Four months in, my days are ruled by feeds, naps, cute baby smiles and pterodactyl-like screeches, all of which are unpredictable in timing and length. I rarely get to focus on something for more than a few minutes without being interrupted, be it cooking, conversation or work.

This is a stark contrast to what my days looked like only four months ago, when I was primarily a strategy advisor, helping entrepreneurs and C-suite leaders transform their businesses, and also a sabbatical guide, helping mid-career professionals shape transformational career breaks for themselves. I would spend hours writing, meeting new people or running workshops.

I’m now enjoying stepping into the mum role, but I do sometimes miss being able to focus my attention on something (anything) for more than ten minutes at a time.

One evening…

As I was checking my phone towards the end of a nursing session, I stumbled upon a post on X which snapped me back into my old world.

In that post, the author points out that many of his friends took open-ended career breaks to ‘figure out what’s next’ and ended up ‘failing’ at shaping a new sustainable path for themselves.

While I disagree with the premise that returning to a job similar to your old one = failure, I wholeheartedly agree with the real message which was called out in the replies: if you treat your sabbatical like a random walk in the park then you’re leaving too much of the outcome to luck.

Going on a sabbatical to reshape your career is NOT easy.

There are many ways you could end up disappointed. And there are ALSO many ways you can prevent that from happening.

I felt a strong urge to reply to that post to share the most common traps that I’ve seen people fall into while on sabbatical.

Maybe it would help someone who’s feeling stuck right now.

But… when? How many micro-windows of focus would I need?

I’d only just put the baby down and really needed to sleep immediately if I didn’t want to wake up like a sleep-deprived zombie the next day.

So I let go of the idea that I would ever craft a response, and went to bed.

Then the universe delivered.

My son woke up twice in the night and my brain was on, which meant I was able to type my thoughts one-handed on my phone as I was nursing and helping him back to sleep. Early the next morning I was blessed with a one-hour nap during which I typed my notes up and posted them just before the end of the 24-window after which the algorithm would have buried my reply.

So here they are.

10 common traps people fall into while on sabbatical

And how to avoid them

Trap #1

You’ve set zero structure or intentions for your sabbatical

—and find yourself scrolling on [Reddit, Twitter, Substack, the news—choose your poison]

Instead, set up your sabbatical in the same way you would a big work project. You can decide on explicit start and end dates as well as a few activities you want to explore, ideally with real outputs that you put out into the world. It’s also worth finding an accountability partner or a coach to check in with at regular points in time… it’ll do wonders.

Trap #2

Your sabbatical is too short. Or too long.

The sweet spot for career transformation (which is the context for the original post) seems to be six to nine months. Do less and you’re not giving yourself enough time to let go of your old habits and transform your mindset around work. Do more and the transition back into employed work will likely feel harder albeit not impossible.

Of course, if you’ve planned for a 6-month sabbatical but you’re lucky enough to realise only a few weeks in that you know exactly what you want to focus your attention onto next then by all means return to the ‘real’ world earlier than you’d expected. As Alan Watts said, if you get the message, hang up the phone.

Trap #3

You skipped the recovery phase.

Tempting, because you want to get to the meaty part of your sabbatical more quickly. Or maybe you don’t realise just how depleted you had been and start draining your batteries before having charged them up fully again.

If you take proper time (weeks or even months) to rest, you’ll have a full tank of energy for your sabbatical explorations instead of whatever was left over as you pressed pause on your career.

Take a step back while you rest and you’ll then be able to leap forward.

Trap #4

You escaped the grind… and immediately rebuilt a new version of it.

After years of having to attend meetings, track KPIs and tick off to-do lists, it can feel pretty disorienting to suddenly have an empty diary and zero expectation placed on you by others. I’ve seen so many people fall into the trap of filling up their time with a bunch of tasks that they don’t even want to do, just because it gives them comfort that they are doing something.

Be mindful that this is a risk. When you’ve been running in a hamster wheel for years, it’ll feel weird to step out of it. That weirdness might feel so unfamiliar, so disorienting, that you might be tempted to recreate a feeling of busy-ness, just so you feel like yourself again.

Instead, let go of the felt-sense that it’s important that you are (seen as being) busy. Check in with yourself that what you are choosing to spend your precious time on is actually serving your sabbatical objectives, and ruthlessly cut out the rest.

Don’t create a new job for yourself.

Trap #5

You’re not being curious enough.

Either because you don’t know how, or you’re not giving yourself space to do so.

If you’re going on sabbatical with an intention to figure out how you want to shape the next phase of your work (or life) meaningfully, then you *have to* follow your interests, and engage in projects that allow you to develop your knowledge, excitement and skills in that area.

Treat your sabbatical like a sandbox, your only ‘job’ is to play.

Trap #6

You changed your schedule but not your surroundings.

It’s very hard to rewire your brain if everything around you is reinforcing who you’ve been so far. If you want different ideas, different habits, and a different version of you to emerge, then something in your environment needs to shift. That might mean spending time in a new place, joining a different community, or changing your routines.

It’s easy to overdo it though.

I’ve found that engaging with a LOT of novel things would eat up my energy and leave very little room for depth or reflection. I much preferred making one or two meaningful changes and then letting them work on me before injecting any more novelty into the mix.

Trap #7

You’re doing it all alone.

One of the BIG cheat codes for a successful sabbatical is to find people to experiment with, and commiserate with on difficult days. Online or offline. They can invite you into their worlds, build on your ideas/work and challenge you when you want or need it.

People who don’t do this while on sabbatical often end up feeling like their life is less vibrant after all, and they’re tempted to go back to a job that automatically comes with an okay-rather-than-great social fabric.

Find your people. It’s important.

Trap #8

You’re not doing the necessary introspective work.

By going on sabbatical., you’re stepping out of the hamster wheel to reflect on where you want to go next.

So do it.

Write, move, create, converse.

Take off the autopilot, and figure out what you’re curious about, what you want to see more (or less) of in your life. Process your emotions as they surface. And consciously notice any mindset shifts as they happen, to make them more salient.

Don’t journal yourself into a corner, though. That’s no good either.

Trap #9

You’re not taking enough action.

You can’t think yourself into a new phase of life.

If you uncover something that you feel excited about then go do something real with that excitement. Test the idea. See what it feels like to do the thing.

If you want to be a beekeeper then find a roof to set up a hive on — you don’t need to set up ten hives. If you want to become a community builder then host a party the next day — it doesn’t need to be huge or perfect, it just needs to happen.

I can’t stress this enough:

Muster up the courage to take action. Show up differently in the world and the world to offer you new ways of engaging with it in return.

Trap #10

You don’t actually need a sabbatical. Yet.

I’ve found that sabbaticals work best when there’s something to reflect on and build from.

If you’re early in your career then you’re unlikely to have already built a foundation of skills and experiences to pivot from.

Taking a sabbatical might still be a useful thing to do, but it won’t serve the same purpose as someone who decided to do the same thing after a decade-long career.

Maybe don’t expect to use that break to build a business selling your skills and experience. Instead you could focus on orienting your budding career towards work you find meaningful.

If you’re on sabbatical and feeling stuck, read this

Maybe you’re stuck in what feels like a series of ‘unproductive’ days. Or stuck in a shame loop because you haven’t yet figured out what your sabbatical was meant to do for you.

There’s no shame in feeling stuck.

That’s often the point of a sabbatical: to create space to get lost, poke around in the dark, and eventually bump into something that makes you come alive in a way that you hadn’t felt in a while. It’s not efficient because it’s not meant to be.

I’m hoping this post will help you shine some light on where the ‘stuckness’ is coming from. Just like the night light helps my baby get enough of a sense of his surroundings to feel reassured before drifting off to sleep, it’ll be a lot easier for you to ‘unstick’ yourself once you see what’s blocking you.

Alright.

Baby is waking up.

Send.

To make radical changes in your work or life, you have to change what you choose to focus your attention on, and rewire behaviours that used to work well for you.

You need to change if you want things around you to change.

I see this all the time in the solopreneurs and start-ups I work with when they decide to kick off a project that’s meant to transform their business: they need to start talking to different people, experimenting and taking on new risks.

It’s also essential for sabbatical-takers who want to make the most of their break: the best thing they can do is replace their ‘worker’ mode with an ‘explorer’ mode.

It’s also exactly what I’m doing now as I transition to self-employment — so I wanted to share some thoughts on how I’m rewiring myself in the process.

Given that it’s Election Day in the US, I thought this might help keep you grounded as you’re waiting for the results 🗳️

Learning corporate behaviours

In 2010, I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed analyst in a consultancy in Paris. How did I end up in a senior leadership position at a FTSE 100 company a decade later?

Simple. I learned to thrive in structured environments where my role was clearly defined and my performance was clearly measurable. Same as school and university but with a corporate spin.

What mattered most for success was solving problems, making decisions, delivering quality outputs on time, caring about being of service to everyone around me and not just my seniors, and working long and focused hours when needed. I also learned to always be on, sometimes at the expense of my personal life, and that I had to take on performative tasks to make myself look good in the eyes of people who could accelerate my career.

Some of those behaviours came naturally to me e.g. wanting to solve problems, caring about being of service, delivering quality outputs. Others I had to learn, like how to make decisions quickly and well.

Slowly I morphed myself into the shape that had the highest probability of being promoted up the corporate ladder and into more senior roles.

