Robert Waldinger in his wonderful 2015 TED talk on a 75-year-long
study proving the life-enhancing importance of relationships said “. . . the
sad fact is that at any given time more than one in five Americans report that
they’re lonely” [source].
In an April 2020 HBR podcast, Dr. Vivek Murthy (former Surgeon General of the
US) showed that loneliness touches some quarter of the population in the world with
a devastating impact on health and the quality of life through the resulting long-term
unwanted stress. Further, that remote working
may be making this worse. [source]
For those of us in the quality-of-life improvement
businesses of coaching, teaching, and advising, this is no surprise. There are many reasons why people come to coaches
for support and advice – career guidance, relationship issues at work or home, perhaps
help in starting their own business – but for many, though unvoiced, is the
need to ‘just to have someone to talk to’.
Sorry to say but often these ‘out of the box’ discussions are not
possible with family and friends; they often have a subconscious desire to keep
things as they were and not upset the habitual way of thinking about themselves
in relation to the coachee. It is sad to say, too, that many times it is the
family and friends who are at the core of the problem.
Another common driver for talking with a coach is some ‘trigger’
event such as a job loss or the risk of one, or some failure in a relationship
or career. It seems that people tend to
stay put, even in a miserable situation, rather than face the fear of change
unless some trigger event occurs. When people open-up to me at the beginning of
a coaching relationship, many suddenly feel free to talk about things that they
have been holding back for years. Our ability as coaches to deeply listen is at
least as important as our ability to ask questions and, when appropriate, to
advise. The best conversations are often when I say least, apart from I’m
listening affirmations. Coachees rarely
talk about their loneliness but is an inevitable backdrop to most
conversations.
My sense is that we are only at the beginning of the avalanche
of loneliness as changes in the world force people everywhere to reassess
themselves and their roles. As the voices
of the climate-deniers and antivaxxers are silenced by overwhelming evidence,
and the world begins to reawaken, like a hesitant chick emerging with blinking
eyes from its shell, the technological shift that has been brought forward by
the hothouse digitization of the pandemic, will start to make itself felt in
the jobs and lives of all our futures. 5G will finally enable low-latency,
high-speed links between devices that have languished in boxes awaiting the
call-to-action so enabling the birth of Industry 4.0 to burst upon society throwing
the unprepared to scramble into upskilling classes in an attempt to understand
the new world of the internet-of-things, of AI, of increasing automation, of
self-driving, low carbon, and high sustainability everything. Those that do not
react quickly enough are likely to find themselves looking for work in a world
where the new-normal jargon of job adverts is as incomprehensible as a Martian
language. Being lost in such a world is
a precursor to a deep sense of loneliness.
If this all seems bleak, it is not intended that way. “Recognizing
that a problem exists is the first step towards solving it.”
Further reading: WEF ‘The Future of
Jobs 2020’
