Have you noticed that in a lot of the more heated conversations you have witnessed or participated in there is a battle of the egos being played? There is a back and forth, each person rallying back their opinion or statement, focused on being right. The ego wants to be right all the time, and if we are not aware of this, or even if we are, but caught up in the discussion, it will take the reins and charge. It can be like a horse racing out of control, the desire to prove to the other person that they are wrong and you are right. The truth is that you may be right, but that you have a choice. The choice is whether to be kind, or whether to be right. Choose the higher choice, choose to be kind instead of right and notice the effect on the person you are in debate with. It is powerful stuff.
Author: Denica Freitas
enjoy the ride
My lungs were burning as I grinded up the hill, keeping my eyes focused just a little in front of my front tire. It had been at least 4 months since I was on my bike. Life had gotten in the way, and as I sometimes do, I forgot the incredible high from getting a great workout. I kept pedaling and breathing and working to keep my mind from going to the deadly thoughts of stopping to rest. If I keep my eyes only on the dirt, I don’t look up the hill at the steep incline still in front of me. I finally reach a little part that is still uphill but not as steep, and fool myself into thinking its flat, telling my dying lungs, recover, recover. I make it to the top and immediately take a moment to put my feet on the ground, panting, sweating from my head to my dripping back, and let my heart slow. I know this trail well, it’s close to my house and I have ridden it many times. Without stopping or falling. I have also had it kick my butt more than once, as my beautifully scarred knees are evidence of.
The next section is a rolling hill to the point where it becomes technical. This is always the scariest part for me, the steep downhill that requires intense concentration, trust in God and the bike. The deep grooves, ruts, roots and rocks that are signature on this trail have sent me skidding at best and over the handlebars in a youtube worthy spill at worst not too long ago. I practice a mantra as I navigate the downhill, “You got this, trust the bike, keep your eyes where you want to go” over and over in my head to keep out the fear. I let myself stop and walk a particularly steep section, forgiving myself for not being brave. When I blessedly reach the bottom I am excited because the last part of my ride is my favorite. The rolling hills are just hilly enough to require little pedaling, the momentum from the smooth downhill carries me right up the next incline and I am able to let go and smile, breathe and feel the joy and thrill of the wind cooling my sweaty self.
This part makes it all worth it and is when I am reminded why I love to mountain bike. It’s such a perfect metaphor for my life, the hard steep uphills when we are working to build something new whether it is a new restaurant, or striving to buy our dream home, or raising our young family full of little ones years ago. Then comes the really hard part, after we open, the tweaks and reversals and start overs you have to make when learning something new or raising teenagers or stretching your limits. But finally there comes a time when you can breathe, coast a little and really take a look at what you have done. This is where I say thank you, thank you for the ride, then start again.
“Though the road’s been rocky it sure feels good to me.”
― Bob Marley
crazy teenager
There are so many moving parts in any business that it seems like it can sometimes be a never ending process to get things right. Even in a well run organization, there are inevitable leaks that spout as you are growing and moving forward with momentum. There is a pattern, or a life cycle in all businesses, no matter whether you are a restaurant, a tech company, a real estate group, a construction company…Big and small, we all face similar challenges as we grow. It’s not unlike the lifecycle of a human being, with the intense attention needed when your business is a newborn, to the chaos that ensues during the go-go grow phase, like an out of control teenager. Even when a business hits it prime, then inevitably starts to age, like we see now with brands like Sears, Red Robin, Chili’s, it’s just part of the cycle of life.
In our business we were teenagers for a very long time. I like to think now we have advanced to young adults, but there are still times when I wonder if I am not unlike my little 3 year old niece who insists she’s a big girl. Much of our teenager phase was recognizable by the lack of systems and the issues we faced. We spent a lot of energy and time “putting out fires” and plugging the holes that would happen all the time. It was like trying to hold a handful of goo. No matter how close I held my fingers together, there would inevitably be a leak, then another and another as I addressed each one. Teenagers are fearless. You can caution them and warn them about the perils of driving fast, but they want to learn by their own mistakes. We were in crisis mode all the time.
So how did we grow up? I made the decision. I got tired of the chaos and realized that I was the leader. It was time for me to grow up and take responsibility for the challenges we faced. We decided to stop hiring from desperation. We stopped assuming our people knew what to do just because they were experienced or well paid. We limited what we were focusing on, and changed that focus to leadership. We changed our inner circle and listened to different voices. We put new leaders in charge. This all gave momentum to the next phase in our growth. By focusing on our people and developing their leadership we are growing from the inside out. Instead of the pedal to the metal method of our adolescence, we have transformed into gardeners, planting seeds that are pushing from the bottom up towards the light. The process of developing leaders takes time. The seeds of greatness lay dormant until the conditions are right for them to germinate and grow. It is our mission now as leaders to find those seeds in our people and help them grow.