That worked well for a while, but eventually, I started feeling constrained. And when I went on a career break in 2022, it felt as though I could finally stretch my arms and legs outside of that corporate mould.

From ladder to labyrinth

My sabbatical tasted like freedom — from any external structure or expectations. It was the opposite of the predictability of corporate life. Of course, that came with a healthy dose of uncertainty that the voice inside my head kept reminding me of, in the form of lines like “errr what do you think you’re doing?”

Ultimately, it gave me a taste of what self-employment might feel like: no mould to fit into, just space to navigate, and no guidance apart from the one I want to give to myself.

Now that I’m fully self-employed, progression doesn’t feel like climbing a ladder anymore. There’s no obvious ‘up’. Instead, it feels like a labyrinth. Not the scary kind where the Minotaur could be hiding behind any corner, but one full of more or less inviting, interconnected paths to explore. Any direction is the 'right' direction as long as it's both aligned with what I truly want to work on and provides me with enough freedom, money and connections to live the life I want.

The ‘ladder’ mindset isn’t the only thing I’ve had to let go of.

I’m unlearning the corporate expectation to ‘always be on’.

I’m my own boss, so the only work I do now is what I set out for myself. I could choose to mimic the corporate world, creating a never-ending list of urgent tasks and falling into the trap of busyness. Instead, I’m trying to be more intentional, focusing only on what truly moves the dial in the direction I want.

Yet, some days, my old corporate habits catch up with me, and I find myself doing lots of things that might look like they’re useful but aren’t really moving the dial.

When I catch myself doing this, I feel like this guy — and take a break.

I’m also letting go of the idea that my work has to be confined to a particular role.

In the corporate setting, my value came from delivering specific objectives that were tied to my job description.

If I wanted, I could reproduce this now by deciding what I’m going to focus my attention on, and forgoing unrelated opportunities when they come up. But if I did this I’d be creating a new ‘job’ for myself. So instead, I’m keeping an open mind, allowing myself to explore opportunities as they come up, and occasionally narrowing my focus — only as needed.

Building new habits

Thriving on the self-employed path doesn’t just require letting go of old corporate habits that are doing me a disservice. I also need to learn new habits if I really want things to change. Interestingly, most of those are relevant in any Big Transition, not just the transition to self-employment.

For example, I’ve started experimenting more, whether it’s to test new product ideas, marketing approaches, or ways of working. 

Many corporate leaders hate failure. It doesn’t look good on their track records, and they’ll only forget a string of failures if it ends in a bonus-boosting innovation. 

As a self-employed person, failure is part of the job because it’s the only way to uncover what really works. It’s not easy, though. It took me a day to accept that a thoughtfully curated email I’d sent would not result in a conversation. It also took me three weeks to get over an unsuccessful product launch a few months ago — and it still stings today.

Experimenting is useful, but it isn’t enough. I’ve also had to make space for my curiosity and trust that it would lead me to good places. 

In my old corporate roles, every single minute of my working day was allocated to tasks and deliverables relating to my official responsibilities, leaving little space for exploration. There was no room for my curiosity to express itself.

The thing is, curiosity is like a muscle. If you don’t use it, it gets atrophied. And now that I’m in the self-employed world, I need to be curious about the world around me if I want to thrive. It’s through reading, podcasts, conversations and the curiosity to explore the unexpected that new ideas and opportunities unfold. Being curious is not a nice-to-have, it’s a necessity.

Finally, and perhaps most challenging of all, I’m learning to cultivate patience. 

Before I left the corporate world, I’d been operating in it for fifteen years. By that point I knew how to get things done well instinctively and I was really good at what I did. I sometimes felt like a master at the corporate craft — or at least like I was on the way to mastery.

Today I have very little self-employed experience and therefore very little instinct about what is going to work or not on this path. The corporate master has become a self-employed noob — and some days, that’s a hard truth to accept. I liked being great at what I do.

One day I’ll be a master at marketing and selling my wares but for now I have a lot to learn, despite knowing I have brilliant products and services on offer. 

Your turn

If you’re finding yourself in transition right now, remember that unlearning is just as vital as learning when you’re moving from one environment or one phase of life to another. You can’t take the tools from your previous context to the next and expect them to work in the same way.

What got you here won’t get you there. Accept that, and you’ll be much closer to seeing the changes you want.

And remember it takes time.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, says it takes more than 2 months for a new behaviour to become automatic — 66 days, on average. 

I’ll add to this that in times of transition, when you’re building multiple habits at once, it may take longer for some to be fully in place. I didn’t climb the corporate ladder in 66 days. It took years. Self-employment will require patience, too.

In London, where everything happens at lightning speed, it's easy to forget what slow feels like.

If you order something on Amazon in the morning, you'll often get it before the end of the day. Trains on the Victoria tube line run every 100 seconds during peak hours, making it the most frequent train service in the world. The average 5G network speed hovers around 250 Mbps, which is significantly faster than most big cities in Europe and equivalent to NYC.

Everyone is used to everything happening at pace, which is super practical in many cases and unfortunately also triggers frustration when things don't get done as quickly as expected. Waiting three minutes for the tube to come in feels slightly annoying, and having to stand by for thirty minutes until customer service finally picks up your call feels almost disrespectful.

Unfortunately this goes both ways. 

You're expected to do everything quickly too — and aren’t always seen as a human with a conscious experience of the world by others around you.

This becomes terribly obvious at work, when interacting with customers and colleagues. You can be contacted at all times via phone, email, Zoom and Slack — and are often expected to cater to other people’s needs before your own.

If you let it, the world will relentlessly fill your head with things you could or should do. For most of us this makes it impossible to reflect on whether we still want to be doing those things.

At work I felt like a hyper-productive machine. I had twelve meetings lined up every day with hardly any breathing space between them. Somehow I also managed to respond promptly to any important request that was sent my way. 

In the process, I would forget to eat lunch, stand up from my seat, or look away from my screen. I would forget to thank my partner when he brought me tea, and sometimes I’d even forget to go to the bathroom.

At some point I realised my life had been on autopilot for a while. 

See the forks in the road in Tim Urban’s sketch below? I couldn’t point to any that I’d consciously spotted for myself in recent years, which meant I likely hadn’t consciously made any big decisions on how to orient my life in that time.

I got really worried that I’d fully lost my ability to consciously shape my life in any meaningful way, so I decided to take a sabbatical in 2022 and reclaim my agency.

Not everyone needs a clean break like me.

Some people are superheroes. 

They can dim the noisiness of the world and are able to consciously orient their work and lives as and when an opportunity to do so comes up. Going back to Tim Urban’s sketch, those people not only see the forks in the road, they also choose which way they want to go every time.

But most people don’t see the forks — and those who do often don’t have the headspace to decide which way to go, so they end up going whichever way feels most familiar.

If that’s you and you don’t want to run your business or live your life on autopilot in a world that is set up to keep you busy all the time, you have two options.

Option 1: The universe takes action

At some point something happens that makes you snap out of autopilot mode. 

That mode is pretty strong, though, and it has a lot of inertia… so that ‘something’ needs to be big enough to cause a serious disturbance in your routines 

— and unfortunately, big doesn’t always mean good. 

Maybe you have a health issue that keeps you away from work for two months. Or a competitor that launches a product that’s putting one of your major business lines at risk of collapse.

Scary. Yet this can often be turned to your advantage.

Once your autopilot mode is switched off, not only can you pour all your energy into addressing the disturbance, you can also use this forced break as an opportunity to assess how well your autopilot mode and routines were serving you. Maybe the autopilot mode is what made you blind to early warning signs of the health issue or your competitor’s moves, in which case it’s worth you regaining some consciousness so it doesn’t happen again.

I don’t think relying on the universe to intervene is a reliable option, though. It might force you to wake up, but the price could be too high. Instead, take control before something goes wrong.

Option 2: You take action — and create a container for your own renewal

Instead of waiting for the universe to magically intervene, you make a proactive and conscious decision to switch off your autopilot mode so you can figure out what you want your path to look like in the future. 

You create a container for (your) renewal, for yourself or your business.

What does it look like?

Containers for renewal take many forms, depending on your needs and circumstances.

If you’re looking to reorient your life, a container for renewal might be as small as working one day a month with a coach to reflect and recalibrate, or as big as a year-long sabbatical where you experiment with new ways of being and working.

For business leaders, a container for renewal might look like one of those two-day strategic acceleration interventions I offer, where we work together to figure out what the right way forward is for their business and how to get there effectively.

Whether it’s a small, recurring reflection or a deep, strategic intervention, these containers should be designed to meet you where you are and guide you toward where you want to be.

When do I open up a container?

Open it the moment you realise you’re getting regularly distracted by a somewhat nagging feeling that something in your routine feels off. This may show up as you feeling curious, uncomfortable or disconnected. 

Then close the container the moment you have enough clarity and energy to take action in a way that feels aligned with what your gut wants to do. Don’t stay in the container for too long or you’ll get stuck in limbo.

How do I set up a container so I get what I need?

Set it up so it gives you a sense of calm and groundedness. Away from the expectations placed by your routines and the outside world, 

Shape it with just the right kind and amount of structure to outline the problem you’re trying to solve and organise the thoughts that are already buzzing in your head. Find ways to inject fresh perspectives into your worldview to build on those existing thoughts in novel ways and play around with possible solutions to your problem. The further you are from the solution, the more you’ll need to make space for divergent thinking and experimentation.

