希尔顿全球行业关系总监金·纳波利塔诺做客《Dare to Interrupt》播客第7季第9集，畅谈成长与界限

Season 7, Episode 9

Guest: Kim Napolitano, Executive Director, Global Industry Relations, Hilton  

Kim Napolitano, executive director of global industry relations at Hilton, joins host Courtney Stanley for a conversation about growth, boundaries and the relationships that shape us. 

Together, they explore ways to stay grounded in stressful moments, the value of getting comfortable with discomfort, and why curiosity can open the door to meaningful growth.

Listen Now:

Podcast sponsored by Visit Atlantic City.

Listen to more Dare to Interrupt podcasts: MeetingsToday.com/Dare-to-Interrupt.

Meet Our Guest:

Kim Napolitano is the executive director of global industry relations at Hilton, where she leads the company’s global engagement strategy with organizations shaping the meetings, events and business travel industries. 

In this role, she ensures that Hilton actively contributes to industry learning, collaboration and advocacy while strengthening strategic partnerships across the global travel ecosystem. 

With more than 30 years of hospitality experience, most of which has been in leading high-performing commercial teams, Kim brings a strong track record of driving growth, building strategic partnerships and delivering results. She is known for developing talent, elevating team performance and aligning commercial strategy to evolving market opportunities. 

A trusted industry voice, Kim frequently speaks at global conferences and serves in leadership roles across several industry organizations. She is passionate about connecting partners, advancing thoughtful dialogue and shaping the future of the meetings, events and travel industry.

Connect With Kim:

LinkedIn
Instagram: @kim_at_hilton
Website

About Our Host:

Courtney Stanley believes that transforming past experiences into impactful conversations through raw, authentic storytelling challenges the status quo, connects people from all walks of life and results in great change for the world.

Courtney is the youngest member to have ever been elected to Meeting Professionals International’s (MPI) International Board of Directors.

She is the recipient of Smart Meetings’ Entrepreneur Award, MeetingsNet’s Changemaker Award, the Association for Women in Events (AWE) Disruptor Award, the MPI Chairman’s Award and MPI RISE Award.

She was also named Collaborate and Connect Magazine’s 40 under 40 and a Meetings Today Trendsetter.

Recognized as one of the event industry’s most impactful change-makers, Courtney serves on the Events Industry Sexual Harassment Task Force, AWE’s Board of Directors, MPI’s Women’s Advisory Board, is a Meetings Mean Business Ambassador and is the co-founder of the award-winning movement, #MeetingsToo.

Courtney was named as a 2020 Meetings Trendsetter by Meetings Today.

Connect With Courtney:

Website
LinkedIn
Instagram: @courtneyonstage
Twitter: @courtneyonstage
Facebook

Transcript:

Editor's note: The following transcription was facilitated by AI and proofed by our editors. Although it is fairly accurate, there inevitably will be some mistakes, so please consider that when reading. Thank you.

Courtney Stanley

This episode is sponsored by Visit Atlantic City.

Welcome back to Dare to Interrupt, the podcast where we have honest conversations about adversity, growth, and what it really takes to lead in today’s world. I’m your host, Courtney Stanley.

Today, I’m joined by Kim Napolitano, executive director of global industry relations at Hilton and a respected leader with more than 30 years of experience in the hospitality industry.

In this conversation, we get to know the woman behind the title and explore what it really takes to grow, lead and embrace change throughout a long and evolving career. We talk about setting boundaries, finding practices that help us stay grounded in stressful moments, and why staying curious and becoming comfortable with discomfort can be such a powerful part of our growth. We also talk about relationships, how they can evolve as we grow, and what it looks like to approach old relationships while still making room for new chapters.

If you’re experiencing growth, managing stress or finding yourself in a season of change, this conversation is for you. Let’s dive in.

Hey, Kim, welcome to the show. What was the best part of your summer?

Kim Napolitano

Oh, just being able to reconnect with family and friends. And it’s that moment where I feel like I can exhale. I’m not gonna lie, I had six trips in August for business, which were all great, magical. But in between those moments, especially in June and July, where you could just settle in and read a good book...

I feel like grounding myself is something that I love to be able to do. So, when I’m not traveling, I’m home and I feel like this is my safe space, like my space where I can reconnect with who I am. So, that was a very delicious moment for me over the summertime.

Courtney Stanley

No, that sounds very yummy. And I do appreciate that your home is your safe space and that you have practices that ground you and just keep you feeling centered and balanced when you’re home. I forgot that you were traveling for six weeks straight, so welcome home. I know you had a very busy month.

Are there certain things, certain practices that you apply, when you are on the road that much and you’re not in your safe space at home that help to keep you grounded?

