The Loneliness Paradox
This past week I coached a leader who felt lonely.
As I dug in, I heard two things.
She’s been lonely working from home—for a while. But then something surprising happened.
She felt lonely in a room full of colleagues at a recent “in person” event.
So, the physical proximity to people wasn’t causing her loneliness.
We came to see it was a lack of meaningful connections and relationships. During the pandemic, she’d somehow lost her, once-strong, habit of connecting deeply with colleagues.
Now, this is a super busy CEO. Endless zoom calls. Many nights in board meetings. Family and volunteer obligations too, naturally.
The Loneliness Paradox
All this busyness was masking how she was really feeling. She admitted that she was piling on the tasks—as if somehow this would make the loneliness go away.
Funny thing was, it did help, sometimes, in the short term. She’d be distracted by pressing deadlines, crises, obligations. But it forced her loneliness underground.
But working this hard was making it worse over time.
Working from the office, or from home. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t connecting deeply with people. It was all transactional. Tasks. To-do lists. Project plans. Outcomes. She was “all performance”, all the time.
Reintroduce Reconnecting
She needed a way to reintroduce connection with others around her, fold it back into the rhythms of her life… to participate in genuine relationships.
We worked on ways she could notice her distancing behaviour. On how she could make slight, intentional changes to permit herself time to just connect. To talk, laugh, listen, share.
A week later she emailed me to say these changes were immediately making a difference.
But, more surprising to her?
Was that others around her noticed. She’d had colleagues, unprompted, comment that she seemed more relaxed. More present and available.
She wrote to me that “she’d missed this person.”
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If you’d like to reintroduce reconnecting into your leadership, reach out. Let’s talk.
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