Once you feel like you’ve played enough, it’s time to converge. Using your up-to-date views, reflect on whether you want to make any changes to your current situation — and if so how.

Importantly, take action while the decision is fresh. The energy you’ve just built up by getting clarity on the way forward is incredibly valuable. Use that energy and start making the changes you want to see!

Sure, you might miss a couple of emails while you do this, but instead you’ll be rewarded with calm, structure, clarity — and a strong sense of agency.

The emails can wait.

Switch off the autopilot. Decide what you want your future to look like.

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for my newsletter.

More about my strategic acceleration work with businesses: I work with high-achieving solopreneurs and start-up CEOs who want 100% clarity on the way forward for their business and are ready to get things done. Commit to two strategic acceleration sessions with me and watch your levels of clarity, energy and executive function increase tenfold.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

I have exciting news.

I just pivoted. Strategically.

I've always loved helping people with their sabbatical reflections and journeys — and absolutely intend to continue doing that (and writing about it here).

At the same time I've always wanted my business to be about that AND other things, so for the past few weeks I've been diving back into one of my favourite topics: business strategy. 

I've been doing some incredibly cool work to help a tech entrepreneur and start-up investor set himself up to transform his business strategically in the next few months. I'm not new to this; it’s exactly the kind of work I was doing throughout my career, usually to help Executive leaders shape ambitious-yet-realistic plans to deliver the big transformations they were accountable for.

I call this strategic acceleration — and I’ll share more on that next time.

Today, I want to talk about what to do BEFORE you move into the acceleration phase. When you're not sure which direction you want to go, and you want to figure it out before you barrel full speed in the wrong direction.

In strategy lingo, this is called the 'strategy development' phase.

Strategy consultants have made it look incredibly difficult to develop a good business strategy because it makes you feel compelled to pay them lots of money to figure it out with you (best case scenario) or for you (worst case scenario). 

The truth is, it's not that complicated. But it does take proper creative and lateral thinking to decide on a strategy that will make your business irresistible.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into how you can do that.

You have an irresistible business strategy when it's leading you to offer unique value that the market wants.

The key word here is unique. 

If you're offering similar value to the market than your competitors then customers will constantly compare you to each other. Your business won't really stick in their minds, even if you're offering the best of that kind of value.

The market remembers what's different, not what's best.

So what you want is to stand out as the ONLY option customers have to get something they want—and THAT is what will make your business irresistible.

Unfortunately you can't ask your customers that question and expect to get an answer that will directly inform a genius new strategy for your business. 

If it were that easy, your competitors would have done it already.

What you really need is:

• To understand the market space you're playing in;

• To be attuned to the DNA of your business; and

• A strong dose of lateral and creative thinking.

I'll touch on each of those points, building on some of the ideas from my new favourite strategy book, which I highly recommend you read if this is a topic you’re into right now: ‘No Bullsh*t Strategy’ by Alex M H Smith.

Understand the market you're playing in

Most markets are clustered, and companies find themselves fighting to deliver the same value.

You do not want to fight with them. What you want to do is take your business out of the cluster to offer value that your competitors are not currently offering.

Many well-known businesses have done that by giving up on serving specific customer segments that the main cluster was focusing on and instead deciding to serve a segment that had needs that were either dormant or largely being ignored.

Wholefoods changed the landscape of the conventional supermarket industry by becoming the first supermarket to exclusively serve organic products to health-conscious customers who were willing to pay a premium. 

Airbnb disrupted a hospitality industry that was very much dominated by hotels, by catering to customers who preferred accommodation that was more personalised and affordable.

If you're a solopreneur or a small business owner, I invite you to think of the market space that your business is playing in right now. Who are your main competitors? What value are they providing to the market through their portfolio of products and services? How clustered is the market? Are any competitors standing out from the cluster, and if so how?

Once you have a sense of how the market space is structured, it’s time to put your attention back onto your business. 

Shine a light on the way you want your business to stand out

Remember that to be memorable you need to be the ONLY one who is providing something that a sufficiently large number of customers want.

How do you do that?

Alex offers two options: you can 'weird the normal' or 'normalise the weird'.

You 'weird the normal' when you start from a familiar category and push your business out of that category so it stands out. This is what Starbucks did when they became the first and only coffee shop chain that also served as a third space.

You 'normalise the weird' when your product or service feels out of place when you position it in the category that feels like its natural home, and on the contrary feels truly innovative when you position it in an unexpected category instead. 

This is exactly what the juice shot company 5-hour Energy did as they started offering small juice shots with vitamins that you can drink in two gulps. If they'd positioned themselves in the juice category they would have been a useless addition to an already crowded market space—and by positioning themselves in the energy drinks category instead they normalised drinking juice shots to get energy faster than if you were drinking from a can. People loved it.

Ok great. But how does this apply to normal brands that aren't the big brands that everyone already knows because of their massive success?

Let me give you an example in the solopreneur world.

Michael is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, an awareness-based skill that helps people live with greater ease and freedom. This technique is well-known in artist and music circles and is usually taught through touch, in lessons that are held in person.

If Michael had decided to develop a traditional teaching business, he would have had to create a physical school and find local students who were interested in attending classes. This is what most Alexander Technique teachers do—and it’s hard to make a decent living out of it.

Instead, Michael managed to carve out an incredibly sweet spot for his business by both ‘weirding the normal’ and ‘normalising the weird’.

After realising that people across the globe and all walks of life were interested in the Alexander Technique, he decided to build a self-paced digital course to introduce the fundamentals of the technique to anyone who was curious about its benefits, thereby freeing himself from the obligation of opening up a physical school and working with local students exclusively.

Three years later he has more than 1,500 students, which is way more than he would have had in his lifetime if he had decided to teach in the ‘normal’ way. 

Looking back, he ‘weirded the normal’ by teaching the technique in an unfamiliar way (i.e. digitally) instead of teaching it via touch; and he also 'normalised the weird' by making what often feels like an obscure technique relevant to people who are neither artists or musicians.

It's easy to spot this in hindsight—but if you're trying to find your sweet spot right now, how on earth do you know if you should weird the normal or normalise the weird? And in what ways?

That's where the lateral and creative thinking comes in.

See if you can deliver unexpected value that your competitors aren’t delivering.

Not the kind that no-one wants of course. Instead, figure out if there's value you can offer that has always been seen as irrelevant—but is actually not. 

In his book, Alex takes the example of the home cleaning product category. Up until recently, businesses in that category had exclusively focused on making their products as effective for cleaning as possible: the ingredients included a lot of nasty (powerfully-cleaning) stuff and the packaging conveyed that effectiveness but was so ugly that cleaning products were typically hidden under sinks. 

Enter Method, who decided to use only biodegradable ingredients and make its packaging stylish. Those characteristics were completely new to the home cleaning product category. If anything is expected to be stylish it's clothes, not bathroom cleaners! Method was the only business that started offering that value to customers and it was a resounding success. 

Now think of the market space your business is playing in. 

What value are most (if not all) of your competitors focused on delivering for customers? Can you offer the value that the main market cluster is offering while delivering some unexpected value on top of that? 

And what if you took a contrarian position—and delivered less of the value that the cluster is offering and instead doubled up on an unexpected value point?

That's exactly what Nintendo did when they decided to create a console that was technically underperforming compared to Sony's Playstation and Microsoft's Xbox, but much lighter which meant it could also be handheld. The Nintendo Switch.

Whatever strategy you end up with should not be complicated.

The simpler your strategy, the more easily it will be understood by customers, and the more effective it will be.

I know, I know, it's easier said than done. 

But start with this concept of ‘unique value’ and explore not only what that might be for your business, but also whether this is something that customers truly want.

You might not be far from shaping a business that is truly irresistible.

PS — for the founders and solopreneurs among you. 

I'm trialling a new offer where I help you find the unique value that your business is offering to the market, thereby making you irresistible to your customers. This will look and feel like a mastermind session where I (i) guide you through a simple, fun and human-centred strategy development process and (ii) act as your strategy sparring partner to help you spot opportunities, stress-test your ideas and make decisions that will shape your business.

The first few workshops are going to be pretty cheap so now's a good time to do it. If you're curious, book a 20-min discovery call with me over here.

There’s a fresh intake of people who have come from LinkedIn, now that I’m a bit more present on the platform. I recognise some names—it’s good to see you here :)

In this issue, I share a couple of things on the theme of sabbaticals.

First: an exciting little quiz I created recently and launched on Monday.

Second: some thoughts about how to approach your manager to ask for a sabbatical. I wrote this in response to questions I received from people this week, so if there are things you would like me to write about next, do let me know.

Alright—let’s dive right in!

Discover your ideal sabbatical with the Quiz!

So many people who feel like they need a break from work never actually take one. The most common reason they give for not doing it is that they don’t have the headspace to think about it properly.

If that’s you—or if you know someone who keeps saying that they need a break and aren’t taking one—I’ve just created something that I think you’ll find useful.

It takes 3 minutes. It’s fun. It’s free.

It’s the Sabbatical Quiz!!

The quiz will help you reflect on your current situation and tell you what kind of break from work would likely do you loads of good right now. You'll also get a report with relevant stories and tips that is tailored to your results.

So—why would it make most sense for you to go on sabbatical?

