By April Terry

My work took me to Palm Springs about a week ago for a conference there, and I spent three days with about one hundred people I’ve never met before.

Of those hundred, I knew only about three of them. Suffice to say that I was thrown out of my comfort zone yet again, but I learned a lot of interesting things about people while I was there.

I learned that you have to say it first. I could go into the lobby and sit right next to someone and if I didn’t say anything, we would sit there in silence. However, if I said even the slightest comment, even just about the weather, I could easily start up a conversation with someone I never met. This fact, went both ways throughout the weekend. I found that as a I got more and more tired toward the end of the conference, I also wanted to make less effort in connecting with others.

Once, I sat across from another woman and we were the only two in the lobby. We were simply waiting for the next session to begin. I had been asked by my boss to make connections and so I forced myself to come up with a conversation starter rather than to continue sitting in silence.

“I don’t know about you, but I am officially wiped out.” I remarked casually, and she looked up and smiled, then made a response that opened us up to conversation. It was all very calculated for me, but for her, she seemed barely aware of the effort on my end. Many people probably think that that for someone like me, it’s very easy, but they would be wrong. I struggle with putting myself out there almost everytime that I do it, but I know that I always benefit from the exchange when I make that effort.

I went there with my boss, whom I have known for the entire eighteen years of my career although with my recent promotion, she just recently became my boss. She had a lot of upper level meetings and conversations that she needed to have and I knew that she didn’t need to babysit me, so I made a conscious decision to find a seat near people I didn’t know rather than near those I did. That decision opened me up to meeting a lot of new people and some of them had real stories. One lady told me of her recent divorce and how she has worked her way back from that.

Everyone has a story that they want to tell, but not everyone gets an opportunity to tell their story. I think we should be gracious and conscious enough to give others an opportunity to tell their stories. We do that by being the first to ask, and then by being open to listening. It takes effort to do both.

I could’ve taken an easier road where I went to my sessions and kept to myself, but instead I chose to find the story behind each person that I met. The effort was worth it, and as I look back at my experience, I realize that searching out the stories was what defined me in a unique way.