The decision to change the course of my organization, from the toddler stage when I was so in love with what we were selling, to the teenager stage when I was so in love with our guests, to the stage we are in now, where we are in love with our tribe, has brought me so much energy and keeps me motivated and loving what I do. I needed to redefine what we are here to do. I believe I am here on this earth still because my work is not done. I am here to help and serve the people in our tribe, which includes the employees, the clients, the vendors, and our communities. This is what gets me up early every day and keeps me smiling no matter what.
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” E.E. Cummings
kill them with kindness
I know I can’t make everyone happy, but in business I certainly give it my best efforts. Ultimately your customers and clients want to know you care. If they know you care and are listening to them its like earning credits in a game of pinball. You may blow it once, twice, even many times, but as long as there are credits left they will let you play again. You earn those credits not by buying them with a quarter, but by adding value in other ways. By giving them more than they expect, by over delivering, by under-promising, by getting it to them sooner, sometimes by being more expensive thus more exclusive. By returning their phone calls or emails quickly, as if you were standing by waiting for their contact. By genuinely caring about their time and being on time to your appointments, or in our case when serving their meal. If you don’t care about your customer, you better start now or get out. You need to love them more than the widget or service or cookies you sell. It doesn’t matter how great your product is if you fail to build and create the relationships with the people who will buy it. And maintain those relationships through the thick and thin.
James had a famous in our family customer that would come in to his cookie store and complain every time. If he wasn’t there she would let him know that the cashiers were gossiping. If he was there she would complain that the muffin she wanted was too small. Or the windows were dirty or he was too expensive or she didn’t like the pictures on his wall. This went on for some time, yet she still came in. She would park herself in the cookie store with the old guys in the corner and complain. Complain about life or her daughter or whatever current event going on. How did this customer become one of our biggest fans? James practiced kindness. He would apologize, sympathize, and truly listen to her complaint, making it right whenever he could. If you can turn around the biggest complainer they will still broadcast, but a different message about you.
If you get defensive when you get a complaint, you are in love with your product. Take a look at that and stop taking it personally. Even if the product is you. Love your client, your guest, your customer. They are, or should be the reason you are doing what you do.
why I write
As I sit here contemplating what to write, my mind goes to why I am writing. When I was a young girl I would write in a journal, but for some reason stopped. My memories of my early writing are littered with the experiences that may have turned me off to putting my thoughts down on paper. There were the countless times where my mother read my journal and sat me down to talk about my very private thoughts, a violation of the highest level to any youngster, although now as a mother myself I have more sympathy for why she would do that. There was the time I left my journal under the desk in my social studies class as a junior in high school. Typically, my journal back then was full of the dreams and agonies that my teen years were full of. My horror was only exceeded by my embarrassment when one of my friends brought the journal to me, sternly telling me “You really should keep track of where you leave this, people were reading it.” At that time the ramblings were about my crush on the popular football player at our school, “Chad”, and I was sure the story circled around to him to my dismay. For the next year and a half until graduation I avoided any possible contact with him or anyone in his group, dropping my eyes if we passed in the hall and doing my best to become invisible.
But here I am, doing it again, putting my thoughts down, but this time in an intentionally public way. Why? It has become clear to me that I really love to write. And I am proud of my journey, the mistakes and all. The how I write means more I think at this moment than why. When I committed to writing every day, I did not think about “well what if I have nothing to write?” There have been days where I sit here in my writing space and need to quiet my mind to hear my thoughts, if that makes sense. Much of the time, though, I wake up with words jumbling in my mind and need to force myself to first let the dogs out and start the coffee brewing before sitting down to get it out. When I write it is like my mind is turned off, the words flow through me and into my fingers The writing is littered with misspelled words, usually transposed i and e or for some reason I exchange the c’s for x’s. I let it all flow out for as long as it needs to, then I pause and read over what I have written.
The process tells me that I am doing what I should be doing. The inspiration and words are coming from deep inside me, or from somewhere else, I am not sure. It is the same when you are involved in any project where you are in the flow, things are moving seemingly perfectly in sync and you lose track of time. I would like to think that we all have times when this is what we experience, and if we don’t something needs to change. When we are in the flow, or the zone, and what we do doesn’t seem like work, that is the juice. That is when the universe conspires to help us, and the right people or ideas or resources show up a the exact moment that you need them. I have been here many times in my life, but it is only now in retrospect that I can see it. It has meant becoming more aware of who I really am, and unapologetically being that person. Not some image of who I think I should be, but me.
branding
If you are trying to be everything to everybody you will be nothing to no one. There is always going to be a percentage of the population who loves you, a percentage who can’t stand you, and those who don’t care. Your primary focus must remain on your authentic voice and your vision.