• To shape the next phase of your life more meaningfully

• To reorient your career in an exciting way

• To dive into a project you’re passionate about

• To recharge your batteries fully

Take the quiz now to find out!

Make an offer your manager can’t refuse

Many people who go on sabbatical do so after having quit their jobs or having been made redundant. For those who go on a traditional sabbatical—the kind where you’re still employed even when you’re not at work—asking your manager for extended time off can feel just as awkward as asking for a pay rise. 

I was lucky that the conversation went pretty smoothly for me.

I had a great relationship with my boss. I’d been doing good work for the company for more than five years. I was well prepared for the conversation and I was ready to quit my job if my request was refused. The only difficulty was that my manager would struggle to replace me quickly, so I knew I might have to wait a bit longer than I was hoping to before going on sabbatical.

But honestly, having the conversation is not that complicated if you prepare for it well and if the company values your work. It might even feel pleasant. After all, it’s one of those moments where you get to shape the course of your life by tuning into what you want and then saying it out loud. It’s very empowering.

To optimise your chances that the conversation goes well, you’ll have to take three perspectives into account when you prepare: the company’s, your manager’s and yours. I’ll dive into each of those in sequence and share some useful tips.

Perspective #1: your company

Before you do anything else, check your company’s sabbatical policy:

• Do they offer sabbaticals?

• How long can you go on sabbatical for?

• How long does your tenure need to be before you unlock that benefit?

• Are there any conditions attached e.g. volunteering or studying?

• Will you have to return to a different position in the business—or yours?

I was lucky to work for a big company that offered sabbaticals as a part of the employment package. All I needed to qualify for an extended sabbatical (twelve months) was to have worked for the company for more than five years—which I had— and be comfortable taking on any job they would offer me when I came back—which I trusted would be something I would want to do.

If all the boxes are ticked in the right way for you too, that’s brilliant! Just bear in mind that the policy will certainly give your manager the right to ask you to delay, shorten or give up on your request if it puts the business at risk.

So your job—before going into the conversation—is to identify those risks and find ways of managing them. We’ll have a look at that in the next section.

If the policy isn’t in your favour, don’t lose hope. At least now you know the starting point for your negotiations and you can prepare accordingly.

Either way, download the policy and keep it at hand so you can share it with your manager to support your conversation later on.

Perspective #2: your manager

Your request is likely to create some chaos for your manager, even if they’re a wonderful human who you get along with really well.

As soon as you mention the word ‘sabbatical’ they will immediately start thinking about the impact your absence will have on the business, and how the work you’re doing now will get done while you’re away. The more unique your skillset and the quicker you want to leave, the more difficult it is going to be for them to find a good answer to those questions.

Technically that’s their problem to solve.

Dealing with your request is more complicated than replacing someone who’s announcing that they are going on maternity leave in six months, but less complicated than replacing someone who’s just quit and is leaving in a month.

Regardless, your manager will be more inclined to agree to your request if you help them solve the problem you’re creating, either partially or fully.

So put yourself in their shoes. 

First, schedule the sabbatical conversation sufficiently in advance of your intended departure date so it gives them enough time to find a solution they’re comfortable with to replace you.

Second, make sure you understand the impact your absence will have on the business: what won’t get done if you’re not around? How easy is it to replace you?

—and then shape your request so you limit that impact as much as possible while still honouring your needs.

Think of the timing.

Suggest your sabbatical starts at the end of the big project you’re currently working on. Or if the team typically experiences a lull in activity at a specific time of the year, offer to go on leave at that time—and maybe to come back before the next uptake in activity.

Also think of who could cover for you while you’re away.

Offer to train them and to prepare a comprehensive handover for them. And if it’s relevant you can present your absence as an opportunity to build resilience in the company as two people would be able to do the work you’re currently doing once you’re back, instead of one.

I knew it wouldn’t be easy for my manager to find a replacement quickly, so I told him I’d be comfortable working my entire contractual notice period (three months) and a bit more if needed.

When he asked me to work another seven months, I refused and explained that I didn’t have enough energy left in me to continue delivering at my usual standards for that much time—so we settled on five months, and I chose to use that time to re-inject another round of energy into my work, to deliver a mini-project that I ended up being really proud of. Thanks to that, I left on a high.

And now last—but not least…

Perspective #3: you

Get your story straight before you share it with your manager.

Here’s how I would structure and tell my story, if I were to do this again.

Start by expressing gratitude for the opportunities the business has given you. This will help set a positive tone for the conversation and lighten up any stress you might be feeling.

And shortly after:

Ask for a sabbatical—don’t make your manager wait too long to hear the news, that’s not cool. Don’t dive into any practical details just yet either.

Explain why this is important to you—the more you bring your story to life, the more human the conversation will be. And immediately after that show how your sabbatical will benefit the company as well—maybe you’re planning to learn a valuable skill, or you expect to come back energised and full of creativity. 

Acknowledge the disruption that this is likely to cause—no need to be exhaustive, instead simply pick a couple of specific examples to show that you understand the impact of your request on your manager and your team.

Use that to inform the next part.

Be clear about what you want, practically—tell your manager when you’d like to leave, for how long, and what role you’d like to return to. The more clarity you give your manager and the more confident you are that this is what you need, the easier it will be for your manager to respond to your request.

Ultimately you need to go into the conversation with a professional tone while being as authentic and flexible as possible.

Be clear (at least with yourself) what the non-negotiable items of your request are, and what you will do if they’re not met. That way you won’t be destabilised if your manager pushes back on part of your request.

And finally, don’t make the same mistake as I did back in 2021…

I let the conversation end with my manager telling me that he ‘would have a chat with HR about it and get back to me soon’ and I didn’t ask when that would be. I’d assumed he would be quick to give me an answer but unfortunately it took weeks (and some uncomfortable pestering from me) for him to finally get back to me.

So don’t leave the conversation without being super clear on when you can expect your manager to give you their answer. Treat this like a negotiation. Put any next steps you’ve agreed with them in writing including the date they committed they’d give you an answer by. 

That’s it.

Good luck. Have fun!

And remember: requesting what you need is an empowering thing to do.

I’m sharing thoughts on what you can do to reignite your curiosity when you’ve lost sense of what any of your interests are.

This often happens, after years of being employed and periods of intense work. It’s also one of the reasons I decided to go on sabbatical in 2022.

But before I dive in, I want to share some exciting news…

I am officially launching Thinking of a Sabbatical, the first-ever playbook that will give you the structure, space and insights you need to decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you.

This is a distillation of the useful perspectives and exercises I've stumbled upon over the past three years since I first decided I wanted to go on sabbatical. I’ve taken inspiration from my own experience of taking the leap (twice) away from employment, the extensive reading-writing-talking I’ve done on the topic as well as the 70+ conversations I’ve had with people who were thinking of going on a sabbatical or who had already decided they would.

If you’re feeling uncertain about your career, exhausted, or stuck on a hamster wheel that you know won’t stop until you retire, this playbook could be exactly what you need right now to start shaping your life more consciously and in a more meaningful way, whether you end up going on sabbatical or not.

Click here to learn more about the playbook, and use UWMTMWOA to get 20% off the standard price if you buy before Sunday (2nd June) at 18:00 BST.

And feel free to share more widely, you probably have a colleague or a friend who would feel relieved to learn this exists!

Now let’s dive into what I’ve cooked for you today.

When was the last time you felt so curious about something you could feel excitement bubble up inside of you?

If you're struggling to remember, you're not alone.

Children ask more than 100 questions an hour on average. They are intrinsically curious. As adults, many of us lose this intrinsic drive because it's buried under the weight of work and routine.

As a child, I was curious too. I spent my days reading, drawing and making (what I was adamant were) pretty objects with my hands. 

Yet by the time I started working, my curiosity levels were the lowest they'd ever been, and after a few years of working in jobs where I was fully directed by others, business objectives and bonuses, there was nothing outside of work I felt truly curious about. 

Thirteen years into my career, I felt like I didn’t know who I really was anymore.

Not only was this preventing me from consciously shaping my life in ways that I would find more meaningful, this also meant I’d likely end up staying on the beaten track until I retired, simply because I wasn’t able to imagine different and more fulfilling ways to shape and live my life.

So I started thinking of going on a sabbatical.

Something in me was really looking forward to getting stuck into whatever it was I'd feel drawn to once I was left to my own devices. Making ceramics. Baking croissants. Herding goats. Whatever it might be.

But I was also worried I'd step away from a well-paying job, a structured life and a familiar path to give my curiosity free rein, only to find out afterwards that it had nothing much to say.

This is a common fear. 

I remember speaking with Anton, who was worried he'd give up his cushy Tech job only to find himself passively watching YouTube videos, one day after the next. Helen was worried she'd spend her days knitting—and while this would likely bring her joy, it would neither be seen as useful by others nor bring any money home.

Both Anton and Helen were terrified they'd waste their time on sabbatical, and saying that out loud felt vulnerable. It felt like confessing that they weren't that interesting, deep-down.

I was terrified too. I knew I wouldn't spend much time on YouTube or knitting, but I was worried I'd fill my time doing things just for the sake of keeping myself busy, rather than because I truly wanted to do them.

Ultimately I decided I'd prefer to know I wasn't naturally curious rather than live the rest of my life without ever having made space for that part of me to show up.

So I took twelve months off.

