Allowing different cities to hold the space for your projects 💗

How I leveraged being in a new city to host workshops, reach new clients, get featured on podcasts, and secured a spot to talk at a festival in Germany.

In April of this year I spent a couple of months in a surprisingly sun-kissed Brussels with my boyfriend and his family. I had ZERO professional contacts in Belgium and didn’t know the city very well (although I did invest a few evenings curating Brussels-related travel videos posted by chic Tiktok girlies).

So, I decided to use this trip as an experiment on making moves in a new city.

A few things I found helpful in making this trip memorable, productive, and of creative significance…

Define a specific theme for your trip 🌞

My theme for April was visibility. I wanted to get seen, build momentum, and create awareness of my work as a limiting belief coach. So, I filtered my potential activities through that lens and tried to choose hangout spots and events that aligned with the kinds of people I wanted to meet.

Tie your theme to specific outcomes 👯‍♀️

I tied this theme of “visibility” to specific brand-related outcomes, specifically to creating new things. This looked like:

❤️ Organising and filming my “Meet your Amplified Self” course, which I did with the help of an amazing local film producer at Anekdote Films.

❤️ Delivering “Meet your Amplified Self” workshops at local women’s clubs and coworking spaces, including Womade Brussels. I also leveraged existing events to introduce myself to other communities and plan future events with them.

❤️ Appearing on podcasts in multiple languages (click below if you’re curious to hear podcast with Courtney Johnson, which we filmed during my stay in Brussels).

Understand that every place has a specific advantage

Every city has its charms, and I think one of the great gifts of travel is that you can actively tune into the advantages of the specific place you’re staying in, whether it’s cultural activities, networking opportunities, visuals, or even how you resonate with that place and what it brings out in you.

Here are a few questions that you can ask yourself, to help clarify what this could look like for you:

❤️ What is the advantage of this city/space that you would struggle to get anywhere else? How can you build on this and leverage it for your project?

❤️ What is something that would be super difficult to do in this space and be better relegated to a later date or occasion?

❤️ How can you leverage being a totally new person in this place, in a really powerful way? What can you try that you might be embarrassed to do elsewhere?

Find new and aligned collaborators

Being in a new space also means interacting with an entirely new group of people.I see it as a great opportunity to align with talent, collaborators, and potential professional contacts that you may never have had the opportunity to meet with otherwise.

I also think that this is what keeps your creative work interesting; instead of depending on one particular scene of people, it becomes a fabric woven together by the hands of many, nurtured by their experiences and perspectives, taking on a more global dimension.

Use the deadline of departure

As someone who is constantly juggling a million projects, using my physical departure as a deadline was tremendously effective. It forced me to focus down on projects that needed to get completed while I was in Brussels, and helped me clarify which projects were simply not a priority. All in all, this was a major factor in accomplishing goals that could have dragged on for months without completion.

Let yourself experience new versions of you

Finally, being in a new place is an incredible opportunity to see new versions of yourself. You aren’t constrained by your usual routines, and you are being actively stimulated by a plethora of new experiences. Let it happen.

Let yourself be activated in new ways, and actively choose new activities and experiences that help you build character and stretch who you think you can be. Some people view travel as a way to see the world, but I see it as a way to receive new versions of yourself, by interacting openly with all that is, and allowing yourself to be moved forever by what you experience.

I hope that this post helps you to create magical experiences in new cities, and to give yourself the little nudge that drives inspiring new projects 💗