I’ve been bad this conference. Usually I try to make a point of blogging at the end of each day but a couple of things kept me from doing it. 1) Each morning was spent polishing and honing my session that I was to deliver on Tuesday – 2) Each evening was spent in great conversations with some of the best Visual Thinkers/Communicators on the planet. The days? Packed wall-to-wall with great content, people and again more conversation.

The truth is, I don’t think I’ve even begun to digest what I experienced in the past few days. As I said above, my waking hours were jammed full – and in the evening hours I haven’t been sleeping well thanks to a combination of a cold, jetlag and being completely unable to switch my brain off at night.

In the final general session, my new buddy Matt Homann from XPLANE, did a couple of exercises with the attendees. Part of it was a “Haiku” of sorts where he asked us to answer three questions – and it was at this point, right at the end that I realized something was shifting in my mindset…

The Questions:

Why am I here? (5 words)

What Have I learned? (7 words)

What am I going to do next? (5words)

My Answers:

Build a Visual Thinking Community

This is where I want to play

? ? ? ? ?

The first two answers came easy. I scribbled something down for the third but it was neither good nor correct, I can’t even remember what it was. It simply filled the space.

It’s interesting, I’ve been running events about this area of interest/expertise for a year now but it wasn’t until this week I really realized how I felt about it. Up until this week it was something I did, now I’m wracking my brain to figure how to make it something I live.

Answering that question isn’t going to be easy for me. In the short term I’ll be dragging as much of this world into what I do each day at work. But when considering future next steps, that’s a whole new question…

(I’m going to post my presentation deck and wrap, as well as a proper conference wrap-up in separate posts shortly.)