Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

…To Go To Conferences Out Of Your Comfort Zone

1. You meet new and different people. In this age of desktop friendship, the people we interact with are generally within our existing network of friends or those that are accumulated online (who arguably are not really people with whom you interact in the traditional sense). Brush off those social skills and put yourself in a situation where you are forced to meet new people. If you can get something/anything out of meeting someone for the first time, every conversation is worth having.

2. New ideas are easier to come by. Whether from the sessions you attend or the people that you meet, going to a conference that is out of your area of expertise will both inspire ideas or give you ones that you can borrow. Call it cliche, but “thinking outside the box” doesn’t happen to easily when you are stuck in a routine.

3. It’s an opportunity to take existing ideas that you may have and bounce them off of new sounding boards. We often get too close to the things on which we work, becoming too wrapped up in the details and lose the trees for the forest. Having an objective, fresh opinion on something can often help work through roadblocks and hurdles. It may even provide new direction or point out something you may not have seen before.

4. It’s a great opportunity to get out of the office or from behind your desk, which can be a cleansing experience. Short of taking a vacation, attending a conference in which you are engaged in new concepts can revitalize the mind, be relaxing and get the creative juices flowing again. Just tell your boss you’re taking your brain to the spa.