There are still a few dinosaurs out there in business who think that barking out three word commands to their employees is a valid communication technique. There are still a handful of emotional infants who are bewildered when an employee stands up to their bullying, and simply can’t imagine what gives this rebel the idea that they might be “equal” to their own high and mighty self. There are still an outpost of colonial rednecks in business who see people as a necessary inconvenience in the ultimate goal of raping the system and every resource available to further their personal ambitions of wealth and popularity. These are the people who don’t read articles like this one. These managers, and even a few intelligent and approachable types, see team building as a complete waste of time and money. “Why would I want to spend precious Rands or Dollars to take my staff away just to have fun? What good is a little temporary motivation? First show me the math that demonstrates how this will positively impact my bottom line! I don’t do games!!”

This is a very shortsighted and ill-informed view of things. If you’re left brained about the whole thing, here is some people math to help you along:

• People + Resources = Income Potential
• Positive People + Effective Resources = Greater Income Potential
• No Team Building + no Communication + no Motivation = Negative People
• Negative People = strikes, go slows, time wasting grievances and reduced Income Potential
• Team Building + Communication + Motivation = Positive People
• Positive People = Energy & Enthusiasm & Ownership = Greater Income Potential

The numbers seem quite clear to me – if you want to increase your income, get with the program, after all, it is 2010 and people actually matter these days!

So what is team building? Many people that have a negative view of the concept have developed this outlook on adventure team building events like river rafting or wall climbing. The problem with these events is that they often promote competition and being ‘better’ than everyone on your team, resulting in one or two ‘superpeople’ loving the event (because they ‘win’) while the losers feel left out and useless – and there ends up being more animosity back at work than there was before. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m one of those people who loves to compete and do crazy things and would personally enjoy such events – but not because they build teams – rather because they’re fun and a great stress relief for people like me. So let’s call these traditional ‘team building’ events… stress relief sessions. To build a team you need to inject the kind of dynamics that get people thinking, talking, playing and laughing together. Once you’ve achieved this you can move onto getting them to ‘work’ together. Here are some key ingredients for an event that actually builds teams:

1. Start by building the individual. Raise self esteem and self worth. I use three specific activities to achieve this: The Dream Walk, Personality Power and Wheel of Life depending on the time available. All of these are done in a conference room and require no physical prowess or competitiveness – instead they leave the delegates feeling uplifted, motivated and open to whatever else may be on the program.
2. Create opportunities that force people to share without interruption and listen without interrupting. For this I use a commercially available board game called ‘The Ungame’ and other activities like ‘Walk Talks’ and ‘Kneecap Sessions’.
3. Do right brained activities! We spend so much time in left brained environments that many of us have a shriveled nut for a right brain. Right brained activities are things that involve color, creativity, music, dance etc. My Hero Game activity has people sitting around assembling and painting figurines. At first people are tentative about such exercises but once they get started they don’t want to stop because they’re healing and growing and it feels great!
4. Do physical activities that don’t prevent the average person from getting involved in a meaningful way. My favorite team building game is team Frisbee which gets the team dynamic going and everyone can get involved. Team volleyball with an enormous lightweight plastic ball is also fun. There are hundreds of clever ways to get people playing together in a way that is not overly competitive, so stay away from having winners and losers – more especially individual losers – rather have 20 people on a team all ‘losing’ together.
5. Energy and Fun!!!! Don’t get an accountant to run your team building event – rather make sure your facilitator has an inspirational quality about them or you’re going to have a lot of rolling of eyes and huffing in frustration from your group. Also make sure the facilitator doesn’t come across as ‘cheesy’ or ‘cliché’ in the way they bring things across. Use variety to keep things alive.
6. Get people doing unexpected things together like making pizza in teams from raw ingredients or solving puzzles together.
7. Give people homework – a personal goal, or something they have to do as a team over the following days and weeks. This will ensure that the energy of the event continues to have positive effect in people’s lives once it is over.

Team building works. Regular team building works even better. But best of all is Team Building followed up by interested managers who care for, and communicate with, and motivate their people every day. Feel free to contact me for some ideas for your team building event.

Need more reasons to turn off the TV? Not convinced yet? Let your logic chew on these little gems:

1. TV destroys your love life

How many couples start their relationship chatting till late hours of the night, going out for coffee to romantic corner cafés and giving each other erotic massages all night long? TV is never even considered in those early, heady, honeymoon weeks of a new romance. Then someone turns on the TV! What a stupid thing to do. He says, “Honey, let’s go explore each other.” She says, “uh, I’ll be there later my love, I just want to finish watching my soapy… you don’t mind do you?” He goes to bed and falls asleep before she gets there. The next afternoon she says, “my love, let’s try position 37, I don’t think we’ve done that yet.” He says, “Not now honey, Liverpool just have to score one more goal and they’re through to the quarter finals.” Before long, a once-romantic couple is in a constant state of distractedness and lifelessness. Television has sapped their energy, their passion, their libido and their reason for being together. There are thousands of woman everywhere screaming “I wish the stupid *&^%$ would turn off the *%^$% TV!!!!!”

2. TV is noise pollution

It is a fact that we are not ‘quiet’ enough. Check out http://www.quiet.org and this article about the consequences of noise on our health. There is a worldwide move back to being more spiritually aware. Generations have lived under a noisy flood of religion, media, television, radio and other sounds that fill our heads with words, clichés, convincing facts and a dull sense of mental anesthesia. To get in touch with ourselves, separate from our need for approval and validation from others, we need to become quiet. We need to learn to sit quietly in the garden, or under a tree, and… think, allowing our own consciousness and self developed opinions and paradigms to form. Some call it meditation; others call it having a ‘devotion’ or ‘quiet time’, (though often these terms refer to another tactic of the institution to influence even your silent thought processes). What we really need is time to be truly quiet. This heals mind, body and spirit, and injects new energy and opportunity into your life. TV is a sure way to keep the quiet out and fill your head with useless buzz.

