Nature can’t grow all year long. There are periods of growth followed by a pause and finally renewal, when the process of growth starts over again. It should be the same with us, but we are constantly trying to deny our natural tendencies for rest and renewal. Sabbaticals, can be that important pause that kicks off a new period of growth and change.
But what happens if this just isn’t feasible right now? When saving is just not possible or taking time off would mean that it would create a huge gap in care for your family, think about ways you could capture the same feeling as being on a sabbatical. The time you devote to it and what you do specifically to rest and renew might look different from your neighbor, but there are some key ways you can experiment.
For me, it’s all about switching things up by season, staying active, and enjoying where I live. In the last few years I’ve been striving to live my life like adult summer camp as a way to get into the spirit of a sabbatical without taking extended leave from my business. I can lean into this even more after a busy period at work. To do this, most weeks I include a component of physical activity, nature, water activity, and arts and crafts in my day-to-day life.
Even if I can’t include all of these in a given week, the energy I get from the activities I can fit in tends to carry me through to the next week. I don’t like things to get too stale, so while some weeks may look very similar, during the course of a month or two, I might change up one or two of the components. Summer is for sailing and being in the ocean, while winter is for tide pooling and hiking.
The curious thing about my adult summer camp experiences—I often come back to work with a new sense of self and I feel less blocked. Sometimes while I’m doing a completely unrelated creative task, my brain solves a work problem in the background. Instead of viewing these adventures as time wasters (or ways to procrastinate on work) I’ve shifted to view them as a necessary part of making me effective at my job. The idea is to life more of my every day life like I’m always on sabbatical.
If the idea of adult summer camp works for you, run wild!
Pottery is My Current Arts and Crafts Go-to
In the last year and a half I’ve gotten into wheel throwing pottery. One of my favorite things to do is make bud vases. I have a fun little collection of them now. It gave me a great idea, “What if I featured a bud vase on each chapter of my new book, The Art of the Sabbatical?”
So I’ve got twelve of my favorite vases, one for each of the twelve chapters tackling the mindset and money behind planning a transformative work break.
And then I thought, “Maybe other people would love these vases as much as I do!”
So, now I’m making them available as part of my presale campaign for the next 30 days.
Rest and Renewal at Work
As you might have guessed, it’s not just about what you add into your free-time, changing your relationship to work is going to be important if you want to start feeling more sabbatical-like. Here are some ideas to try:
Re-align your time boundaries at work (when you work, days you work, location you work).
Ask for help with some of your responsibilities
Ask your boss for extra personal days or partial workday day here and there
Intentionally reduce some of your responsibilities (home and work) on a temporary basis
Train a back-up at work; it’s important to develop new talent and create succession plans.
Take actual vacation days and commit to truly unplugging while not working
A sabbatical is a great proving ground to learn how to be more comfortable with unstructured time, but a sabbatical isn’t the only way to train yourself to love having less on your to-do list.
“Our brains crave unstructured time to wander, ponder deeply, find new sparks or just rest,” Allison Holzer, shared in a blog post. As the author of Dare to Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration in Work and Life, Allison explored this topic and has learned to value and prioritize unstructured time in her life as a specific strategy that supports her work coaching executives.
Weekly she blocks out one, two-hour period with no pre-determined structure or activity. She sometimes listens to a podcast or takes a walk. But the one rule is to “stay away from devices that would trigger my need to immediately respond and produce.”
Monthly she blocks out an entire day for discovery or self care. It could be lunch with a friend, getting a facial, attending a thought-provoking conference or devoting a day to read or learn about a new topic.
Quarterly she schedules a long-weekend for vacation with family. Some portion of that weekend will include family activities, but she also prioritizes recharge time alone too.
What do you do to add more ease and peace into your daily life?
Most workers are no longer employed in the manufacturing sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet, we still follow productivity standards honed during an age when the majority of workers were employed in farming or manufacturing. Examples include measuring output, efficiency, mistake prevention and comparing one time period (or one company) with another.
We now work in a “knowledge economy”—in professional services like law, health, finance or tech, in which new ideas and creativity are prized and repetitive tasks can be outsourced to machines. But companies still urge workers to comply with metrics, objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) often tied to their productivity.
“How can we do more with less?” is often asked of us. It’s enough to put pressures on even the most productive knowledge workers.
The impact of this productivity-focused approach has shown up in research. A 2015 Deloitte Study discovered that 77 percent of respondents experienced burnout in their current positions (Deloitte 2015). Some clues you’re experiencing burnout include feeling depleted or exhausted much of the time, experiencing cynicism, having a quick anger fuse, and/or being less effective or more prone to depression symptoms at work.
