This episode is the second half of Andy Hillman and Adam Teterus’s discussion on the annual Coworking Europe Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.  They talked about how to bring the experiences from the conference back home to their own community.

Unconferences

At the conference there were a lot of speculative unconference questions.  These unconference questions tell you what people care about. Unconferences allow people to share in a group of people that understand what they are talking about.  Others can offer solutions or relate to what you are saying. This sharing can foster good ideas. It also creates a sense of not being alone.

The Why of Coworking

People go looking for new ideas that they can implement and often forget to look for some type of reaffirmation.  It is important to remember why you got into coworking in the first place. It is easy to lose track of the why. However, the why should never be sacrifice for something else because it is the most important driving factor of everything you do.

Make sure you can keep doing what you do.  Sacrificing other elements of your quality of life means that it will lower your happiness.  When you start to make tradeoffs for the things that are important and create value to you, you start to scramble.

Bringing it Back Home

Conversations from conferences are going to influence the conversations you have with partners, team members, and community members back home.  The topics discussed are usually all actionable.

Think about how you describe coworking to people who are not already a part of the industry.  It is hard to describe coworking — a word that many people have not heard of. Reflect on what you say to them and why you choose to describe coworking in this way.  Usually, it is not that people do not understand coworking, but that it is not being described well.