This means not taking it personally when you have critics. In actuality, embrace it. Take the feedback and grow from it if you can. Ignore the haters and nay-sayers, they are not your tribe. Live with integrity and focus your energy and attention on the ones who love you. They are the ones who need to hear your message, the ones who want what you are providing, who can propel your brand.
There is tremendous power in the tribe of people who love and support you. Exceed their expectations and always ask yourself how you can add more value to them. Listen to them, always, but especially when they give you feedback. Feedback is the most valuable opportunity to make things better for your tribe, team, clients, followers, organization.
When you are on the inside looking out your view is very one dimensional, depending on your personality you may be focusing on all the little details that are not perfect, or turning a blind eye to potentially damaging issues that can be percolating in your group. Feedback from your tribe is the way to look from the outside in. This view is the perception you are projecting. Checking often with your tribe helps to ensure you are staying true to your values.
When building your brand never compromise on your standards, always be open to new and better ways, and know that your people are your biggest asset.
permission to dream
I am not sure when I stopped dreaming but one of the most powerful things I have done is to start dreaming again.
As young children we are natural dreamers, we imagine and play and pretend all day long. As we grow up we are taught to get serious, told to get out head out of the clouds, to pay attention, stop daydreaming, grow up. All of these things and the growing responsibilities of being a parent or employee or husband or wife or homeowner can conspire to stifle the dreamer inside.
I had dreams, and one day I woke up and realized that I had made those dreams real. I have the bakery. I am financially independent. I can take my parents to dinner and pay. I have beautiful, unique, originals who are my children who love me and I admire immensely. I have a strong, handsome, attentive and loving partner who meets my every need. I have my lap dog. I am helping others. I experience joy and happiness as a regular state of being. I realized that everything I had once dreamed of had become my reality. I asked for it, I worked towards it, I kept it in my heart, and I received it. I created this life for myself.
About the same moment that I began to realize this, I also realized that I had stopped dreaming. Somehow I had programmed the belief into my mind that dreaming was a waste of time. I also believed that if I dreamed, I would become unhappy with the way things were and impatient to change them. I told myself that I was not good at visualizing, even knowing that I was closing doors before even allowing them to shine a little light onto my limiting beliefs.
The thing that changed this for me was listening to John Maxwell speak live. He spoke about intentionally growing every day, and challenged us to create 5 daily habits that would take us in the direction of growth. This was yet another example of the teacher appearing for the student who was more than ready to make a shift in her life. I was feeling a little stagnant, knowing that I was not doing what gave me fulfillment although I could find nothing to complain about. I committed pretty easily to the first 3- Read, Pray, and Write. Then I stalled. What could I do for the last 2 I asked myself. I sat at the table, right at the conference with John still on stage, and looked inside myself. The answer that came popping into my consciousness was Dream and Reflect. The two things I was not currently doing, and in fact avoided like the plague.
As I thought about the 2 that my intuition were sending me, I knew that these were areas that were absent from my life. I had shut myself off from dreaming, and so was cruising along with the flow, not really directing the course of my life. I do have my amazing partner and love who I am blessed to say is a very proficient dreamer, and has been an amazing guide as I floated along, so life was good. But somehow once I reached and exceeded my original dreams, I didn’t expand my vision to include a bigger dream! I actually needed to give myself permission to dream again- to trust that whatever I dream I can achieve, and that it is absolutely ok, actually even mandatory, that I continue to dream and grow! Reflecting became easy and is going hand in hand with the dreaming. I can reflect back on my life and see how every dream can and will come to fruition if it serves a greater good and I keep it in my heart.
worry
“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”- Thomas Carlyle
I don’t know about you but the battle with worry is one that I have taken years to call a truce with. I don’t say win, because it is tempting sometimes for me to find myself “concerned” or “apprehensive”, synonyms for that “w” word that my mind tricks me by using. My ears are very in tune to hear the worry word when other people speak it, and to mentally say to myself “fear”, but my tricky mind has caught on and doesn’t allow me to use the word when referring to my own feelings. Instead it subs in other terms, “I am concerned about….” or “I am scared that…” I know that worry and its many forms are caused by thinking too much about the past or possible futures. Our minds as we know are supercomputers, super creative and imaginative, look at the world we have created with our human intelligence! Anything you see was once just an idea in someone’s mind.
How do we really harness the power of our minds and take the lessons we have learned in our past with us to help us make decisions in the now without holding on to the negativity from the failures? How do we direct it’s tendency to look for all the things it’s afraid of in the future?
It begins by seeing every painful experience as a learning tool, and by redefining your past. It’s true that you can’t physically go back to the past and re-do anything, but what you can do which is incredibly powerful is to mentally go back and change how you define it. Sometimes it takes a lot of time to be able to see what possible good can come out of our past, especially if it was extremely painful. But one of the gifts we have as human beings is the ability to control our own minds and what we think about. It takes practice. It takes looking at the course of your life and how each decision and success and failure has brought you to this moment, today. It takes realizing and remembering and reminding yourself always that how you live today is the true indicator of how your tomorrows will be.
