Last week I was at a company related dinner party event with a bunch a work folks and consulting folks. Being an introvert I am often out of place in dinner events and struggle to participate in conversations. Also, I am often finding the first excuse to run out of there. Knowing all this about me, I decided that I will do none of those things this time, even though it was completely out of my comfort zone - and also stopping fidgeting with my phones in order to escape from the conversations. Not an easy task.
I am known to bring dinner conversations or any conversation at all back to my favorite topics - work and human change. I also vowed to myself that I will not talk about work this time and stay away from steering the topics back to my comfort zones. And this did help.
When I gave up on my wants and dinner I found that I just went with the flow. Each of the conversation with different people is wherever they wanted to take it. And as part of that journey I realized that behind the facade the humans brought to the party there was so much more in them. Hidden skills and talent. Desires. Fulfilled and unfulfilled. Dreams - met and unmet. Things that they enjoyed doing. Partnership and pain. The list goes on.
And that is what transpired. I kept my conversations to a minimum. Listened to others - an extraordinarily hard endeavour and absorbed the stream of stories that spoke wonders of who we are - humans. Just that.
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