When we do knowledge-based work—that is work based around ideas, creativity, focus, writing, or people—we need restorative time during and after our work day. When we don’t allow time to recharge and reflect in an unstructured way, it kills our drive and stifles our energy to move forward. Corporate life just isn’t designed for this type of recharge time and it’s not celebrated or cultivated enough. It’s not common to have “rest metrics,” only productivity metrics. Throw in constant strategy changes, reorganizations, and unclear communication from leadership and it’s a recipe for disaster for employees. Until these pressure-inducing work norms are addressed, burnout will continue to be a major issue in all sectors.
In my first book, “The Resiliency Effect,” I explored how the epidemic of workaholism and hustle culture keep us from the big things we want to do in life. Being busy and achievement focused is a coping mechanism. It can be a good way to maintain self esteem (or cope with other problem areas in our personal life) but unfortunately this road can lead us straight to overwork and suffering. That book further explores the root causes of some of these coping mechanisms and I share journal prompts and concepts to help facilitate change in yourself.
But I’ll be the first to admit, it’s hard to find to the time to do the necessary inner work to explore and remove these obstacles—which are often emotional in nature.
It definitely takes changing your values and priorities to do this hard work, as well as time. What greater time to do it than on a break or sabbatical from work?
We need to normalize work breaks! And people need to know *how* to take a fruitful break. My second book, The Art of the Sabbatical (working title) will tackle these things and more.
Extended work breaks seems like a dream! But nearly everyone thinks taking an extended break from work will be detrimental to their career, family, or financial lives. Based on my experience and research, extended work breaks (not just vacations) are the best catalyst to discover, learn and grow professionally and personally.
A mentor said to me one day, “Developing your mindset is actually about unlearning behaviors.” That really stuck with me.
And if there’s one thing I learned from talking with dozens of people for my book is that all of us go through quite a bit of UNlearning as we take our lives and careers to the next level. When we focus only on life hacks, learning new skills and certifications, and to-do lists our brains get too filled and we forget to let go of what no longer serves us.
Without a specific intention, I’d been focusing on unlearning lots of behaviors since becoming an adult. Many of the behaviors had been coping mechanisms that protected me as I went through so much as a kid and young adult. Before doing this work, I often focused too much on the negatives in life. I also put a lot of pressure on myself to learn everything on my own because it was a sign of weakness to ask for help.
It got me thinking, what are some key things we can spend time un-learning to put us in a better mindset to accomplish our dreams?
Asking for Help ≠ Weakness
In The Resiliency Effect, I interviewed an entrepreneurial-minded woman named Vanessa Mason. She has a background in public health and even co-founded a venture capital firm that invests in up-and-coming companies changing the public health landscape. Before she landed her current job at the Institute for the Future, she owned a small consulting business for five years.
Rather than staying in corporate jobs that weren’t meeting her needs, she decided to start a consulting business on her own in 2013. Vanessa said to herself at the time, “You learn by doing, not just thinking or analyzing what it would take to do something big.” Since she had been successful picking up contracting projects in some of her other professional roles, she thought she had enough experience to go out on her own.
She knew she needed to give it at least 18 months to start because it would take at least that long to become profitable. Managing to pick up some big-name projects in the public health and tech sectors, Vanessa enjoyed the freedom of being on her own. However, as she continued in her entrepreneurship journey, she found herself focused on cash management and the bottom line, which took away from her ability to think strategically and get help in areas she was weak in. Those old habits of needing to do everything on her own were creeping back in.
Things came to a head when she found herself depressed, and unable to give the business the full attention it deserved with less revenue coming in than she wanted. What Vanessa learned from the experience was that you have to ask for help and take it. If she were to do it again, she said, “All of my resources should have been protecting my time rather than trying to do things all on my own. I thought how much I was doing was a measure of success, not what I was building.” Basically, she would focus on un-learning this coping mechanism of feeling like she has to do everything on her own.
Achievement ≠ Self Esteem
A big theme throughout my book has been about how achievement and over-functioning is the enemy of us. It works against our physical and mental health and creates the hamster wheel that’s hard to remove ourselves from unless or until we completely burnout.
In my own life — it took burnout to finally listen and I realized that my need for achievement was what helped me feel like I was worth something. Leaving my job and taking a sabbatical helped reset this expectation in me so I could focus more on a being a human being instead of a “human doing”. It also helped me to reset my expectations for myself and for my business — which was a new creative endeavor that I found space for only after getting off the hamster wheel of full-time corporate work.