If you are worried now about tomorrow, you will be worried tomorrow about Friday. Stop the cycle and take control of your thoughts. The future is today. The best way to prepare for tomorrow is to use all of your intelligence, your enthusiasm, on doing today superbly. Worry is a synonym for fear. Look it up. The thesaurus also lists misery, anguish, pain, woe…all words that mean the same thing as worry. I for one do not want to live in that place where those words describe my life. Misery has been candy-coated into the “W” word. Let it go.
just be yourself
But what does that mean? It means stop trying to please someone else.
This became so clear to me when I met Sherry, who had just come to the realization that she had gone to medical school and become a doctor to please her parents. Her dad was a doctor and wanted her to follow in his footsteps, so as a good daughter wanting to please her parents, she did. She was in her late 30’s when I met her and all she craved was a relationship and a family. The hours required for her to follow the career path she had chosen in the medical field virtually elimnated any free time, and everyone she met was in the same boat as she was. She felt that she was in a no-win situation, no time to meet anyone other than the other driven doctors who also had no time for relationships. She wanted to have a loving relationship and a couple of kids. She wanted to teach wellness, not cure sickness. She had gotten herself stuck in a career that was taking all she had and was leaving her feeling drained and unfulfilled.
This got me thinking. What decisions am I making that are to please someone else? Is my life one I have created of my own design, or am I following the blueprint laid out by my well meaning parents? There is nothing wrong with leading your kids in a direction of less pain, but letting them know and truly believe that you will love them no matter what is the best parenting you can give them.
So be yourself. What does that mean? It means getting to know yourself. Know what give you joy, and what brings pain. Stop trying to fit into an image that you have in your mind of how you should act or look like or what you should be doing at this point in your life. Slow down and stop judging yourself. How can you truly love anyone unconditionally if you are judging yourself? You may think you are not judging others, but as long as you are judging yourself I can 100% guarantee you are also doing it to other people.
Relax, breathe, feel that place inside you that lets you know when things are not jiving for you. Get to know and love that voice, that feeling, that is your intuition. Whether you believe in God, a higher power, your inner self…trust it. That voice, that feeling, is talking to you, and your internal guidance system is the most undervalued asset we have. Give yourself a break, be kind to the little boy or girl that is still there inside you.
what is culture?
What IS the culture in my business? How do I start defining it? These questions and more went through my mind when I first began to hear the word culture. Until that point I thought culture was going to the ballet, or museums, or playing a musical instrument. The idea of creating a culture in my business was foreign. I knew that we had amazing, kind people working in our restaurants, people I had hand selected and liked working with. But I wanted to know more about this word I kept hearing, and how to create it intentionally.
When I stepped out of the daily operations role in our first location to open locations 2 and 3, it was the real test on what we had built in Dublin for our brand, our culture, and the people that worked with us there. We hit some stumbling blocks, because we were in unknown territory. Thankfully we have a strong and loyal client base and core team that rallied around us and gave us the support and the critical feedback along the way to let me know in real time how things were operating without my daily presence. Many of my fears about growing our company were unfounded, but just as many proved true. I found it challenging to continue to improve our standards, and maintaining alone was difficult at times! Too much of the first 3 years after opening our second and third locations was spent putting out fires and plugging holes.
The shift began with a final straw. I’ve said it before, I have been a slow learner. But that’s changing. For me, the most difficult thing to do as a business owner is to make the hard decision to transition someone off the team. It is hard to make the call that there is nothing more that you can do to coach someone into the position or level of performance that you must require to operate your business successfully. I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I know I need to do this, and I remind myself that I have a responsibility to my team to make the best decisions for them. Sometimes people get stuck in a job they don’t like or that they cannot do with success, and if they don’t make the move on their own to improve or move on, it becomes up to me.
The final straw was when I decided to stop looking for solutions outside of myself. I made a decision to change my mindset about how we hire, who we need on the team, and to invest my energy with the people already on board. We began intentionally coaching, mentoring, training and developing people already in our organization to help them grow. I took off the blinders and saw that we had so many diamonds just waiting for someone to notice them, give them tools and to believe in them. These people are teaching ME about the culture we are building.
What is a culture? Its a shared belief, a shared vision. It is people like us who do things like us. A culture based on LOVE. What that means is that the people in our tribe, our family, know that we care about them. It means that we respect each other and want to help each other out. We say please and thank you, and believe in empowering people to do what it takes to brighten someone’s day. We believe that growth is mandatory and its always a process. Success is defined by the fact that we are headed in the right direction, even if we have not arrived. We believe that one person can make a huge impact, and we are working towards creating a kinder, more loving world. This is our culture.