A deep exploration of how nervous system regulation and operational excellence intersect in hospitality, revealing how better systems, clear leadership, and employee wellness create environments where teams genuinely perform at their best.
Her Story
About Adriana "Aria"
Adriana (Aria) Klansnic is a hospitality professional, entrepreneur, wellness program creator, writer, and creative strategist whose work brings together high-touch guest experience, operational leadership, team development, transformational wellness, and nervous-system-centered approaches to human experience.
With more than sixteen years of experience in luxury and high-touch hospitality, Adriana has developed a deep understanding of what makes both exceptional guest experiences and strong hospitality teams possible. Her background includes luxury hotel and destination dining, fine dining, restaurant openings, service training, shift leadership, team support, guest recovery, VIP service, and navigating the fast-moving realities of hospitality operations. She has worked in Forbes-level luxury environments and has been entrusted with serving high-profile and celebrity guests.
Her work has also been recognized for excellence in both service and technical leadership. At Montage Deer Valley, Adriana was named a Masters Winner in 2012 and later a Masters Nominee in 2014 for service and guest-experience excellence. At John Howie Steak, she received the Technical Ability Award in 2016 in recognition of her leadership, service knowledge, and technical expertise. More recently, she was named Team Member of the Month at Hotel Polaris in January 2026.
Her years on the floor also gave Adriana firsthand insight into the operational problems that undermine otherwise talented hospitality teams: inconsistent training, unclear expectations, poor communication, reactive leadership, preventable service breakdowns, employee burnout, and systems that depend too heavily on individual employees holding everything together.
That experience led her to create Shift Better Hospitality, a hospitality training and consulting company designed to help restaurants build stronger systems, better-trained teams, healthier leadership practices, and more consistent guest experiences. Shift Better provides practical training frameworks, operational tools, consulting, and resources that help hospitality businesses move from reactive operations toward greater clarity, consistency, accountability, and preparedness.
Through Shift Better, Adriana develops structured server-training systems, competency tools, operational processes, leadership resources, and practical approaches to improving the flow of service. Her work also explores the relationship between nervous-system regulation and hospitality performance—particularly how stress affects communication, decision-making, leadership, learning, guest recovery, and team dynamics during demanding shifts. She believes that better systems do more than improve efficiency: they reduce unnecessary cognitive load, create predictability, and give employees a stronger foundation from which to perform well under pressure.
Alongside her hospitality work, Adriana is the founder of Alkhemy Arts, a creative and wellness-centered body of work focused on nervous-system awareness, embodiment, reflection, creativity, and personal transformation. Through Alkhemy Arts, she has created written teachings, guided practices, audio experiences, reflective exercises, digital resources, participant communications, and transformational programs designed to help people reconnect with themselves.
She developed Return to the Root, a 28-day nervous-system-centered journey incorporating guided practices, written teachings, reflection, nourishment, boundaries, self-awareness, and embodied safety. Her broader creative work includes writing, poetry, visual art, meditation, sound-based practices, program development, digital content, and experiences exploring the intersection of creativity, the body, and personal transformation.
Her background also includes operating creative businesses, developing digital products and curriculum, managing client relationships, producing educational and marketing content, and supporting clients within a healing-centered movement therapy environment. She is a certified 200-hour yoga teacher, Reiki Master, artist, writer, and experienced hospitality professional, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to leadership, wellbeing, service, and experience design.
Adriana is particularly interested in work involving hospitality innovation, program development, participant and guest experience, learning and development, training systems, wellness programming, retreats, workshops, curriculum development, community engagement, onboarding, digital learning, brand storytelling, and experience design.
Her long-term vision is to bring these seemingly different threads together by creating and leading a transformational destination property where exceptional hospitality, restorative wellbeing, food, nature, creativity, community, and meaningful human experiences are intentionally integrated.
She envisions a model of hospitality that cares not only for the guest, but also for the people creating the guest experience - where thoughtful systems, strong leadership, beautiful environments, meaningful programming, and human-centered operations allow both guests and teams to thrive.