Kim Napolitano

Yeah, there are a couple of things that I do, Courtney. One is I’ll meditate. I’m a big fan of meditation. And I think that many of us have either been around people or we may be those people are like, absolutely not.

But I learned the art of meditation through an energetic course that I’d taken. And I just feel like it grounds me, it helps connect me. And I had the good fortune of leading that type of meditation in two events in August. So, it was a lot of fun to be able to bring the woo into the event space and to open people up to a different perspective.

But yeah, that’s definitely one of the things, is just finding some time to meditate, sleep. Honestly, I got to tell you, that is probably one of the biggest things that maybe back in the day I was up late and having a good time and up early. I have found if I do not get a decent amount of sleep that’s needed for me, because I know we all have different amounts of time that we need, it’s very hard the next day. So, I found prioritizing my sleep is not [drinking] alcohol. And for me, that suits my life decisions better. But it’s crazy. I’m like, why do you care?

Courtney Stanley

Yeah, and I love what you said: you do, you boo. If we could be surrounded by just a bevy of our board of directors, our personal board of directors and the closest, nearest, dearest in our hearts who would say that more often, I just think the ripple effect would just be incredible about how people would be elevating themselves to a level that they never thought possible.

Kim Napolitano

Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree.

Courtney Stanley

And Kim, you said something before that I want to come back to. You talked about how you’re very much a practitioner or you practice meditation. You have created experiences for others to practice meditation. You also mentioned that you studied energy. Tell me more about that. What inspired you to get into this type of work and how has it changed your life?

Kim Napolitano

Well, that’s a whole ’nother TED Talk, but I’m happy to do a surface conversation on this because it’s so near and dear to my heart. I’ve been on this journey since 2019 and I knew that…have you ever felt, Courtney, that there’s something bigger out there for you?

Courtney Stanley

Absolutely, yeah.

Kim Napolitano

Like you just can’t put your finger on it and you’re like, no matter what, like what is it? And so I had a conversation with a coach. And her, like the first conversation we had, she goes, “Well, why are you seeking my support and service?”

And I told her, I said, “You know, Jane, I just, I feel like there’s something out there and I cannot put my finger on it, but I feel like there’s something bigger and I just feel lost and I’m not sure what it is. I have a wonderful husband, a great marriage. We live in a…”

[Portion unavailable in the supplied excerpts.]

“…one of my coaching calls, she recognized a pattern that I was in and she said, ‘Would you be open to a meditation?’ Because I was not able to articulate what I was feeling in that moment in time, but reflecting back on it, I was in a state of freeze and fawn. So, if you fight, flight, freeze, fawn, I was stuck between freezing and fawning.

So, I said, ‘Yes, I would love to go on this meditation.’ And she brought me into this moment because I was ready to do anything, Courtney, honestly. It was like, I’ll stand upside down. You tell me what I need to do.

And so, she led the meditation for me and I found it so cathartic. And what I did not realize in that moment in time, how impactful that one experience would be and how it opened doors to then shift into learning about the wisdom teachings from the Kiro Indians who reside in the High Ande Mountains, and they are direct descendants of the Incas.

[Portion unavailable in the supplied excerpts.]

…emotions and the stories we attach to the trauma. So, if we can detach that energy to the situation, because we never want to act like the situation never happened, it happened. And we need to honor that. And however you want to honor that.

What we are saying, though, is how do we remove the limiting beliefs and the energy that may be holding us back instead of serving us our highest good. So, it’s about honoring and acknowledging the situation while allowing us to move forward in that thoughtful way and not be held back from that trauma.

Courtney Stanley

This is so fascinating. I haven’t heard of this before, so this is new to me and this makes me really curious to dig into it a little bit more. If somebody else is listening and they also feel that this is something that they’re curious about, how do people start to try decoupling?

Kim Napolitano

Yeah, you can go on the Four Winds Society, their website. That is where I learned how to do this. They have a list of practitioners who are available to be of support to you, give you that assistance. If they wanna reach out to me directly, I’m more than happy to have a conversation, talk a little bit more about it.

It’s just such a beautiful gift that we can give ourselves that when we find ourselves what I would call as triggered, like there’s something that has us now dealing with our survival mechanism. So, we know we’re coming from a place of defense, we’re trying to protect ourselves. If we can just pull back and just kind of, I say, one hand on your heart and one hand on your second chakra, which is about two inches below your belly button. That’s really what we’re trying to reconnect these two chakra centers. So, your place of relationship and your place of love, kind of reconnecting the two. But anyone who’s trained in this can walk you through this process.