In the first week, I packed up my flat. By the end of the second week I'd moved to Oaxaca, Mexico. And once I felt settled, I asked myself: alright, what do you want to do? 

No response.

Tumbleweed.

Turns out, curiosity is like a muscle; and not only was mine completely atrophied, I had no idea how to build it up again. Simply making space was not enough.

People often broadly suggest listening to podcasts or meeting new people at events. To me it’s like suggesting I garden with a pair of blunt scissors to cut off branches from the oak tree, and water the lawn with a sewing thimble. If I just showed up to random events I'd likely end up listening to someone talk about a topic that doesn’t light me up, and I’d awkwardly bump into people with whom I share little in common. I’d then feel less inclined to go to the next event.

The usual advice on how to rekindle your curiosity lacks specificity and nuance. And the best advice on how to amplify your curiosity doesn't work when you're starting from scratch.

Instead, I got really curious about the process of reigniting my curiosity, slowly changing my internal wirings and shaping my external environment such that they would become primed to help me on my journey to uncover and explore my interests.

It took me months to reconnect with my curiosity. And even more to feel like there was such an abundance of things I was interested in that I was unlikely to get bored or feel boring again.

It took me months because I didn’t have a plan.

Now I know what I would do if I needed to start from scratch again, and I want to share with you what’s worked really well for me.

Step 1—redirect your attention in a more mindful way

I was completely out of practice at noticing any sparks of interest inside me. They were also completely out of practice at making themselves known, after I’d been ignoring them for years. 

Separately, I had been so busy with work and life routines that I had fallen into a tunnel vision, where I filtered my environment such that I would only engage with things that were directly relevant to those routines. When I wasn’t doing that, I was often caught up in digital distractions that were capturing my attention on things that weren’t constructive or joyful. I was missing out on a whole lot of the outside world, despite the fact that it was right there in front of me.

If that sounds like you, I invite you to do two things that will help you redirect your attention more mindfully. 

First, set an intention to be on the lookout for any sparks of interest that might come up inside of you, however small they might be. Notice when you suddenly start walking faster, at an excited pace. Notice a twinkle in your eye, or when your heart skips a beat.

Then, create containers of time and space where you set an intention to expand your awareness to include more of the world around you and the signals it has to offer, and where you consciously decrease the attention you give to work, life routines and digital distractions. 

I was able to create big curiosity containers because I was on sabbatical, but if you’re looking to do something similar you can begin with brief, dedicated moments. Ten minutes. Most days.

Step 2—move and write to unclog your curiosity channels

I'm not suggesting you force yourself to move in specific ways or that you decide to write a 10,000-word essay on a specific topic. What I’m suggesting is much simpler and more intuitive.

Let’s look at movement first. 

I invite you to make space for your body to let you know how it wants to move, and if you feel an invitation to move in a specific way, accept it and see where it leads you next.

Maybe you feel like going for a slow walk while being on the lookout for birdsong, and you’ll end up noticing how your feet feel on the ground with every step you take. Maybe you feel like stretching your arms out a little bit further than usual, and then realise that that feeling that was stuck somewhere inside your chest has moved on and you’re feeling much lighter as a result. It’s often easier to notice and follow what's going on inside of you when you’re moving slowly.

As you move your body in ways that it wants to move, you will start tuning into the signals that you are getting from your body more and more intuitively. You’ll also feel your inner landscape and levels of openness change as you move in ways that release tension, and you’ll start noticing sparks of curiosity more easily, when they come.

Writing is a wonderful complement to movement. It can unclog your mind in a powerful way.

When I say writing I mean free-writing, the kind where you write without stopping for a fixed amount of time (e.g. twenty minutes) or space (three pages). A stream of consciousness.

Putting things on paper means that you are getting them out of your head. Not only does this make your ideas and feelings more salient, particularly the ones you didn't even know you had, it also calms down any internal chatter. On top of that you can then look at the ideas you’ve written down, which means you can engage and build on them more easily.

Move and write intuitively most days. 

At some point, something that sparks your interest will start flowing through you. You will be ready to not only notice it but also act on it.

If this takes time, that’s okay and normal.

Step 3—catch and amplify any curiosity sparks

Once you’ve noticed that something has sparked your interest, it’s time to double down. Usually this happens when you are moving, writing or in diffuse thinking mode i.e. when you let your mind wander as you shower, drive or look out the window.

Use the energy, the curiosity, the excitement around that spark to explore it. Maybe you feel like you'd make an amazing ceramics artist—great, go check out the nearest pottery school and arrange a trial. Or maybe you keep wondering what caused the fall of the Roman Empire—excellent, go on wikipedia and dive into that rabbit hole. 

Or capture these sparks of curiosity and revisit them later in the day or week. Simply commit ten minutes to explore and see where your explorations lead you.

Every time you do this, you’re activating your curiosity muscle.

Start small, stay consistent, and your curiosity will be stronger than it’s ever been. At that point, it will be much easier to amplify it, by attending events and listening to podcasts of course, but also reading books or learning a craft that you now know truly fires you up. And if you connect with people who are interested in similar things to you, you will likely get ten times more excited.

But getting there is likely to take weeks, possibly months if you’re not consistently putting time and energy into it. So be patient, and be kind with yourself even when you’re not seeing results.

Step 4—accelerate the process, if you want

Now you might be so impatient to go through a meaningful life change that you’re ready to throw everything you have into this process to accelerate it. Or you might feel so stuck in the urgency and busy-ness of your work that you have no energy left to dedicate to anything that is not work, and you might feel discouraged before having even started.

I have good news. You have a trump card up your sleeve.

Or maybe I should call it a sabbatical card, because taking an intentional break from work for at least three months (i.e. a sabbatical) will give you the time, space and energy you need to bring your curiosity back to life.

Clear your diary so you can engage in movement and writing practices, and follow sparks of interest whenever they come up and for however long you feel like it. 

Step away from tunnel vision so your nervous system can calm down, away from the ‘fight or flight’ mode that overworked people so often find themselves stuck in. Once the constant noise from work disappears, you’ll find it easier to notice sparks that show up inside of you.

Maybe even change your environment so that you don’t have to go looking for novelty in a familiar space. Go live somewhere with a completely different energy and culture from what you’re used to, for a while. Unfamiliar places will hit you in the face with so much novelty that you’ll be forced to engage with it, and you can use that novelty as triggers for your curiosity.

Is all this worth the financial and career risk?

I think so. Many others who have also taken the leap agree.

Going on sabbatical gave me the self-knowledge and the tools I needed to shape the next phase of my life in a way that felt meaningful to me. Even now, 18 months after I returned to work, I can feel my personal interests and curiosity guiding me every day to do things that make me feel more alive.

If I hadn’t gone on sabbatical and hadn’t awakened my curiosity properly, I wouldn’t be here writing this piece. My life would probably be very similar to the life I had a few years ago: similar job, same tunnel vision, but with more money.

If that feels scary to you, now might be the right time to play your sabbatical card. If not, you can always keep it up your sleeve and play it when the time is right.

Many of you who read me will have stood there, at the fork in the road, looking at your two possible futures knowing fully well you can't both go on sabbatical and not go. Maybe you're standing there now, and you’re realising just how difficult it can be to decide to overhaul your life, in the hope that something good will come out of it.

The module I'm making will give people who feel stuck or anxious a space where they are guided into making a decision that is aligned to what they truly want to do and who they truly want to be, deep-down.

If that's you, this will give you structure at a time when things might feel chaotic. You'll hear stories from others and get invitations to reflect, at a time when you might be struggling to calm the noise in your head and listen to what your heart has to say. And you'll find peace of mind knowing that you’re engaging with a process that’s been thoughtfully crafted by someone (me) who’s made the decision twice already, and who's guided dozens of others on their own journeys.

I know how valuable it is to hear about other people's experiences, their fears and their hopes, and how they came to a decision. So I've been recording podcast-like conversations with thoughtful humans who have already made that decision, so they can share their story and help anyone who is standing at that fork in the road.

One of the most difficult parts of the process to describe is the tipping point, the moment where you go from 'I'm not quite sure just yet' to 'hell yeah, I'm going on sabbatical'. So I asked every podcast guest to share their thoughts with me on that topic, and today I want to share some of those stories.

Sriram had been thinking about going on sabbatical for more than a year, to heal from burnout, focus on health and spend more quality time with his family. He has set money aside and wasn't too worried about how difficult it would be to find another job at the end of a sabbatical, but somehow he wasn't quite ready to take the leap.

It's only when he spoke with two thoughtful internet strangers who had already gone on sabbatical that it finally became obvious to him that he had to go. In those conversations, he shared his hopes, talked through his thinking, and felt comforted that other reasonable humans had taken the leap before and didn't regret it one bit.

There was a clear 'before' and 'after' for him.

Bruno already knew he was ready for a big life change but he wasn't quite sure what or how, so he'd been looking for new professional opportunities and new places he could move to.

He’d already heard about sabbaticals in the past but the idea of him going on a sabbatical only crossed his mind when he listened to a podcast on the topic with , and me.

As Paul, Michelle and I shared our sabbatical experiences, Bruno not only realised the change he was looking for could be in the shape of a sabbatical, something actually clicked for him in the moment, and he just knew going on sabbatical was the answer he’d been looking for.

He went on to have a few conversations with the people who'd be most impacted by his decision to take time off before making any formal decision, and as soon as they gave him their support, he started preparing for his adventure.

