New experiences help us to grow as individuals. Whether that be eating new foods, visiting a new place near home or overseas or joining a class to learn a new skills, you will expand your horizons and be more open to trying more new experiences. New experiences can also help us to live more happily and successfully in the world around us.
What to try?
New experiences do not have to be expensive or take a lot of your time. If you’re at a restaurant that serves a dish you’ve not eaten before, try it. You may just have found your perfect dish and want to experiment with other dishes rather than sticking with the food you know you like. Taking small risks like this successfully will make you more confident to take on bigger challenges you would not have previously considered.
Meet new people
Today, we live in a world where social media platforms make us paradoxically more anti-social. Get out and meet new people in real life. Develop rapport and deepen conversations with people you meet by identifying common interests and similarities between the two of you.
Meeting new people improves our communication skills which helps us to develop stronger relationships both at home, at work and in social settings. New experiences will give you a broad base of topics on which you can talk, rather than repeating the same stories from the past.
Meeting people where you don’t have a shared language can be a challenge, but the results can be wonderful as you communicate through facial expression, body language and gestures. Try it when haggling in the markets of Marrakesh and you’ll be as delighted at your conversation with the vendor as you are with your purchase.
Go Travelling
People who have traveled and have a lot of new experiences are typically much easier to have an exciting conversation with as they can relate to more of the things you enjoy or have done. You don’t need to take a long-haul trip to have exciting experiences to share, travelling within a local region in your free times makes you appear to be more interesting, which helps attract people into your life.
Break with your usual routines in your free time. Think about trying somewhere new, the experience might just help you build rapport with someone who might change your life.
Break through your comfort zone
Remember that all great ideas were inspired from experiencing something, so if you want to improve your creativity try a new experience. Break through your comfort zone, whether that be walking into a foreign language class on your own, or to go sky-diving from 13,000 feet. Once you have broken through your comfort zone limits, you’ll be open to try other things you may not have previously considered. You may also find that having this new broader perspective, means that you’re calmer around problems and issues and able to comfortably manage what you may have been too afraid to do in the past.
What have you got to lose?
There is no guarantee that your new experiences, whether travelling or meeting new people locally, will impact on your life in a significant way, but what do you have to lose? At least if you try these new experiences, you’re lessening the chance for your life stagnating in your previous week-in, week-out routines. At least trying new experiences will increase your self-confidence.
Why not set yourself a challenge of setting a goal to try a new experience, whether it’s one new thing a month, a week or even each day.
