Revitalize Meaningful Connections in Your Personal and Professional Life

Have you ever asked yourself why you choose every day to spend less time interacting with people in person and more time sending and receiving brief digital messages while sitting alone behind a pixilated screen? As we furiously type into our keypads in search of the Holy Grail – an empty inbox – our happiness and well-being dissipates.

Is all the time that you spend on your laptop or smartphone crowding out any time to reflect on your life and its direction? Are you finding it difficult to focus on your larger life goals due to the vast amounts of time you spend online? Do you reminisce over the days when you actually spent time with family and friends during which you were focused on each other, rather than being “alone together” in the same room while each person taps onto a keypad instead of into the needs and motivations of the others?

GLI President Anthony Silard once asked 300 people at a leadership conference to share what they had done over the previous month that had most contributed to their happiness. There were about thirty responses—ranging from “spending time with my daughter” and “going dancing” to “going for a long hike in the mountains”—not one of which involved time spent online. What brings happiness to your life? Are you finding the time for it, or letting your life pass you by as you manically try to return every email and text?

Do you check your email account at 5:45 pm before you leave the office, and then instead of leaving at 6 as you planned, end up staying until 7 or 8 pm? This practice has become so commonplace in our society that we should create a verb for it. Your life doesn’t have to be ruled by this dynamic any longer.

We frequently check emails, cell-phone or Facebook messages for three primary reasons:

1) We fear something is wrong, someone is angry at us, or that we have in some way messed up, and we better keep our pulse on the stream of interaction at our fingertips 24-7 to ensure harmony is still preserved in our lives.

2) We are seeking approval from others, and, ultimately, love.

3) We subconsciously wish to avoid ourselves, and a lurking feeling of emptiness that we fear awaits us when alone.

On a team level, our cohesion and team unity has also decayed as we engage in “efficient” online team dialogues that mostly generate reduced morale, polarization and silos.

In this breakthrough session, GLI will help you and/or your team members to design advanced time management strategies for our technology age that incorporate your email/online activities as one component of a greater and more holistic strategy with two chief aims:

1) To work effectively toward a mission you believe in.

2) To create meaningful relationships in your personal and professional life.

GLI will also share the Myth of the Internet and Social Media with you. We will examine the overwhelming appeal of digital addiction and why it has claimed so many of us in such a historically short time. GLI will then help you and/or your team members to design some new strategies to cope with your check-email-and-text-messages-until-you-drop tendencies and reclaim what has been lost amidst all the time you spend online: Yourself. Your emotional connections with your coworkers and others.

In this session, GLI will help you and/or your team to create new (offline) processes of interaction that foster real-life connection and team unity.

GLI will also walk you and/or your team through the most common causes and symptoms of digital addiction. We will help you ask yourself some tough questions about why you feel so compelled to be online and what you can do about it. Let GLI help you and/or your team to confront your overwhelming over-reliance on technology while you still have an opportunity to do something about it.