a gift idea.
More Tips to Max Out Your Credit Card
Hopefully, you’re on Substack because you like to read. What better way to give yourself and others a holiday gift than to choose an awesome book?
Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and a whole host of other sales will have us making lists and checking them (and our credit card limits) twice in the coming weeks. Here are my top tips for shopping season:
Zero Sum - Charles Hecker
Want to better understand how Russia went from the free-for-all economic bandwagon everyone jumped aboard in the booming 90s to where it is today: a feared aggressor that invaded its neighbour and has other neighbours preparing for war? Charles Hecker has lived, worked, and travelled in and to Russia for decades. He’s a former editor of the Moscow Times and partner at Control Risks Group. I’ve known Charles personally for about 25 years. He’s an amazing analyst and storyteller. He has unparalleled insight into how doing business in Russia went from communism to capitalism to collapse and all the highs and lows along the way.
The Rise of Security - Mike Croll
Isn’t it weird how the more we get, the more we want? That’s true for fame and fortune, acknowledgement and recognition. It’s also true for security. Mike Croll’s career took him from “mall cop” for a supermarket chain, to leading roles in corporate security at Facebook, as well as security leadership positions in the European Union and the United Nations. Even for the non-security professional, Mike’s book is a wonderful collection of spellbinding stories.
Slalom - Joe Jacobi
Joe Jacobi is an Olympic Gold Medallist. He won his medal because he was first across the finish line in whitewater kayaking in Barcelona in 1992. If you ask Joe, he’s not too concerned with finish lines. He focuses on start lines. Joe’s book and his life revolve around how rivers, like life, are ever-changing. There are calms and rapids, rocks and falls, and other obstacles. I call Joe “The Master of Flow,” and Slalom is an excellent guide on how the value of finding flow and simplicity should never be underestimated.
ON SALE! - Spin the Bottle Service - ON SALE!
“Is this your first time visiting us?” “Are you celebrating something special?” “How those first few bites tasting?” “Got any plans for the rest of the evening?”
Hospitality has become so scripted that guests are bored and employees are leaving the industry. In a world of social media and influencers, no hospitality employee wants to recite a script all day long. They want to be creative. They want to treat people like people. They want to behave like people instead of robots. A.I. should give us the opportunity to personlise service. Instead, like innovations often do, companies use it to slash staff and standardize service. Our book is a collection of stories and anecdotes that show how personlised service makes guest experiences more memorable and jobs more meaningful.
It’s the perfect gift for hospitality businesses to give their employees! Our year-end offer on Amazon.com: US$ 9.99 for the paperback. As a special shoutout to all of our friends in the Ukraine, and others who celebrate Orthodox Christmas, the sale continues until January 15, 2025.
Thanks for being part of the Always Care Community.
I’m Paul. I was born, raised, and currently live in Canada. After high school, I embarked on a gap year in Europe. It lasted four decades. I went to university in Norway and started my hotel career in the basement of a five-star hotel in Oslo. The manager who hired me told me I was too old, too educated, and had too many opinions to be a security guard. He also told me that the only other person who applied for the job didn’t want it.
Thirty years later, I left that same company. It had grown from a small regional hotel chain in Scandinavia to become a large, global, multi-brand company. I moved from Norway to Denmark to Belgium. The company awarded me their highest individual honour for leadership, and security professional peers selected me as the world’s most influential corporate security executive.
I’m a hospitality professional. I’m a security professional. If you ask, I will tell you that security was my job, and hospitality was my business.
Today, I’m an educator and a consultant passionate about hotels, hospitality, and keeping people safe during their travels.
In addition to the Always Care Community, I also write for Risk Resiliency’s Keep Travel Safe.
Written with the clarity of hindsight, the accuracy of a faded memory, and countless creative liberties, this is a newsletter of how life has made me an emigrant, an immigrant, and gifted me experiences I never dreamed possible.
Thanks for reading. Your support is my motivation and I’m genuinely grateful that you’re here. Please share, subscribe, and connect with me.
Aw, thank you for the mention! I enjoyed reading your post and am now going to bed worried about my Gmail address! I'm glad you are feeling better and good on you for making coffee for your wife!
Sending you lots of healing post sepsis recovery. Enjoyed the post about gratitude. I did think- oh my canadian friend, you don't need to apologize :) anywho: hug from peru.