3. TV is a money drain

Having already established that TV is a waste of time with a list of negative consequences on your life, it would make no sense to spend any money on it, right? Well, we do spend money on TV, and lots of it. Let’s consider the impact of television on your budget. This is a South African scenario but I’m sure the principles apply anywhere. Firstly, if you own a TV you have to pay a TV license fee to the national broadcaster. This enables them to keep churching out rubbish on 3 channels 24 hours per day. A TV license costs about R250 a year. Then there’s the TV itself. Most people aren’t content to watch TV on a small box anymore, after all if you’re spending 4 hours per day watching the thing you may as well do it properly right? An 81cm flat screen LCD TV costs around R7000, which of course turns into R10000 when taken as credit installments. Then, most people aren’t happy to have only three channels of local rubbish to watch, they want 100 channels of international rubbish too. A full ‘bouquet’ of DSTV channels will cost about R6000 per year, and throw in another R4000 for an HD decoder and, hey presto, you’ve spent R20250. You could be paying about R800 per month to keep up the TV addiction, and that doesn’t include TVs in other locations like offices and holiday homes. On top of that, time is money, and if you’re spending 4 hours per day watching TV and let’s say you might be investing at least one of those hours into an earning opportunity (like writing this blog), then TV is probably costing you well over R5000 per month in wasted opportunity. Instead, the poor masses stare vacantly at the screen waiting for their ‘ship to come in’ and throwing away opportunities for success, happiness, wealth creation and relationship building, all the while making companies richer – hmmm.

Started your TV fast yet? It’s easy – just unplug your TV from the wall and put it high up in a cupboard for a month. Move your couches around to fill the vacant space and start doing other things with your time. Start a small business. Invite some friends over for games. Read to your children. Make love to your partner. Read a book. Play an instrument. Improve your garden. Start a hobby. Get fit. Discover a new restaurant. The possibilities are endless. Have fun.

That’s fairly impressive if the TV is improving our lives… but as you’ve probably guessed already, it’s not. The reality is that billions of people are sitting and staring at a noisy glowing box every day that is stealing their time, dulling their senses and blocking their opportunities for success. Here are 3 reasons to turn off your TV and take back your life – or at the very least knock down your zombie-TV-staring hours from 21 hours to 4 hours per week. I dare you.

1. TV turns your brain off.
   
   There are numerous studies that show the negative effects of watching television on your brain. Click here to read an article about the neurological impact of television published by the Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics.
   TV is not making you smarter, despite the fact that you may be watching hours and hours of Animal Planet. Have you ever had that dull feeling after watching a few hours of TV, like you’re not all there? It’s a type of catatonic state that slows your senses and makes you feel like reality is far away somewhere… not unlike many drugs – this may be the very reason so many people spend so much of their lives doing it. Here is a sample of lyrics from a song called ‘Television, the Drug of the Nation’ by the group ‘Disposable heroes of Hiphoprisy’…
   

   TV, it
   satellite links
   our United States of Unconsciousness
   Apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive
   The methadone metronome pumping out
   150 channels 24 hours a day
   you can flip through all of them
   and still there’s nothing worth watching
   TV is the reason why less than 10 per cent of our
   Nation reads books daily
   Why most people think Central America
   means Kansas
   Socialism means un-American
   and Apartheid is a new headache remedy
   absorbed in its world it’s so hard to find us
   It shapes our mind the most
   maybe the mother of our Nation
   should remind us
   that we’re sitting too close to…
   

    

2. TV steals your time. It seems that almost everyone I meet these days tells me, “I don’t have enough time”, and yet they can spend in excess of 1000 hours per year watching television. What could you do with an extra 1000 hours each year? Learn to play a musical instrument? (Improving your creativity and relieving stress). Start a small business? (Improving your finances and getting you out of debt) Write a blog like the one you’re reading now? (Potentially increasing your finances and improving your networking opportunities). Make a few new friends? Join a club? Write a book? Read a whole pile of books? Get a diploma?
   There are any number of life-improving things you could be doing with your time rather than watching TV but instead we just have to find out what the latest scandal is on the Bold and the Beautiful or Grays Anatomy or Big Brother. People actually sit for hours watching other people brushing their teeth and washing dishes… go figure. Let’s take our little mathematical projection further. 1140 hours per year means that in the 60 years of your life between ages 13 and 73 you will have thrown away EIGHT YEARS of your life sitting on a couch and passively staring at a box!
3. TV is antisocial. It is really annoying to walk into someone’s house and the atmosphere is filled with the sound and light of television. I have had people invite me to their homes so that I can advise or counsel them on personal matters only to have them sit me down in the lounge and chat to me with the TV blaring in the background, and then when asked if we could turn the TV off they turn the volume lower or just look at me as though I’m crazy… “What? Turn the TV off? You can’t be serious!”
   Improve your family and love live by turning off the box and sitting around a table playing games or reading to each other or discussing life or dare I say… have sex!

For your health, your mind, your body, your relationships and your future, I challenge you to cut down your current TV watching time by half. Even better, have a TV fast for a month. Make a deal with your family that for one month you will watch absolutely NO TV! Unplug it and put it in a cupboard. This little exercise will demonstrate to you that you can survive without TV and you’ll be surprised how many other great and productive things you’ll end up doing with your time, not least of all – talking to people. Just remember though, TV is like a drug, so for a few days you might be tempted to stare at the empty space in the wall where the TV was because your body and brain are conditioned that way. In time you’ll find that even when the TV is there, you seldom turn it on because you’re too busy doing meaningful things. Let me know how your TV fast goes.