Remember when you were at the peak of your career, and you represented your organization at conferences? How proud did you feel wearing your name badge and representing the ideals, values and mission of your organization? The fact that the company or agency spent money to send you to a conference meant you were a valuable member of the team. You can still have that feeling of pride after you retire! You can still attend conferences in your former career area or explore new interests/hobbies. Three reasons to attend conferences are:
- Learn something new
- Interact with others who share same interest
- Travel to new location
Learn Something New
It’s always exciting to learn new concepts. Learning generates new brain cells, so it’s important for over 50 citizens to keep the brain working by learning something new.
Interact With Others Who Share Same Interest
It’s fun meeting people who share your interest. You can compare notes, compare your experiences, and you may find that you made better choices in your career than you thought. Time gives you perspective, so when you look back on your career, you can evaluate the decisions you made with a fresh set of eyes.
Travel to New Location
Traveling to a new location is exciting because you can tour the area and sightsee during your free time. You have to use your brain cells to navigate to your hotel, restaurants, and tourist attractions. For the first time, we drove by car from the Mid-Atlantic area to Orlando, Florida for a conference. We took our time and drove about 5 – 6 hours per day, so it took 3 days of driving to get to Orlando. We had so much fun seeing new sights! More importantly, we accomplished a goal of driving multiple days to reach a location. We used to fly whenever we wanted to go to a location that was more than a day’s drive. Now we have the confidence to drive multiple days to locations 1,000 miles away.
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