This past week, I participated in the Agile For All Humanizing Work Advanced Learning event. Essentially, this event is designed to help Agile For All alumni grow further along with their Agile mindset and skills. Just as previous years, I found myself standing at the close of this event with all sorts of feelings that deserve to be acknowledged:
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- Learning: I’m lucky. When I’m done presenting, I don’t need to take a break and recover. So when I wasn’t giving a session, I attended someone else’s session. I learned content, I learned tips on delivery, I learned about my teammates, etc!
- Grateful: Here I am in this amazing location of Beaver Creek surrounded by people that have formed new bonds and insights over the last several days. Not everyone gets to say that they love what they do for work. I do! Again, I couldn’t be more grateful to be able to continue to say that 🙂
- Together: Given that we live in various locations and are not together often, I appreciate events that facilitate Agile For All coming together. Time together to talk, laugh…simply engage is so important.
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- Pride: This was an amazing event for attendees and facilitators. I am proud to be a part of providing this experience. I am proud to have these colleagues. And I am proud that I am helping to make a difference.
- Reconnecting: One of my former colleagues attends this event and just getting to see him was wonderful. Add that to getting to spend some time talking and learning, well, the memories just come flooding back.
- Experimenting: I got to experiment with a couple of new sessions ideas with new concepts to add to our courses, specifically the Leading Amazing Teams course.
- Ideas: Not everything ran smoothly, so I have ideas of what we should evolve for next year. Also, I had a few moments of “what if we do this next year” brand new ideas. I’m looking forward to our retro!
- Unexpected Moments: After being appreciatively kicked out of an event (fear factor food challenge was
about to happen), I sat down at a table. One of the attendees shared a story about how much of an impact I had made by reaching out to her at a previous conference. I found myself tearing up. I was grateful for her appreciation, I was thrilled that I was making a difference and mostly, that I am paying it forward. This made my week!
I’m already looking forward to next year!
What conferences do you enjoy/recommend?