At the center of Adriana's work is a simple belief: transformation can begin with how people are received, supported, and cared for. Whether she is designing a hospitality training system, creating a wellness program, writing a guided practice, supporting a guest, or imagining the future of transformational hospitality, she brings together operational understanding, emotional intelligence, creative expression, lived experience, and a commitment to creating environments where people feel welcomed, understood, capable, and more connected to themselves.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Adriana "Aria"
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to a combination of genuine care for people, emotional intelligence, resilience, creativity, and a commitment to continual growth. My years in hospitality have taught me how to anticipate needs, build trust quickly, communicate with empathy, remain composed under pressure, and create experiences in which people feel genuinely seen, welcomed, and cared for.
My personal healing and creative journey has deepened those strengths. It has taught me to listen beyond the surface, stay curious about what experiences are revealing, and turn insight into something practical and meaningful. Whether I am supporting a guest, leading a team, developing a training system, or creating a wellness program, I bring the same intention: to understand what people need, create the conditions for them to feel supported, and leave the experience better than I found it.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I’ve received is to pay attention to what feels both meaningful and sustainable. I’ve learned that just because I am capable of doing something doesn’t mean I am meant to keep doing it forever.
Some of the biggest shifts in my career have come from being willing to notice where my energy, experience, and strengths are naturally leading me next. Hospitality taught me an enormous amount about people, leadership, service, and resilience, but it also taught me to recognize when a chapter has given me what I needed from it.
I’ve come to believe that a career doesn’t have to follow a perfectly straight line. The experiences that seem unrelated at first can become the exact combination that makes your work uniquely valuable. The important thing is to keep learning, stay curious, and be willing to evolve when you realize you’ve outgrown the version of success you were pursuing.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
My advice to young women entering hospitality is to learn as much as you can, but do not confuse being hardworking with having to prove your worth endlessly.
Hospitality can teach you extraordinary skills: emotional intelligence, adaptability, confidence, communication, leadership, problem-solving, and how to read a room in seconds. Take those skills seriously. They are transferable, valuable, and often far more sophisticated than people outside the industry realize.
At the same time, learn your boundaries early. Being capable does not mean you should become the person who carries an entire operation because the systems or leadership around you are weak. Speak up, ask questions, understand how the business works beyond your own position, and pay attention to the leaders who make people better rather than smaller.
Find mentors. Learn the operational side of the business, not just the guest-facing side. Understand training, labor, revenue, systems, leadership, and what makes a team actually function. The more you understand the whole operation, the more choices you will have about where your career can take you.
Most importantly, do not let anyone convince you that caring deeply is a weakness. Some of the best hospitality professionals are successful because they notice what others miss, understand people quickly, and genuinely care about the experience they are creating. Protect that quality, pair it with strong boundaries and business knowledge, and it can become one of your greatest strengths.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
One of the biggest challenges in hospitality right now is that many businesses are still trying to solve people problems without addressing the systems underneath them. High turnover, burnout, inconsistent training, poor communication, and reactive leadership are often treated as separate issues, when in reality they are deeply connected.
At the same time, I believe this creates one of the industry’s greatest opportunities: to rethink hospitality more intentionally, both for the guest and for the people creating the experience.
The greatest opportunity I see is in bringing hospitality, wellness, nature, food, creativity, and meaningful human connection together in more thoughtful ways. Exceptional hospitality can extend far beyond traditional service. It can create environments that help people slow down, reconnect with themselves, connect more deeply with others, and leave feeling genuinely restored or changed by the experience.
There is also a significant opportunity to design guest and participant experiences through a deeper understanding of nervous-system awareness, compassionate communication, purposeful programming, and human-centered operations. That includes not only considering how guests feel, but also how employees are trained, supported, communicated with, and led. Better systems, clearer expectations, stronger onboarding, and healthier leadership practices can reduce unnecessary stress while improving consistency, confidence, and the overall quality of service.
