For the fourth episode of The Thrive Global Podcast, in partnership with iHeartRadio, Thrive Global founder and CEO Arianna Huffington sat down with a true force of nature. Glennon Doyle Melton’s is ability to connect, to create intimacy, and her fearless honesty about both the highs and lows of her own life, her marriage, and her relationships have created a devoted following
For those who don’t know her story, after becoming sober, getting married, having children, and having what she thought had been a solid 14-year marriage, which she’d been chronicling throughout, she found out that her husband had been having affairs all along. That revelation and the aftermath was the subject of “Love Warrior.” Then a few months before publication she announced that, in fact, she and her husband, Craig, were separating.
This past November, she announced her engagement to former professional soccer player, Abby Wambach. The two were married in May. And Glennon and her former husband are still co-parenting their three children together. And, like all families, both kids and parents struggle to create a healthy relationship to technology.
“I feel like a lot of my parenting is just trying to get my kids off their phones,” Melton said. “This is a major struggle. I’m a person who uses the internet and uses social media to build community and to serve the world. It’s not good and it’s not bad, we just have to be intentional about what energy we bring to it and that will determine what we get back from it.”
Huffington agreed, adding, “I find that the addiction to screens has never made it easier for us to run away from ourselves.”
And, as Melton said, it’s also made it easier than ever to feel like we don’t measure up. “We compare our insides to other people’s outsides,” Melton said, “or our whole life to other people’s highlight reels.”
And all that distraction comes at a significant cost. Time spent paying attention to the surface of a screen is time we can’t spend learning out to go deeper.
“I think our addiction to screens makes us feel completely lost,” said Melton. “We’re entertained, but we’re lost. We have information, but we have no wisdom. We have entertainment, but we have no peace because we’ve forgotten how to go inward to discover who we are meant to be and what we’re supposed to be doing down here.”
Download the podcast here to learn how you can thrive more like Glennon, and be sure to stay tuned for more episodes of The Thrive Global Podcast, featuring business mogul Mark Cuban, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and Jennifer Aniston.
Listen to The Thrive Global Podcast Episode – Episode #4: Glennon Doyle Melton on iHeartRadio
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Originally published at journal.thriveglobal.com