Transition Becomes Your New Conference Threshold

What’s your favorite room in your home?

I have two: my front porch with its porch swing and my master suite that looks out into my backyard. I cross the thresholds of those spaces daily without much thought.

We rarely think about thresholds. Yet, we spend a lot of time traversing them—both literally and figuratively. Crossing from a room that is comfortable and familiar into one that feels uncertain and unpredictable, can be frightening and disconcerting. As you embark on a new vision of conference renovation and reform, you may feel that you are crossing from a comfortable, familiar space to one that is unknown and unsettling. Instead, reframe your thinking about your improvement process as the gateway and threshold to bigger and better opportunities for your customers and your organization.

Crossing Life’s Thresholds

A threshold is a doorway, gate, entrance, exit, foyer, or portal. It can be the start to a new beginning. It is also be defined as the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested.

As teenagers most of us celebrated our 15th birthday at the department of vehicles applying for our learner’s permit. Young adults often cross the threshold of a new chapter in their life when they move out of their parents’ home to attend college, join the military or take a job in a faraway city. Some of us have walked across a church vestibule to attend a life-celebration of a loved one that just crossed the threshold from life to eternity.

Every one of us has experienced some type of transition in our life. We moved from the way we were accustomed to doing something to a new way of thinking, feeling, acting and being. Some of those movements were full of fear and sadness. Some packed with anticipation, excitement and curiosity.

Conference Improvement As Your Threshold To New Growth

You and your conference planning team have adopted a new vision to reform and renovate your event. You’ve decided to step across the worn-out edge of predictable averageness and into your deep desire to help your conference customers thrive, lead, learn and create community.

Your goal is to help your participants find their voice, rediscover their purpose, clarify their contributions, develop a robust life-long learning mindset, and thrive embedded within their tribes of likeminded peers.

Crossing from a room that is comfortable and familiar into one that feels uncertain and unpredictable, can be terrifying. Instead of seeing your conference reimagining as an obstacle, consider it the portal to a fountain of inspiration. Aim for your new reforms to stir up feelings of empowerment, excitement and growth for your customers and your planning team.

At some moment in this transition, the ending becomes a beginning. What was a deeply rooted way of planning and implementing conferences falls away.

Your conference participants arrive and encounter a fresh, newly reinvigorated experience. At this moment, the transition shifts toward being a threshold. A boundary has been crossed.

Now your conference is more about building up than tearing down.

What holds us back from crossing a new threshold? Where, when and why did we develop a fear for new experiences?