The challenge is building these meaningful, human-centered experiences while still maintaining the operational excellence, consistency, financial health, and team culture necessary to sustain them. Vision alone is not enough. The systems underneath the experience have to be strong.
I believe the most exciting future of hospitality sits at that intersection: exceptional operations and genuine human care. The organizations that learn how to do both well will not simply provide better service—they will create experiences and workplaces that people truly want to be part of.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values that matter most to me are integrity, compassion, growth, creativity, and meaningful contribution.
Integrity is foundational for me. I want my work and my choices to reflect what I genuinely believe, not simply what is expected of me. I value honesty, accountability, and doing what I say I will do, especially when other people are depending on me.
Compassion is equally important. Whether I am working with a guest, a team member, a client, or someone I love, I want people to feel respected, understood, and treated with dignity. I believe care and high standards can exist together, and that the strongest environments are built when people feel both supported and accountable.
Growth is another core value. I never want to stop learning, questioning, refining, or becoming more aware of how I affect the people and spaces around me. I believe our experiences should teach us something, and that real growth requires both reflection and a willingness to change.
Creativity is how I make meaning and imagine what could be better. It shows up in my writing, my art, the programs I create, the systems I build, and the way I approach problems. I am drawn to work that allows me to bring together ideas that may not traditionally belong in the same room.
Finally, I value meaningful contribution. I want the work I do to improve something - an experience, a system, a team, a person’s sense of possibility, or the way people care for one another. Success matters to me, but I want it to be connected to purpose. I want to build things that are useful, beautiful, sustainable, and genuinely good for the people they touch.
Her Content Hub
Articles by Adriana "Aria"
The Missing Bridge Between Hospitality and Wellness
How nervous-system-aware operations can transform hospitality performance and employee wellbeing.
I have spent more than two decades in hospitality.
I have worked in fine dining, luxury hotels, high-volume restaurants, and Five-Star environments. I have trained employees, served demanding guests, navigated impossible rushes, watched brilliant teams come together, and watched good people burn out inside systems that asked too much of them for too long.
And somewhere along the way, my work in hospitality began crossing paths with something I never expected:
The nervous system.
For years, hospitality and wellness seemed like completely different worlds.
One was about service, efficiency, standards, sales, timing, tables, ticket times, and guest expectations.
The other was about the body. Stress. Safety. Regulation. Breath. Recovery. The ways human beings respond when they are overwhelmed.
But the deeper I went into both, the more obvious something became.
You cannot separate operational performance from the nervous systems of the people performing the operation.
A restaurant is a human system. And human systems respond to stress.
We Have Normalized Dysregulation as Hospitality Culture
Anyone who has spent enough time in restaurants knows the scene.
- The printer won't stop.
- A table is angry.
- The kitchen is buried.
- Someone called out.
- A server was double-seated.
- A manager is answering three questions while trying to solve a fourth problem.
- Someone raises their voice.
- Someone else shuts down.
- Communication gets shorter and sharper.
- Mistakes multiply.
- And then we tell everyone to move faster.
Hospitality often treats this kind of environment as normal. Sometimes we even glorify it. We call it being able to handle pressure. We praise the employee who can carry an entire shift on their back. We promote the person who can tolerate the most chaos. But tolerating dysfunction and performing well are not the same thing.
When people become overloaded, their ability to communicate clearly, prioritize information, remember details, solve problems, and respond thoughtfully can deteriorate. That matters in an industry built almost entirely around thousands of small human decisions.
Better Systems Are Nervous-System Support
This is where operations and wellness begin to meet. When I talk about nervous-system-aware hospitality, I am not suggesting managers turn pre-shift into a meditation class. I am talking about something much more practical.
- Clarity.
- Predictability.
- Training.
- Communication.
- Recovery.
- Good leadership.
Think about a new server walking into a restaurant. If training consists primarily of following another employee around and hoping they absorb enough information, that employee spends their first several shifts trying to figure out what they don't know.