Yujia laughed as she told me she actually carried out a proper 'alternatives, risks, and mitigations' analysis, like any reasonable corporate person would do.

She'd had this nagging feeling inside of her that she needed to take a break but couldn't quite get herself to take the leap, despite knowing deep-down that it was what she wanted. It's that analysis that made her realise that the downside of going on sabbatical was actually pretty light. As she put it, the worse case scenario is "you lose 6 months of income and skills that you would have gained".

The downside is known but limited. On the other hand, the upside is unknown but infinite. In that sense, sabbaticals are like positive black swans i.e. they're highly impactful events which have a limited downside and an infinite upside.

For Yujia, this felt like a breakthrough, and she went on sabbatical less than two months after this realisation.

Everyone's story is different.

Yet everyone can point to a moment when the seed was planted and a moment when things clicked and they knew they had to go. The amount of time that goes by between those two moments is highly variable. For the most decisive people—like Yujia— it will only take a couple of months, and for others one or two years.

For those who are standing at the fork in the road right now, this might feel terribly long. It is—and that's because the whole process is iterative.

Also because it's a decision in which you need to involve your head and your heart. Things will only fall into place once they're both aligned.

And my advice—to anyone who’s interested in hearing it—is to best not ignore the fork in a road if it’s right in front of you.

Once the idea of going on sabbatical has been planted inside of you then it’s not going to go away. What might have started off as a light-hearted fantasy will likely become a nagging thought that you get to hear on an increasingly frequent loop, as time progresses. So you owe it to yourself to give yourself the space to properly consider it as an option, and think about how you would shape an experience that fits your risk appetite, your hopes, and your life circumstances.

The last thing you want to do is let time go by without making a decision, and end up with one of those big life regrets when you're older.

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

The kind where you're standing at a fork in the road, looking at two life paths ahead of you, knowing very well you can only live one and not the other.

I'd been working in a small energy strategy consultancy in Paris for three years and wanted to move on. I now had two very different job offers in front of me.

The first offer was in an industry I knew nothing about (home improvement retail) and for a company I only knew because I used to visit their stores with my dad when I was a kid. The company was well-loved and I’d had a great experience during the interview. If I took the job, I'd manage a small team and have my very own P&L. The role was hugely different from anything I'd experienced in the consulting world. It felt fun but also professionally risky: I'd either end up learning loads fast or failing hard.

The second offer was in the energy industry, although it was a subset of the industry I didn't know much about. Just like the other job, it was about repairing human-made assets and buildings, but this time the work needed to be done on oil and gas platforms and pipelines that were dozens or hundreds of meters below sea level. I'd start off my work doing market analyses, of which I'd already done loads as a consultant. It felt professionally safe.

The first role was in Paris, where I'd lived for the past 4 years and which felt like home. The second role was in London which I’d felt drawn to for a few years—but the idea of moving there alone far from my family and friends felt scary.

The pay and benefits were similar.

I had 48 hours to make a decision and no idea which offer to go for.

The former felt like going on a risky professional adventure in a safe personal context while the latter felt like going on a huge personal adventure in a safe professional context.

I kept going back and forth between the two.

So I talked to my parents, to friends. I made lists of pros and cons for each option. I'd feel convinced I wanted to become a great team manager and have a career in Paris. Then I'd start dreaming of walking down London’s stunning Regent Street towards Piccadilly Circus.

As the deadline approached, I started panicking because none of the conversations I was having or lists I was making were giving me a clear answer on what direction I should give to my life.

Then the deadline came. I had to decide.

So I picked the Parisian adventure, sent an email to the home improvement retailer accepting the offer, and went to sleep.

I then proceeded to have the most ridiculously difficult night I'd had in a long time. I woke up because I was feeling warm. Then because I was feeling cold. Then because I had a nightmare. Then another one. I lay in bed wide awake for a couple of hours wondering if this is what insomnia felt like.

After a night of tossing and turning I woke up feeling weirdly and wonderfully calm. Somehow I knew I had to move to London.

It was so obvious.

It's like my entire being had oriented itself unconsciously, yet wholeheartedly, onto the London path, and like it had already taken a decisive step in that direction. Paris didn't even feel like an option anymore.

Looking back on that night, it definitely feels like my body had been contorting itself in all possible ways to tell me I'd made the wrong decision. Like it was yelling “WRONG” in a loop, in the only way it could. Ultimately it succeeded in making the 'right' decision obvious to me, thereby doing what the lists of pros and cons hadn't been able to do.

That morning I rescinded my acceptance of the Paris offer, accepted the London offer, and started flat-hunting.

Ten years later I'm still in London.

I've now made a few of those Big Life Decisions.

In 2021 I decided to step away from a senior leadership role at a big company to go on a twelve-month sabbatical in Mexico and Indonesia. In 2023 my partner and I decided to move back to busy London so I could lead a cool work project. In 2024 I decided to leave the financial and psychological safety of employment to try my luck as a free agent.

While those Big Life Decisions never really get easier I do get slightly less surprised by the process now.

I used to think I needed to make the decision. I'd look at the risks sitting on either side, I'd talk to family, I'd reach out to a coach, I'd read posts written by people who'd made similar decisions to see how they'd handled it.

Just like I did in Paris in 2014.

All this is a useful part of the process.

I wouldn't want to pick a life path without having sketched out what I think it might look like. I also wouldn't want to discard a life path just because my fears are preventing me from considering it calmly and objectively.

I now also know that thinking about the decision is only part of the process.

The other part is more nebulous. It’s about letting go of the need to think through and make a decision, and about creating spaciousness around and within you so the decision can emerge on its own instead.

It's when I spent a few days on holiday in the middle of the English countryside that it became obvious to me I had to go on sabbatical.

I was sitting barefoot on the grass watching the trees dancing with the breeze as the sun was rising slowly over the rolling hills. In that moment, and for a few minutes, I felt such a blissful connection with the world around me that I knew I had to re-arrange my life so I could feel that kind of connection more. It's like every single cell of my body was inviting me to take proper time off to explore a different way of being, one that didn't involve attending intense back-to-back meetings every working day from 9 to 5.

I hadn't actively been thinking about whether I should go on sabbatical or not in that moment. Instead it felt like the decision simply emerged out of nowhere after months of actively trying to make the decision, and not succeeding.

We need both parts to make good life decisions.

The intellectual part and the spiritual part. The conscious and the unconscious.

The intellectual part consciously assesses the risks and benefits of both life paths, thereby sketching out the landscape for the decisions we have to make, and the spiritual part slowly and unconsciously uncovers the decision that feels deeply 'right' for us in that landscape.

It's like a dance between those two parts. The decision only becomes obvious after both parts feel like they've had their say.

And just like any dance, the point isn't to reach the end. The more those two parts dance together, the more you learn about the person you want to become through the lens of that big decision.

It's worth letting the music play on for a bit.

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

This is only partly helpful when you're trying to figure out whether you should go on sabbatical yourself. If you read blog posts you'll get a sense of what the authors got out of their experiences. They’re useful anecdotes, but you need loads more data points to get a sense of what your experience is likely to be. If you read a news article, you'll likely get a broad sense of the psychological and financial cost of going on sabbatical, but you won't know whether people who have gone through it themselves think the benefits outweigh the costs.

I want to know how people who have been on a full sabbatical cycle feel about having had that experience. If their sabbatical has damaged their career. If their relationship to work has changed. If they'd go on sabbatical again.

So I asked Twitter eight questions through a light-hearted Twitter poll.

Five of those questions were pretty straightforward e.g. how long was your sabbatical, how much did you spend, did you go back to your old company at the end of your sabbatical. The other three questions were invitations for people to reflect a bit more qualitatively and thoughtfully on their experience and how it had impacted both their lives and relationship to work.

The poll got 77 answers on average across all questions, and 95 if you don't count the last two questions which I added late and won't touch on here.

Not bad.

This is not top scientific research by any means but it does sketch out a picture about sabbaticals that I'd never seen before, at least not one that was data-based.

I want to share some of this data and some reflections with you.

Interlude: anyone need help deciding whether to go on sabbatical?

Deciding whether to go on sabbatical and then more recently whether to quit my job were two of the most difficult decisions I’ve had to make. It's so easy to see all the risks that come with taking either one of those leaps and much harder to picture the benefits.

I want to help others who feel stuck at that stage of the process. I'm offering pay-as-you-want 1:1 calls for people who are thinking about going on sabbatical and are struggling to make a decision. You'll be in good hands, I've done this dozens of time before.

Click here to book 30-mins with me over Zoom. And if you know of anyone who'd like to have a chat with me, do forward this on, they are welcome to book a 'sabbatical chat' too!

Back to the Twitter poll commentary.

I was lucky that my employer offered sabbaticals as a benefit and that I'd already spent enough time with them to be able to take one. I want and then came back like 22% of respondents. I worked for them another year before quitting.

I know from past conversations that many people don't have that option, particularly in small companies. Many also choose to not give themselves the option of returning to their employer by handing in their notice before they go on sabbatical. That option might feel less safe, but it makes sense to not have to think about whether you want to return or not if you already know before your sabbatical even starts that you’d be unhappy if you did.

But look at that large chunk of data at the bottom of the graph. Where do 56% of respondents go, if not back to their employer and not back to their industry?

They go on to do loads of very different things!

