Conferenced-Out

Last year was quite a year for me in terms of conferences and presentations. In 2017, I attended SEVEN conferences (local, state, regional, and national) and delivered NINE different CI-related presentations, in addition to co-leading a full-day CI in-service for a school in my district. All I can say is that as a result of all that, I am completely conferenced-out at the moment.

On the one hand, this was a rather easy conclusion for me to arrive at, considering the conference schedule which I gave myself last year. On the other hand, however, I absolutely LOVE presenting. Whenever I present, I feel like I come alive. While I know that many people absolutely dread public speaking, communicating to an audience comes very natural to me. It is very easy for me to read an audience, so connecting with a crowd when speaking in public is very natural for me. When I took a "match-your-personality-to-a-job" battery test in high school, my three top job matches were 1) company spokesperson  2) politician and  3) religious leader (like as in a cult?), since all of those positions involve public speaking. I feel so incredibly comfortable when speaking to crowds. In fact, in many ways I am more at ease talking to a large audience (or communicating via this blog) than I do when talking one-on-one individually to someone. 

It is easy to see why attending conferences has its draw for me if I get the chance to present at them. However, I feel like I need to draw some boundaries for myself in order to take a break from it all for now. So this year, my goal is to take some time off from attending conferences and presenting. Outside of my CI-Italy tour with the Vergilian Society this summer, I am going to try to keep a low profile for the year when it comes to conferences and presentations in order to recharge my "conference batteries."

I am looking forward to this respite, but I cannot wait until 2019 to start back up again!