The One Thing Hospitality Students Need Before They Enter the Workforce
On a rainy morning, in a room of hospitality and tourism students, and their teachers, at a local college here in Brunei, I talked about Emotional Intelligence (EI).
Here's the thing about EI - it sounds like a buzz-word until you realise it's actually a framework for something you've been navigating your whole life.
Every time you held your tongue when you wanted to snap back.
Every time you read the room and adjusted.
Every time you sensed that someone needed patience more than efficiency.
That's EI. You were already doing it.
What the framework does is help you do it more deliberately and more consistently, especially under pressure.
In hospitality, that matters more than almost anything else. Because guests don't remember the room. They remember how you made them feel.
And the same is true in any industry where people are at the centre of what you do.
Skills can be trained.
Knowledge can be taught.
But the ability to manage yourself while taking care of someone else - that's what separates GOOD from EXCEPTIONAL.
That's what we worked on that morning. And that's what I'll keep coming back to, wherever I go.
This session was delivered to hospitality and tourism students at a local technical college in Brunei, August 2026.
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