Transforming Your Hospitality Career Through Personal Development - Rachel Vandenburg

Are you ready to level up as a hospitality provider and leader? If so, stick around, because a hotel owner and personal development coach is going to show you how. Coaching is such an important part of being a leader. I know this from the executive coaching I've received, but also hear it time and again from the leaders I talk with. You may remember Remington Hospitality CEO Sloan Dean talking about this on a recent episode.

I sought out executive coaching and I was about three months into executive coaching and I just got my 360 feedback from everyone and my coach said to me, Sloan, you need to let go of thinking that you're always the smartest person in the room. You're always listening to respond, not listening to understand. I had that real epihany. I always cared about people, but it was almost like my ambition was more important. Over the last eight years, I've tried to really bring empathy and vulnerability into the workplace.

We're doing a deep dive on personal development today with Rachel Vandenburg, a hotel owner and operator who benefited from coaching so much that she decided to focus her time on providing this for others. In this episode, you'll learn why personal development matters, cultural trends that will impact your career, communication, how to find a coach, and much more. We started out by talking about why personal development is important. Here is Rachel's answer.

I entered from the angle of I was challenged by managing people and I was looking for resources to help me manage outwardly. That's how I got driven into it and started reading a lot and eventually that led me to hire a coach. What I learned in the process, and especially when I started my coach training for myself and realized that that was something I wanted to do in the next phase of my career, is that it's actually all about you. It's all about the self first, and then it's about okay, how does that manifest when you are working with others? Long story short, the importance of personal development is that you are first getting to know yourself and your strengths and your weaknesses, your understanding, your values, your purpose. Then it's about putting that to work in everyday day leadership and modeling, being a good human being first and foremost. That's where I think it starts, and then it just steamrolls from there into really how you relate to other people and deal with challenges in the workplace.

There may be people listening to this that say, hey, i'm trying to figure this out because I need to lead my teams. I need to lead my teams, i need to take care of myself and make sure that I'm growing my career. Having been through this journey yourself as a hotel owner and then now helping others through this journey, what are some practical steps you'd advise them take to start?

I would start maybe where I started, which is reading articles, reading books. Another thing that I've done is be participating in any kind of network or a mastermind group. a lot of associations that many hotel people belong to have these kinds of mastermind groups where you can learn from other leaders. That's where I would begin. When you really feel like you're ready to spend a significant amount of time and effort and you are motivated to change and accelerate something in your career and in your leadership or in your life, i would strongly recommend hiring a coach. It can make a huge difference in your career development and getting promotions because of the way that you change yourself and the way that you're able to lead on the job, but it can also make a difference in your personal life, with your families, with your relationships and friends, and all of that influences each other.

I've certainly experienced it myself and I feel like being coach. there's traits and personality characteristics or just communication practices that transcend the kind of business versus personal life divide, and so there's benefits across the board. How would you advise people evaluate a coach and find one that's good for them?

Great question, because finding the right coach is very much about fit, and, first of all, definitely recommend vetting multiple. Just like a software, meet different coaches, have a discovery call with them for sure. Another way to go through that process look at their website if they have recorded podcasts with people, if they are speaking at an event. That's a way to hear them speak and the content that they're providing and see if that's a person you think you can work with. So any kind of way that you have to be able to have some interaction with a coach and see what they're all about is a great way to go through that process And also seeing okay, have they been officially trained by a coaching certification program or have they received their ICF credentials, things like that.

Well, our listeners need to go to the travelleadercoachcom And if you click the little podcast tab, you can not only see the Travel Leader podcast, which I recommend our listeners subscribe to check it out, But also your guest appearances, right? And I think for those that are looking for help, check those out. And I think it's always good to just have a conversation first, right, And kind of see here's the goals, here's where we're looking to go With. That being said, as you think across your coaching practice today, is there an area of focus that's either top of mind for you or you're really emphasizing leadership development? coaching can be very broad. I'm curious if there's a theme that is especially important to you right now.

I've been thinking a lot about communication. I think a lot of times we think that we know how to communicate, but we really don't understand the full breadth. Communicating isn't just speaking, it's also listening, it's understanding. There's so much more to it, so that would definitely be a big topic. I think also, leadership mindset is an area that I think a lot about, and how our beliefs and the things we think about influence our actions, and oftentimes we very quickly jump to actions. And it starts with your mindsets, and one of the most important mindsets to me is humility, because if you don't even realize that you are a person who is, has flaws and can always improve, and if you're not open to change, basically there's nothing else that can happen with your personal development.

How do you stay humble? Because I feel it could be a temptation as you grow in your leadership responsibilities. You have a bigger job, bigger title, you're owning a hotel. You can feel good. You feel like, yeah, i've made it, i know stuff. How do you stay humble?

The first one that comes to mind is trying new things that you're not good at and making yourself realize that, yeah, there's always something to learn. I think another one is really focusing on listening and connecting with people, without always jumping to form your own opinions right away or to speak your opinions, because that creates an open space in which someone can teach something to you And, yeah, just in general, always learning new things and opening yourself to those kinds of opportunities.

I love that. Is there anything that you've been learning recently that put you in that zone?

Definitely Going back to chat GPT and AI. Someone told me about it like a few months ago And I was really reluctant and resistant And I was like, oh, this isn't really that important for me right now And you know. But the person really pushed me to take a look at it And it was a humbling experience because I was like, wow, this is really important. I need to pay more attention, i need to learn about this.

I feel exactly the same way. It's really fascinating. Where do you feel our culture is going over the next five or 10 years? broadly, it feels like we have these insane advances in technology. We talked about going through the pandemic. Where do you feel like we're going collectively?

I think we have a little bit of a bumpy road ahead. Honestly. There's a lot of really troubling things happening in the world income disparities and the power that people with companies and big, really big amounts of money more than money than a whole country. There's a lot of power there And that power and the benefit of that power is not necessarily being distributed. I think that's something that's concerning. I think also another concern I have is about the ability to speak up and to debate, have a healthy debate. We've become a very polarized country, So those are some of the things that concern me, And my hope is that, with all of these things that are happening, if there are enough people that are really focused on the human experience and also mindfulness and being good human beings, that we can counterbalance those things. And that's where I think to bring it back to coaching, I think coaching and any kind of reflective process really helps with that as well, But there's also, of course, many other ways to do that.

I like that a lot. I wonder if there's a way hospitality has an opportunity in that as well, Because I heard themes of communication of the human experience. It feels like a very hospitality-focused thing as well.

Yeah, and I think I listened to one of your episodes this week about why hospitality is an industry that will become even more important in the AI world, because it's one of connection and human connection. So I can definitely relate to that, and I think that hospitality is all about person-to-person real-time experience, and so the more we can really lean into that as an industry, and there's no accident that after people were deprived of that for so long, that people have gone crazy with travel ever since, not being able to travel since 2020. So that's, i think, where hospitality plays a really big role for sure.