Courtney Stanley

How did all of this information, this knowledge, these practices, how has this made an impact on the way that you lead, whether it’s at home or it’s at work or anywhere?

Kim Napolitano

It has caused me to become more aware, and I call it conscious leadership. So, after I went down the rabbit hole of energetic medicine, I then went down the rabbit hole of ontological coaching, which is the coaching of beingness. And that at the same time was running parallel about a deep dig on what exactly is conscious leadership and how do we bring that forth into the workplace.

And so, by kind of reconnecting in with myself, I recognize that there is an opportunity to help those I’m leading in this moment in time to really be a better version of themselves. Because what I was finding is people were just operating from the amygdala, the lizard brain. I call her a lily lizard. She’s there squawking, “Oh, look, there’s a bear right behind you.” And I’m like, “No, no, that’s just Q3 coming to an end.”

So, it’s how do we take the narrative that’s sitting in the back of our brain because we’re all operating from a central lens of fear, and whatever that fear is, we’ve all had a moment in our life and you could have been pushed in the stroller by your mother walking in the park, having a grand old time, but you heard someone talk to your mom or heard a conversation in passing that could have triggered some sort of sense of fear.

And so, that is subconsciously running, it’s running in the back of your mind. So, as you are receiving information, Courtney, as you’re having conversations with people, everything you are hearing is being filtered through that lens sphere.

And this is how when people have conversations, and you may get in the, you may be the third person that’s brought into it. And you know, you’re saying, “No, I said the sky is blue.” And I’m saying, “No, she said the sky is pink.” So, the third person is trying to figure it out. It’s because I, as the recipient of the conversation, was processing through my lens here.

So, that’s why reaction, it’s so good to take a breath. That’d be one of my recommendations for our listeners is if you find that your brain is going a thousand miles a minute, it’s okay to just say, “Can we just pause this conversation? I think I’m hearing one thing, but I want to go back. When I heard you say this, did I understand that correctly?”

And another tip I have is if you feel like all of a sudden you’re very activated, like you can hear the voice in your head talking, I encourage you to do box breathing. And this is where you’re coming in for either a count of four, seven or eight. You pick the number, but it’s in through the nose, hold out through the nose or mouth, whichever you’re comfortable with, and then hold for the same count. So, it literally is a box breathing exercise.

And some people may say, “Well, that sounds very woo woo, Kim.” And I just wanted to spell the myth of the woo. Like, it’s okay to do a lot of these things and you can do it in the boardroom and no one will know that you’re doing this.

And I don’t know if you know this or if you’re aware of this, Courtney, but the Navy Seals are the people who created box breathing.

Courtney Stanley

Wow.

Kim Napolitano

And so before they go into a very high stakes, very intense mission, they will, before they’re deployed and whichever, whether it’s a helicopter or wherever, however they’re getting to where they need to go, you will see them like maybe three minutes out, start doing the box breathing ’cause they’re trying to regulate their heart rate. They’re trying to reconnect in. So that way they’re not in the back of the brain with the lizard brain. They’re at the executive functioning portion of the brain because of the magnitude and the scope of what they do, they have to be laser focused present.

[Portion unavailable in the supplied excerpts.]

Kim Napolitano

…wanna stay in that level as we’re working up. So, some people will just be a natural, like you just, you know, stop talking as much as you used to, or, you know, we’re, oh, we’re so busy. We’ve all seen it. It’s not a negative. It’s just an understanding that friendships truly are designed for seasons of life. And some of those seasons are very long, and some can be as short as a plane trip.

Courtney Stanley

Have you ever had any friendships that were on the 40th floor, who approached you about spending less time on that floor with you?

Kim Napolitano

Yeah. And then we have the conversation about, well, what do you want to do about it? What are you interested in learning? But what action will you take to move up, to get to the elevator? So, you can press the up button. Sometimes, right?

I liken it to this. I’ve heard James Clear, who speaks about the atomic habits and maybe one of the first things you do, you know, listen, I want to work out and I want to drop 30 pounds and I want to have defined arm muscles, like whatever it is. But what prevents us from actually doing that? So, maybe the first step isn’t running out and getting a gym membership. Maybe the first step is actually going in your closet and putting the workout clothes on and just putting them on. And then day two, you put them on and then maybe you say, “I’m going to go for a walk around the block.” And then like baby steps, right?

Instead of saying, “Well, by next week I will have shed 30 pounds.” Well, unless you’re very ill, there’s something not right with that. It’s impossible. So, it’s repetition that will make the difference. So, I share all of this because it takes action. And the question is, what’s inspiring them to take action?