While a few people go on sabbatical to rest or work on a personal project, many go because something in their career or in their relationship to work doesn't feel right, and they want spaciousness to figure out what they need to change.

After going on sabbatical and exploring other ways of working and being, many end up changing careers, like my colleague Angelita, who left a career in the energy industry to become a maths teacher. Many also become entrepreneurs like Cinzia, who transitioned from the finance sector to offer retreats based on the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle.

It would also be interesting to see who ends up employed or unemployed straight after a sabbatical, and then ten years after that. I haven't seen any data on that yet.

But one thing is certain…

It seems very few people regret taking a sabbatical.

A whopping 93% of people would choose to go on sabbatical again if they could back in time, with most choosing to not change the format.

And if any of you are wondering how damaging this move might be for your career specifically, I'm happy to say that a large majority of respondents believe their sabbatical has had a positive impact on their career, with most of the remaining respondents reporting a neutral impact.

Of course, there might a post-purchase rationalisation bias behind this Very Positive Data. People who've spent twelve months of their lives on sabbatical might be skewed towards thinking and saying that this was a good decision because it's what they did and it’s irreversible. It's impossible to account for this bias, at least in this small Twitter poll.

All I can say is that most sabbatical-takers I've talked to in real life seem to be genuinely happy about what their lives look like now compared to before they went on sabbatical.

Not fake happy. Real happy.

Often they feel they better understand their motivational system and have developed the agency to shape their lives to optimise for their happiness.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case for everyone.

5 of the 76 respondents in the second graph report they wouldn't do go on sabbatical again if they were presented with the choice. The same number of respondents in the third graph (right) report that their sabbatical had had a negative impact on how satisfied they are with work more generally.

This is more than I was expecting. I've spoken to twenty or so people who have completed the sabbatical cycle from start to finish and have not met anyone yet who reported feeling disappointed by the experience. Paul Millerd, the author of the Pathless Path, has spoken to hundreds of people who have taken a career break and seems to have only stumbled upon one person who wouldn't do it again.

At the same time I'm not surprised...

So many things can go wrong when you go on sabbatical: maybe you've not budgeted enough, or you find yourself unable to structure your time well, or you struggle to find work that aligns with the new motivational system you've unlocked for yourself.

People who are unhappy with past life decisions don't tend to talk about them as much as people who are happy with them, so there's a lower chance I or Paul would end up on a call talking to them about their sabbaticals.

Short anonymous polls like this one on Twitter might draw them out, and help us sketch out a more realistic picture of the sabbatical reality.

Click here to see the results of the Twitter poll (raw data).

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

Hello everyone, I’m back!

You’re receiving this because, at some point, somewhere, you opted to receive emails from me, Cécile. That may have been via this newsletter, which used to be called On Sabbatical, or via another newsletter called Behind the Scenes.

I've decided to merge these channels so I could do all of my writing in one place. Do feel free to unsubscribe if you're not happy about this! There's a link at the bottom of this email.

I've also decided to rename this newsletter to 'Newsletter C' (for now) to allow myself to write about anything I'm interested in or feel excited about, for example:

• work sabbaticals and our evolving relationship to work

• what individuals can do to have a hugely positive impact in big organisations

• systemic change in organisations, sectors and society

• my transition in the world of free agents and creators

My intention is to publish 500-1,000 word notes on things I'm thinking about, when I feel like I have something valuable to share. Probably weekly or fortnightly.

Thank you to those who are choosing to give me your continued attention. To those who are choosing not to, thank you for having given me your attention in the past and for honouring your desire to focus it elsewhere now.

A month ago, I decided to leave a 14-year career of employed work to navigate the world as a self-employed free agent.

Making the decision to quit was hard. Harder than deciding to go on a extended sabbatical from work in 2022.

I felt like I was leaving safety for freedom.

The part of me that likes to feel safe really didn't want to let go of the comfort of having money drop into my bank account every month. It also didn't want to give up on the comfort that comes with being told what to do, rather than having to figure everything out on my own even on days where I don't feel like doing it.

But another part of me longed for the freedom to work where and when I wanted, on things that were fully aligned with what I wanted to do. It also felt super excited at the idea of creating a version of myself that had the agency to focus my attention and creative energy on things I feel curious about.

Choosing freedom felt like levelling up as a human being, at least on my timeline.

I'd successfully played the corporate game for 14 years, I was ready to warp myself from the corporate world into the world of free agents and creators.

So I quit.

It probably took me three months to make the decision to quit, and once I'd quit I still had to work another three months to honour my notice period.

Turns out leaving constrained safety for free uncertainty ended up making my last three months at work feel more like an emotional rollercoaster full of paradoxes rather than a smooth exit. Every time I attended a deeply inefficient meeting or was unable to go outside when the sun was shining, the part of me who was craving freedom would feel both deeply disrespected and comforted that I'd made the right decision by quitting. And every time I got into a pure work flow of interesting work, or achieved something really cool, I’d feel both elated and anguished that I wouldn't get to run important projects like this once I'd left.

I left work on a Monday, and on Tuesday I woke up at 06:00 with huge feelings of anxiety and feeling a crushing pressure to already be the successful free agent I had imagined myself to be. I had a hard time calming the part of me that was freaking out.

It took three weeks of transition—a week of anxiety, a week of co-living with friends in Spain, and a week of being ill—before I started feeling like I'd landed in this new world properly and relatively peacefully.

A couple of things helped hugely in bringing me peace of mind.

First, I'd been thinking about what I wanted to work on as a free agent for a while but all the ideas kept bouncing around in my head in an unhelpful and unfocused way. I took an afternoon to capture them in a very simple (analogue) vision board which now has three work pillars, why each pillar is important to me, and what my ambitions are for each pillar, practically.

Doing this cleared my head but it also gave free rein to the manager inside of me to want to start making progress, ideally by working on everything at the same time.

This is where the second piece of the puzzle comes in: Steward Brand's exquisite book 'The Clock of the Long Now', a collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking essays that promote long-term thinking and responsibility.

In chapter 25, Brand introduces the concept of finite vs infinite games, a concept he adopted from James P. Carse, a professor of religion at New York University.

According to Carse, "a finite game is played for the purpose of winning the game, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing to play the game”. Football, elections and most of business are finite games that people want to win. Gardening and family are infinite games where winning or losing isn't a thing.

As I was reading, I realised a couple of things.

First, I'd spent the past seven years of my life working for a company dedicated to playing an infinite societal game (decreasing carbon emission down to zero and then maintaining them there so humanity can flourish alongside the environment) but to do that, teams had to play a series of never-ending and intense finite games (building new electricity markets or deciding what electricity cables needed to be installed where) which were using up their energy levels fast.

I then realised that being a free agent had now become one of the infinite games I wanted to play. Of course, I'll also play finite games like building a new course module, or doing some freelance work, but I'll play those in service of the infinite game of 'being a free agent'. But in order for this to be sustainable, I need the corporate manager inside of me to stop yelling at me to Achieve More Finite Games or I'll exhaust myself, similarly to when I played my employer’s finite games.

Brand’s words and ideas seem to have come at the most opportune time because the manager in me disappeared (almost) immediately.

Looks like I lost it in the portal between the two worlds.

Now that I’ve warped myself safely into the world of free agent I now get to choose what I’m motivated by, now that there is no salary, no bonus, and no promotions.

And I choose to have fun.

As long as I have fun I'll want to keep going, and the game carries on.

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

• A (free) sabbatical panel on 27th of July where five experienced sabbatical-takers will share their thoughts and respond to questions (see picture below)

• A (free) online experience that I'm launching soon to help anyone who’s on the fence decide whether going on sabbatical is the right move for them

• An introduction to The Sabbatical Project, a website full of incredible (and free) resources for anyone who is thinking about taking the leap or has already leapt

A sabbatical panel

On the 27th of July I'm joining four other sabbatical-takers for a fun and candid conversation which you are all invited to join. On the panel you'll find:

• Paul Millerd, the author of The Pathless Path, an inspirational blog post called 'The Case For Sabbaticals', and countless tweets on the future of work

• Michelle Varghoose who shares sabbatical stories on her Substack, and is also a podcast host for a podcast called 'Build a Wealthy Spirit'

• Matt Yao who's been posting thoughtful reflections on both Twitter and his Substack 'Game of One' since he quit his job earlier this year

• Tobi Ogunnaike who's published a resourceful guide called 'How to design a sabbatical' in Every (paywall) and writes 'Wandering the Grey' on Substack

• ... and me, who went on a year-long sabbatical in 2022, returned to work five months ago and have been sharing reflections online at every step of the process.

96 people have already signed up for the call (!)

And many have already shared with us what’s on their minds… looks like we'll be talking about a variety of things like how to set intentions for your sabbatical, how to structure your time, how to handle the (perceived) stigma that comes with not working, how to manage money anxieties, how to prepare for your return to work, and generally how to turn this into a transformational experience.

Sign up [here—link removed] for this online event.

I'm really excited about this!

I’m launching a new (free) online experience!

I'm excited to say that I've been busy building a little online module for people who are considering going on sabbatical and are not quite sure whether to take the leap.

In there I cover questions like:

• How long should a sabbatical be?

• What should I do?

• How do I know I should go on sabbatical?

• I'm really worried about money!

There's 30+ minutes' worth of material in there in the form of videos and guided exercises I've created specifically for the occasion.

