Real life conversations
This week I travelled from my home in Cambridge to Newcastle two days before the conference I was attending. The event is on Tuesday, why go on Sunday? Because lots of my friends go on Sunday. It gives us time to have dinner, drinks, and for early birds, breakfast, before the official opportunities for socialising kick in.
You might think our decision to take an extra day out and pay for an additional night in a hotel when we can all meet on Zoom or Teams is unnecessary. But something that came up in conversation a lot was how valuable being able to chat without agenda is.
When you are on Zoom or Teams, you feel you need to stick to a topic. It’s hard to have spontaneous conversations.
We would meet people we knew walking down the street, or outside a bar and have a chat. We’d find ourselves meeting new people who came along with other people we knew. We’d discover people didn’t know each other who we thought did know each other so we introduced them.
“Is anyone sitting here?”
“You are.”
Conversations had space to evolve.
They could be picked up again the next day when we saw each other somewhere else.
We chatted about work, how people were getting on with projects from running online summits to writing books, but also about drumming, films, pets, kids, relationships, and holidays.
Talking to a friend today, they said you need to do things that feed your soul.
Video conferencing is incredibly useful. I couldn’t run my business without it. But getting out of my house and being in a room with people without any pressure to perform is joyous.
