What If the Thing You're Dreading Is Worth It?
If reframing conferences can help me, maybe this can help you
For years, I avoided conferences. The small talk, the pitch parade, the social exhaustion of spending eight hours performing mild interest in people you’ll never see again. Hard pass.
Then I started speaking: about my book, about behavioral psychology, about the stuff I actually care about. Suddenly, not going to conferences felt like I was limiting myself.
So I had a choice. Keep dreading them, or figure out a way to actually want to be there.
I chose the reframe.
Instead of going to network, I went to joke around. To be myself. To be the slightly weird conversation people don’t usually get at these things.
It changed everything about how I showed up. I stopped performing. Stopped steering every conversation toward what we both do for a living. Started being more myself — a little sarcastic, genuinely curious, completely uninterested in whoever’s umpteenth pitch I was about to receive. I’d bring up whatever was actually on my mind, even if it wasn’t exactly conference-appropriate. (I mentioned enshittification at a tech event recently. After a beat, most of the group leaned in.)
Some people are too locked into what they came to extract. No amount of coaxing gets them off-script, and that’s useful to know fast: it makes the exit easy and guilt-free. But the ones who can relax into a real conversation? Those are the ones worth finding. Sometimes it’s just a good talk. Sometimes there’s a way to actually work together that makes sense for both sides, built on something real rather than a cold pitch.
Did this magically turn conferences into my favorite thing? Definitely not. But they’re no longer something I avoid, and that’s a meaningful shift.
Which is really the point here, because this isn’t just about conferences.
Most of us have something in our life we’ve quietly written off: an obligation we phone in, a situation we avoid to our detriment rather than flipping it to the positive.
The reframe isn’t about pretending you love it. It’s about asking: how can I make this fun for myself?
For me, it was finding a real connection in a room full of transactions. The conference didn’t change. I just stopped going in with the wrong goal.
So I’ll ask you: what’s something you’ve been treating as an obligation that might actually be an opportunity?