You can’t learn if you don’t show up!
Have you attended any conferences or networking events this year? Which ones are on your must-attend list for next year? I hope you have many because the value is both monetary and intangible.
Listen to this short, new 7-minute episode and hear why you want to block off time for learning.
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– You can’t learn if you don’t show up. As you’re looking into 2022, what conferences have you put on your calendar as a must-attend? What local events through local associations like NACE and ILEA and local wedding associations and WIPA and all of the great associations out there, what local ones, what national ones through WeddingPro Wedding MBA, and all the industry specific ones, which ones have you said, I absolutely have to go to? I hope it’s some, because you can’t learn if you don’t show up. I go to speaker conferences and most of the time, I don’t even look at the agenda until I’m on my way, because I know I’m going to learn something. And more importantly, I’m going to meet someone and someone unexpected, someone at a meal, someone sitting next to me in a session, someone I’m holding the door for. And all of a sudden we ended up sitting together and talking, or somebody says, Hey, you know, can I ask you a question? Or, you know, what are your thoughts on this? And next thing you know, we have a connection and someone that I can reach out to and they can reach out to. Those are the best parts.
But they only happen if you show up. I’ve been doing virtual presentations since 2007. I started doing webinars then when I was VP of Sales at The Knot. In 2007, we had to explain to people what webinars were. They didn’t know what they were. They didn’t know how to tune in. And now you fast forward to 15 years later, and it’s a very commonplace thing. Certainly after last year, people are so used to Zoom calls and that’s great. But as soon as it turns off, it’s done, the hallway doesn’t happen. I was at Wedding MBA not that long ago and I love the hallway conversations. I love the, “Hey Alan, can I ask you a question?” or someone coming up to my booth and asking a question that they didn’t ask in a session or didn’t want to ask or didn’t think to ask. And now, “Can I ask you a question?” And that type of just serendipitous relationship gets started that way. So many people I’ve met that way. Whether or not they’ve ever done business with me personally is not the issue. It’s that interaction is powerful, but you have to show up.
Now, do I learn in sessions at conferences? And will you learn? Absolutely, if you walk in with an open mind. I once heard an expression that said “Education’s purpose is to turn an empty mind into an open one.” And that’s the thing is if you’re open to a possibility that there’s another way to think other than the way that you think, you can learn something. If you’re only looking for confirmation, that what you know is true, you’re not going to learn anything. I think it was Henry Ford that said, “Whether you think you can, “or whether you think you cannot, you’re right.” If you think you can’t learn anything at a conference, you shouldn’t even go because you’re right, you can’t, because you’re going with the wrong attitude. I go with the attitude that I need one idea, one connection, one thing to make this entire trip worthwhile. And I always get more than that. But I rarely go with an agenda of, “I need to learn this”, whatever this is, because if I needed to learn it, I could have learned it already. I could have reached out to someone, taken a class, watched a video or something to learn something if I knew what I needed already. It’s what you learn when you don’t know what you need. It’s those, wow, oh my gosh, yeah. I actually had that happen.
I was at the Catersource Conference in July down in Miami. And there was a woman sitting in the front row of one of my sessions and I said something and she out loud was like, “Yes!” I was like, “Oh, you just got your nugget didn’t you?” You got the one nugget you needed to make this worthwhile. And she’s like, “Oh, I got more than one”, but that, well that’s, that’s why that’s it, that’s it. But you have to be there. So what conferences have you skipped? Obviously the last couple of years, there’s some of them didn’t happen. Some of them, maybe it wasn’t the right time to go. What is it that you are going to do to commit to the learning, commit to the education? Whether you’ve been in business for five weeks, five months, five years or 15 or 25 years, you can learn something IF you show up. You don’t have to do them all. I know that can be time consuming and money consuming. I know people that go to just tons of different conferences because of that, “I need only one” attitude.
Which ones are you going to go to? Which ones are you going to commit to put on your calendar, not take business on those days specifically crossed off? That’s what I do with my speaker conferences, crossed off. They’re are the crossed off in pencil that if I get business, I might take it on those days, and they are crossed off in marker, which is, I am not taking any business on those days. I’m going to this event, especially in 2022, when I’ve missed two years now worth of those conferences. So which ones? And if you don’t know what they are, reach out to your industry friends, reach out online and ask, reach out to me and ask me which conferences do I think that you might want to attend based upon where you are in your business, what it is that you might be able to accomplish with that and gain from investing your time and money? Yeah, it’s an investment in time and money, but for me, education pays off time and time again, because you never know when you’ll need that thing that you got at that conference. And it’s like, yeah, that was worth it.
So, whether it’s a big group, small group, whether you decide to have a mastermind day with me and a few of your friends, or you go to Wedding MBA, WeddingPro, or any bigger event, commit to doing something to invest in yourself because you need to invest in yourself the way you want your customers to invest in you. And that means invest heavily in you, so they will invest heavily with you. Let me know how I can help.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
- Apple Podcast:
- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
- Pandora:
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