So, I often like to ask; I love this conversation, “What’s inspiring you to say this?” Because if they don’t have their due north, if they don’t have their purpose defined, it’s only going to last to when they go to the elevator, they push the button, but they never get on the elevator. Well, I bought all the books, right? Or I downloaded the podcast, but did you listen to the podcast? Did you take notes when you were listening to the podcast? Are you taking one practice away from it? Or did you actually read the books?

So, it’s interesting how when people say they want change, the question is, are they motivated to make the change? And if they are, then what’s that motivation so they never lose sight of that. And then continuing to give pathways when they’re ready. But the minute they start saying no to the pathways, then that’s fine. Just release them. Hey, that’s fine. You’re never going to hear me preach or harp on someone. Did you take it? Great. Did you not? Okay, that’s fine. When you’re ready, that path is there.

Courtney Stanley

Yeah, I really appreciate what your coach said about visiting that 40th floor, because I do find that it is so easy to go to the extreme of I’m on the 70th floor, I know that I want to, you know, engage with people who are at the same energetic level or higher frequency than I am here so that I continue to grow and continue to evolve. And it is easy to leave that 40th floor behind completely and just say, they don’t belong in my life anymore because they’re not at my level. And so, I appreciate that your coach said, “What would you like to pursue? You know, how can I support you?” I think it just feels more human rather than purely judgmental.

Kim Napolitano

To be fair, there are times when we remain on the 40th floor.

Courtney Stanley

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kim Napolitano

We’ve all been on the 40th floor. Some of us, like none of us are perfect. So, it’s, I would never want my conversation here to be construed with you no longer talk to the people you feel are not, you know, understand by personal level. Like please, no, that is not it.

Your job is to exude love. It is to push love to the world, to help people feel valued, seen, heard, respected and appreciated. And the question is, what are you doing to maintain that level of presence? What are you doing to maintain that high vibrational level? Because it is a beacon for all energies to connect into. So, you’re going to have a variety of people come up wanting to connect, and that’s a beautiful gift. And you just continue to radiate the love.

It’s just to me, that analogy of the elevator for me is a reminder of don’t play the role of the victim.

Courtney Stanley

Yeah.

Kim Napolitano

Oh, I played such a good victim throughout my life. Like, please, the storylines are amazing. But I don’t want to be a victim. I never wanted to be a perpetrator. I really want to be the narrator, the true author of my story. And with that means making choice and living a life through choice and not through the effect of others.

Courtney Stanley

That’s beautifully said, Kim. That’s really beautifully said. And I actually feel like this is such a good point in the conversation where I feel like we have talked about so much and we have not gone through any of the questions that I had planned, which is perfect. This is my favorite way to have an interview because I feel like we really explored topics that I just find very fascinating and also meaningful.

So, I want to, first of all, thank you, Kim, for just allowing me to explore different areas of our conversation today. But I also want to ask you, you know, in everything that we talked about, if you could leave the audience with one piece of advice as they’re digesting all of this information, what would be something that you would want them to take away?

Kim Napolitano

It’s two things. It’s remain curious, lean into being a life learner, and be comfortable with the uncomfortable because growth does not happen in the comfortable space.

And I liken us all to diamonds. And a diamond is formed through thousands of years of pressure put on the coal. And so, if we liken ourselves to that, if we are saying, “Well, why didn’t I get the job?” Or, “Why didn’t I do, you know, why am I not here?” Or, you know, “She always gets,” or, “He always gets,” right? Like we all hear those conversations in the storyline and we’ve been the author of those conversations many a times, too. So, calling us, you know, calling a spade a spade here, we’ve got to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

And that may be walking up to someone you admire in the industry. “And Courtney, I loved your podcast and I, you know, I’m curious, how did you…” Just be bold and ask the question. Because those of us who are trying to grow and evolve, we welcome people asking us; we want to tell our stories. We’re not just going to be on the street corner saying, “Hear me, hear me,” right? You know, we’re all here. We’re here to be a light and a beacon.

So, those would be my two recommendations, is just be curious and be comfortable with the uncomfortable.

Courtney Stanley

I think those are perfect words to conclude the conversation with. And Kim, I just want to thank you so much for your energy today and for everything that you shared and your lessons learned and the teachings that you have gained so much knowledge within and you’ve really shared so much with our audience today. So, thank you for being here.

Kim Napolitano

My absolute pleasure. And thank you for inviting me to the table for this conversation. I’ve enjoyed it.

Courtney Stanley

Me, too. This is fun. This is really fun.

And audience, of course, we always thank you for tuning in. Share what you learned from this episode with us on social media by following @meetingstoday and @courtneyonstage. And be sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to Dare to Interrupt on any major podcast platform.

Embrace discomfort, lean into growth, and keep daring to interrupt, my friends. Until next time.