Being Connected Isn’t the Same as Feeling Connected

Mark

This week, Renee and I wrapped up the second annual Connect & Convert: JV Accelerator with our partner David Riklan. For three days, we had people joining us online from all over the world, meeting one another, sharing what they do, making introductions, and having conversations that probably never would have happened without technology.

I don't take that for granted.

Not that long ago, bringing that many people together would have required a ballroom, airline tickets, hotel rooms, and months of planning. Now we can send someone a link and suddenly we're sitting across from people in different states and different parts of the world.

Technology has given us an incredible ability to reach one another. But after spending three days watching people connect through a screen, I was also reminded that being able to reach someone and actually feeling connected to them are two very different things.

Renee

I think that's one of the strange things about the world we live in now. We have more ways to communicate with people than we've ever had before. There are texts, emails, social media, Zoom calls, group chats, and notifications coming at us all day long.

We can be in contact with hundreds of people and still not feel like we really know many of them.

And I think that's especially important in business right now. People aren't short on information. We have more information available to us than we could possibly consume. We can Google something, watch a video, take a course, ask AI, or find a dozen people online telling us how to do virtually anything.

What feels harder to find is someone you genuinely trust.

Trust takes longer. It comes from watching how someone shows up over time, seeing whether they do what they say they're going to do, and having enough real interactions with them to know there's actually a person behind the marketing.

Mark

That's one of the reasons we're approaching next year's Soulful Leadership Experience a little differently.

Almost two weeks ago, we hosted the first of five online gatherings leading up to our eighth annual Soulful Leadership Experience here in Orlando next February. We could simply sell tickets, send everyone the details they need, and meet them when they arrive. But that doesn't really fit what we want the experience to be.

Soulful Leadership has always been about the relationships in the room as much as anything that happens from the stage.

So we're starting those relationships now.

Each month, alumni have an opportunity to reconnect, and people attending for the first time can meet us and begin meeting one another. By the time everyone arrives in Orlando, we don't want the room to feel like a collection of strangers wearing name tags.

We want people to walk in and already recognize some faces.

Renee

That's especially important to me because of what people tell us after Soulful Leadership.

We hear versions of the same thing over and over again: "I go to a lot of events, and this is the best event I've attended because of the deep connections and alignment with the other participants."

I love hearing that because they're not talking about a speaker or a presentation. They're talking about the people they met.

And these are people who attend a lot of events. They've seen beautiful stages and great speakers. Of course we care about creating an incredible program too, but what they remember afterward is often the conversation they had over lunch, the person they met who understood what they were building, or the relationship that continued long after everyone went home.

You can't manufacture that with a prettier PowerPoint.

Mark

That's what we've always wanted Soulful Leadership to be.

Our role isn't to be the center of every conversation. In fact, some of the best moments have nothing to do with us. They happen when two people meet and realize they should know each other, when someone shares an idea and another person immediately sees how they can help, or when a conversation that started casually turns into a friendship, collaboration, or opportunity.

We can create the environment for those things to happen, but ultimately the people in the room create the experience together.

That's also why the online gatherings before February matter. Technology gives us a way to begin building those relationships months before we're physically together.

But I still believe something changes when we finally get into the same room.

Renee

We'll see another example of that in less than a month when 24 of our MetaMind clients come to Orlando for our fall mastermind retreat.

We see these people on Zoom throughout the year. We know what's happening in their businesses. They know one another. Those calls matter, and we absolutely couldn't run MetaMind the way we do without them.

But something different happens when we're all together in person. 

Conversations continue over lunch. Someone grabs another person after a session because something they said sparked an idea. People hang out together in the pool and hot tub, after we've officially finished for the day. There are conversations we never could have scheduled because we didn't know they needed to happen until everyone was together.

That's one of the reasons I don't think this is an either-or conversation.

I love what technology makes possible. We've built relationships with people we never would have met without it. We've created communities that aren't limited by geography. We've built businesses that give us enormous freedom because so much can happen online.

But the screen isn't a replacement for being together.

It's another way to get us there.

Mark

And maybe that's the opportunity we have right now.

We don't have to choose between technology and human connection. We can use technology to find one another, stay in touch, create opportunities, and build relationships across distances that once would have made those relationships impossible.

Then we can decide what we do with those connections.

Because in business, especially now, I think trust matters more than reach. Having thousands of people see something isn't necessarily more valuable than having a smaller group of people who genuinely know you, trust you, and want to be part of what you're creating.

Mark & Renee

We've spent a lot of our careers bringing people together, sometimes online and sometimes in a room. Technology has changed tremendously over the years, but the thing people seem to want from one another really hasn't.

We want to be seen. We want to know who we can trust. We want people we can call, collaborate with, learn from, laugh with, and occasionally sit across from over a meal without anyone needing to click "unmute."

So yes, we'll keep using Zoom. We'll keep sending emails, building online communities, and appreciating everything technology allows us to do.

But we'll also keep creating reasons for people to get into the same room.

Because being connected has never been easier.

Feeling connected is still something we have to create together.