We are so connected to our phones today that many people say not having their smartphone for just a minute or two creates instant panic. But what if you didn’t have access to the internet, emails, texts, or social media for an entire week? Speaker, business owner of 11 companies, and business consultant, Troy Hazard, shares what happened on a recent vacation where he disconnected from his smartphone and spent a week reconnecting with family. Below are the seven lessons that Troy learned from being antisocial.
Anxiety Is Your Enemy
Anxiety will be the single thing that stops you from your own antisocial experiment. I was fortunate that we were on a cruise, so there was some mental separation from the world just by being at sea. I just kept convincing myself, with some creativity, that "they can’t reach me anyway."
Set Your Pace
Find a new rhythm in your day, and find new (read: old) ways to fill your newfound time. It’s amazing just how much time you create when you’re not checking something you checked only 60 seconds ago.
Watch This Space
Use the headspace for something creative/productive/interesting/strategic—insert any word you like here. Just don’t fill it with reality TV to keep your mind from the real world.
Reflect and Reboot
Once past the anxiety phase, I found myself in a moment of reflection. Casting my mind back over all of the things I liked to do but had since replaced in my life with a screen. The feeling of "reboot" was very rewarding.
Engagement Is the Energy You Seek
While my wife Dominique joked about our experiment on social media when we returned, there was an element of truth, and irony, in her post. We did find ourselves re-engaging in some old school family activities—playing cards and board games, dinner conversations, and long walks around the boat for no reason other than to "people watch."
Form New Habits
On stage, I will typically ask one last question before the end of my presentation: "armed with this new information, what will you change?" So our experiment would have been all for naught if I did not ask the same question of myself when we got home. And yes, I have set some changes in motion.
Plan the Next One
Even though we have children that have both seen more than 20 countries, we all exclaimed that this was the most fun we’d had in a long time. We thought it was so good for all of us that we’ve already started to plan another antisocial sabbatical.
If I had to simply summarize our little experiment, it would have to be the way I started this story—it’s OK to be antisocial.
Troy Hazard
SpeakInc.com Blog
To read Troy Hazard's full blog post about these seven lessons, follow this link.