I went to a symposium last week hosted by Nick Gray, author of The 2-Hour Cocktail Party.

Nick’s an incredible host and invited a group of 30 people with some common interests to get together. He split everyone into smaller groups of 5-6 and provided a prompt to start the conversation.

I talked to some business founders about growth and enjoyed hearing about the different ways each of us had seen some success with a technique that the others weren’t using.

My favorite example was the founder of a swimming pool business in Austin who uses her own backyard pool to showcase their work to prospective customers.

Her pool is available to rent by the hour on Swimply (it’s like Airbnb for pools) and she encourages customers to book her pool and try it out as part of her sales funnel.

Later on, there were some beautiful thoughts and stories shared in a parenting group. It gave me some extra appreciation for my relationship with my Ava and was a good reminder to make the most of our time together.

The business conversations sparked some new ideas for me. Even days later, a combination of two concepts came to me that I don’t think would have occurred otherwise, even though neither concept was discussed at this event.

And the perspective-shift with Ava was purely driven by dedicating time to share our memories and experiences as parents. It was a heartfelt conversation and there was a lot of love in that circle.

I often go looking for the solutions to my problems, but in this case I wasn’t looking for anything. I feel grateful to have made some new friends and appreciate the benefits of having my perspective shifted through these conversations.