- Where do I find this?
- Who do I ask?
- What happens when this goes wrong?
- What am I forgetting?
- What does my manager expect from me?
That uncertainty creates unnecessary cognitive load before the employee has even taken a table.
Now imagine something different.
- They receive a clear training roadmap.
- Each shift has defined objectives.
- Their trainer knows exactly what to teach.
- There are competency checklists for the POS, menu, allergies, service sequence, and guest recovery.
- They practice difficult situations before encountering them with a real guest.
- At the end of training, both the employee and manager know whether they are actually ready for the floor.
That is an operational system. But it is also nervous-system support. The employee is not constantly asking their brain and body to navigate uncertainty. Good systems reduce unnecessary stress.
Leadership Sets the Temperature of the Room
The same principle applies to management. A leader's stress does not stay contained inside that leader. It moves. A manager who becomes frantic during a rush can unintentionally transmit that urgency across an entire floor. Communication gets harsher. Servers rush. The kitchen becomes defensive. People stop asking questions because they do not want to get snapped at. Small problems become larger problems.
The opposite is also true. A steady leader can walk into a difficult moment and begin bringing order back into the room. Not by pretending everything is fine. Not by moving slowly when the restaurant needs speed. But by creating clarity.
- What matters first?
- Who needs help?
- What can wait?
- What are the next three moves?
That is leadership. And it is regulation.
The Guest Experience Begins Before the Guest Arrives
Hospitality companies spend enormous amounts of money studying the guest experience. We think about lighting, music, menu design, table settings, service standards, reservation systems, and brand language. All of those things matter. But there is another environment the guest walks into.
The emotional environment. Guests can feel tension. They can feel when the staff is overwhelmed. They notice when communication is fractured. And they can also feel when a team is working together.
A genuinely hospitable environment is difficult to create when the people delivering that hospitality are operating in chronic survival mode. This is why employee well-being cannot simply be an HR initiative sitting somewhere outside operations. It belongs inside operations.
- Training is wellness.
- Clear expectations are wellness.
- Adequate staffing is wellness.
- Functional sidework systems are wellness.
- Respectful communication is wellness.
Giving someone a moment to recover after an intense guest interaction is wellness. A manager who can remain grounded enough to solve a problem without humiliating an employee is practicing wellness, whether they use that word or not.
Hospitality Does Not Need Less Excellence
Sometimes conversations about wellness at work are misunderstood as lowering expectations. I believe the opposite is possible. I care deeply about excellence. Standards matter. Accountability matters. Details matter.
Hospitality requires people to perform difficult work at a high level. But there is a difference between high standards and unnecessary chaos. Great systems do not remove accountability. They make accountability clearer. Great training does not make employees dependent. It makes them capable. Steady leadership does not make a restaurant less urgent. It prevents urgency from turning into panic.
The goal is not to create restaurants where nobody ever experiences stress. That would be unrealistic. The goal is to stop creating stress that does not need to exist.
There Is Another Way to Build Hospitality
For years, the industry has asked a familiar question: How do we get employees to perform better? I think there is another question worth asking.
What kind of environment allows human beings to perform well consistently?
That question changes things. It forces us to look beyond the individual employee and examine the system surrounding them.
- Were they trained?
- Do they know what is expected?
- Do managers communicate consistently?
- Are problems addressed before they become emergencies?
- Are people allowed to recover from difficult moments?
- Does the operation create clarity—or does it depend on employees constantly compensating for chaos?
The future of hospitality does not have to choose between performance and humanity. We can build restaurants that are efficient and human. We can create strong standards without fear-based leadership. We can teach people to work under pressure without making pressure the culture. We can care about the guest experience while remembering that the people creating that experience have bodies, brains, emotions, and nervous systems, too.
That is the bridge I am interested in building. Because better hospitality is not only about teaching people how to serve. It is about creating systems where people are actually able to do their best work.
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