Risk ≠ Always Unsafe
Another woman I interviewed in my book shared about how launching her entrepreneurial journey required her to let go of the fear of risk. Dr. Annemarie Spadafore was taught all her life to find a “safe job” that would suit her well. He grandfather had been an entrepreneur and an early death created trauma for her father’s family. The message to seek safety and security first was passed down to her.
She had a long career in government service before sitting down with a coach to take a career assessment. The results showed that “financial security” ranked lower for her than freedom in her life and career. She realized, “I’d rather move to a cabin in the middle of nowhere and scrape by while working for myself than work for someone else. I’m willing to make huge lifestyle changes just to keep the independence of working for myself.”
In fact, taking this coaching assessment is what opened her eyes to getting her own coaching certification. At first this was an add-on that helped her in her government role, but later became what allowed her to launch her own coaching business.
She describes her unlearning journey as one that has many layers. She often tested the waters before making big leaps.
Thankfully, she hasn’t had to make big lifestyle cuts in order to grow her business, called Powerlab, while maintaining her freedom. When she looks back on it, she never really wanted those government jobs because the bureaucracy bothered her. Yet, she was more than willing to endure the frustration of bureaucracy because she wasn’t ready to give up on that need for “safety.” Now the desire for freedom and flexibility has fully eclipsed the fear of risk and desire to seek out safety and stability. This reframing is what allowed to her to unlearn that risk is not always unsafe.
There’s No Such Thing as Negative Emotions
Keeping feelings deep down inside — especially anger is both societally reinforced and likely something that was modeled in our families. For instance, I viewed all anger as bad growing up, I didn’t even feel like I could express frustration with a work issue. I wasn’t a doormat, but rather if things got bad enough I would “cut and run.” Emotions would finally boil over and I would end the relationship or quit the job. There was no middle ground.
I had to unlearn that anger was a “bad” thing. I had to find ways of tapping into my anger and releasing it appropriately. A book called, Facing the Fire, by John Lee was instrumental in giving me tools like wringing a towel, punching a pillow, or screaming in the car. These activities which once seemed overly violent, scary or unnecessary to me, helped me understand that I was harboring much more anger than I could’ve imagined. These “safe” ways of expressing anger don’t hurt others, so I was able to use these tools to discharge all the energy associated with my anger. Keeping all these feelings locked away for years was affecting me in all sorts of ways and prevented me from discovering my true potential.
I came to appreciate that all emotions are human emotions — none are good or bad. They exist for a reason, especially as indicators of what is happening to us or around us. However, they don’t have to rule us.
Exploring some of the “negative” emotions and unlearning that they were bad made a huge difference in my interpersonal relationships and my ability to find contentment in my work and with myself. This tool even helped with accepting and relating to my anxiety – which I can now often “say hello” to whenever it pops up, kind of like an old friend, and then ask myself, “What’s this feeling related to?” Before unlearning that anxiety was a bad thing, feeling it would send me into a huge worry-storm which would only reinforce and make the anxiety, and the inability to breath, worse.
To find success, it’s more important to unlearn coping mechanisms. Most of the time, our initial instincts such as pushing down our feelings, pursuing security over passion, or a fear of sharing our dreams with those around us are there to protect our old selves from getting hurt again.
It’s important to appreciate those protective instincts for what they are — coping mechanisms that kept us safe in the past. Then, we can actively choose to unlearn them since they often create roadblocks to us achieving our biggest dreams.
Questions for Reflection
What are some coping mechanisms you may have picked up because of adversity you experienced?
How did these coping mechanisms protect you?
Are any of these habits creating obstacles for you in your life or your career?
We just launched an exciting giveaway on Goodreads. Enter to win 1 of 100 FREE Ebooks! This is an inspirational summer read — find out how to create lasting resilience in your life or even take a work sabbatical. Don’t miss this opportunity to grab a copy, the giveaway window expires August 30.
As one Amazon user said: “This book teaches readers how to be resilient through some of life’s hardest lessons. Author Cady North shares great insight on financial planning, psychology of human behavior, and entrepreneurship to help her readers get in sync with their life’s purpose and passions. Highly recommend!”
Cady North had the opportunity to sit down with Nat Brown and Sylvie Hall of the Female Founders Network Podcast to talk about all things entrepreneurship and financial resilience. This podcast is great for those navigating business ownership, leadership and life. Give it a listen here.
The Audiobook version of The Resiliency Effect is published and available now on Audible, Amazon and everywhere you consume audiobooks. Check out a free preview from the audiobook here.
I write about money, mindset, behavior, sabbaticals, and work culture. In my private client work, I help women act on their biggest dreams and build financial resilience for the future.