I expect it'll be ready in a couple of weeks... if you're interested, stay tuned!

And for those who have already decided to go on sabbatical, I'll simply encourage you to sign up for the sabbatical panel on 27th July (see above), explore the resources from The Sabbatical Project (see below), and also consider signing up for 'On Sabbatical'

‘On Sabbatical’ is the self-paced online guided journey I've created specifically for people who are taking the leap, to help them make their sabbatical enjoyable, transformational and full of life. In there you will find insightful videos, useful resources, a budding community, as well as short exercises and longer quests to help you reflect on your journey and take action in a playful and constructive way.

I launched 'On Sabbatical' a couple of months ago and have already received some wonderful testimonials from people who've engaged with it!

I’m so happy I’m struggling to resist sharing some of them here… Check this out!

An introduction to The Sabbatical Project

The Sabbatical Project is a fantastic resource for anyone who is thinking about going on a sabbatical or already on sabbatical.

The team has collected dozens of stories from people who've gone on sabbatical. Simply scrolling through the stories will show you how varied the sabbatical-taking population is, and if you read more closely you'll get an idea of the variety of sabbaticals they all went on.

Interestingly their research not only demonstrates just how valuable sabbaticals can be to individuals, but also how employers can benefit from their valued team members taking a break from work to relax, explore the outside world, and return to work more energised and creative than they were before they left. The work they're doing has the potential to change company mindsets around sabbaticals in a similar way to how the pandemic changed company mindsets with regards to working from home.

They've also written a couple of reference pieces on sabbaticals and have collated useful resources from across the internet.

I want to point out a few resources you may find useful:

• A research-based article on the transformative power of sabbaticals

• A podcast which makes the case for sabbaticals from the business point of view

• A sabbatical manifesto in the form of a book (to be published in 2023)

• A cohort-based course to accompany you on your sabbatical

I hope you enjoy diving in!

Until next time…

So many people dream of taking an extended break from work, yet few people end up doing it. 

I get it; it’s terrifying. I weighed pros and cons for months before deciding to take the leap. I was worried about spending money with no income, about my professional skills becoming atrophied, about my career taking a hit, and even about not knowing what to do with all the free time I would gain. . 

I couldn’t resolve all those Big Fears fully before going on sabbatical, so I had to take a leap of faith. Now that I’ve experienced pondering whether to go on sabbatical, deciding to go, actually going and finally returning to work, I’ve gained a lot of perspective on the topic that I’ll share with you in this issue.

But first, some exciting news…

I am launching ‘On Sabbatical’, a self-paced online experience that helps people navigate multi-month sabbaticals.

Inside is a collection of short videos with stories and insights I’ve distilled from my 12-month sabbatical and the 40+ conversations I’ve had with fellow sabbatical-takers. It also contains invitations to explore and embed new ways of being, useful resources I’ve collected along the way, and a community where you can meet and engage fellow sabbatical-takers.

Consider it like a map. I don’t tell you where to go, because your sabbatical will be as unique as you are, but I will point out interesting directions that are worth exploring if you’re looking for a transformational experience. I’ll also point out traps and challenges that you’ll end up facing, and share ideas on how you can avoid or escape them if you get stuck.  

For now, the standard price is $125, with options for lower and higher prices. I will increase the price in the future as I improve the course and as the community becomes more active, but don’t know yet when that will happen.

If you’ve been eagerly waiting for me to launch this, head over here for more details.

Now, back to those Big Fears!

First of all, it’s normal to be worried about taking a break from work for an extended period of time, particularly if you’ve never done anything like this before. Even if you’re feeling uncomfortable in your current work situation, that’s a situation that feels familiar, and it’s often easier to pick familiar discomfort over the risks of the unknown.

After all, if you’ve been following the same path in work and life for a while, you know it inside out, and you have no idea what the alternative might have in store for you. It’s easy to imagine all sorts of horror stories. Often, though, that’s just what they are: stories. 

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the stories are right and you shouldn’t be going on sabbatical. I wouldn’t recommend you take an extended sabbatical when you only have enough savings in the bank to last a couple of weeks. That’s not a sabbatical, that’s either a bucketload of stress or a fast-paced money-making adventure!

As I was talking to people who were considering going on sabbatical a few months ago, I noticed that many felt paralyzed by the same Big Fears. I’m going to name a few of them, and offer alternative perspectives to help you think about them differently.

Fear #1 - Going on sabbatical is a money sink 

Yes, going on sabbatical costs money. Sometimes a lot of money.

I spent 50% more while on sabbatical than I would have spent if I had stayed in London, which felt like a *lot* of money to me. That money went on accommodation, flights, insurance, touristing, plus local and online experiences like breathwork, tantra workshops, a leadership retreat, and a few online courses like Write of Passage.

Even worse, this doesn’t account for the opportunity costs of not having saved for a year, not getting a bonus, or not adding money to my pension pot. 

Sabbaticals can be an expensive affair, I’m not going to lie, but there are ways to make it less expensive. 

First, you don’t have to take a whole year off, though if you do opt for a shorter sabbatical, I’d encourage you to take at least six months off. People who’ve been on sabbatical report that they’ve needed at least three months to feel deeply rested, and another two or three months to start experiencing early signs of the transformation that they were going through.

Then, you can decide to live in a place where the cost of living is low. In Indonesia, rent was a quarter of what we were paying in London. If you opt for this solution, go live in an environment that is sufficiently different from your normal living environment so that new aspects of your character will feel invited to show up. You don’t have to travel to the other side of the world to find that environment, you could also find it online.

The thing is, if you isolate this Big Money Fear and look at it from a purely financial perspective, it’s hard to make the case to go on sabbatical, because the benefits are much more intangible than the costs. You know how much money you’re putting in and how much money you’re not getting from your job, but you can’t put a value on the transformation you’ll go through.

Spending money on a sabbatical is only a ‘money sink’ if you get absolutely nothing out of your experience. Speaking from personal experience, and from the 40+ conversations I’ve had with people on the topic, there’s a very low chance that this will happen. 

It’s not a money sink. It’s a transformational investment in yourself and your future.

Fear #2 - I have no idea what I’ll do with all this free time

Yes, it’s likely that you’ll get bored.

When you stop working, 40-60 hours of time are suddenly handed back to you, or 80 if you’ve been working like a maniac. Your best hours. The high-energy, high-creativity hours that you usually spend on your job. 

You might know how to fill this extra time the first week, maybe the second week, and even the third if you’re lucky, but at some point you’re likely to start feeling agitated. It turns out that dozens of hours a week is a lot to fill, particularly if you’re used to working intensely and not used to thinking about how you want to use your time meaningfully.

Four months in, I started realising that there was such a thing as having too much free time. I only knew how to put 15-20 of those extra hours to good use and got incredibly bored. I also got anxious about not putting this time I’d gifted myself to good use, whatever that meant.  

I’d known that quote for 20 years, but I’d never quite understood what Pascal meant until that moment in Mérida, Mexico, when hours and minutes were going by at a painfully slow speed.

I felt tempted to schedule a bunch of activities to fill the void. I found myself scrolling through websites offering hikes in the mountains and visits to pre-hispanic sites. I could have easily signed up for all those activities but deep-down I knew that those activities were distractions from my main quest. They weren’t the solution.

The truth is, to start thinking and being in a different way, you have to stop doing things all the time. If you keep moving at the same pace that you used to work and live at before you go on sabbatical, you won’t know how  it feels to experience life at a different pace. Your nervous system will feel just as activated by constant travelling, day trips and site visits as it used to feel from working hard day after day.

Unsurprisingly, the only way out of boredom is through. Feel what it feels like to be stuck. 

But sitting on your sofa for days (or weeks) won’t make creativity and novelty descend upon you, so once you’ve had enough feeling stuck, start moving both your body and mind. You don’t need to know where to go, you just need to move so you ‘unstick’ yourself both physically and psychologically. The two are linked anyway. You can walk, stretch, run, journal, tweet, or do all of it at the same time—whatever you feel drawn to.  

Fear #3 - My career will take a hit

Maybe.

Probably, if you try and go back to the exact same career as the one that you left behind. 

But if you’re thinking about taking an extended break from that career, it’s probably because your priorities have shifted and that career doesn’t feel right for you any more. 

Why would you want to go back to something that isn’t working for you?

Your priorities are likely to shift even more while you’re on sabbatical, and the chances of you wanting to return to the same kind of work in the same industry may not be that high.

Even if you’re taking a sabbatical not because you hate your job, but because you want to dedicate a period of time to a specific project or people (for example to spend a whole year with your newborn child), you’re bound to be quite a different person in a year’s time. 

Trust that your future self will be able to sort itself out.

Steve Schlafman stepped away from his career after making partner at a multi-billion dollar VC firm to become a professional transition coach. He writes a newsletter ( I’m sure you would love) called and he nails it in this tweet:

You won’t lose the skills that you built over years of hard work. They’ll simply go into hibernation for as long as you don’t need them, and for 90% of knowledge workers it won’t take more than a month for them to awaken again. To be honest, the only skill that I totally lost was my ability to tolerate bullshit tasks and projects—and I’ve decided that’s probably a good thing.

If you end up wanting to return to some form of employed work, you’ll have to figure out a way to distil your experience into a few talking points that the professional networks you want to join will understand. Maybe you’ve learned new skills, or you’ve built a network of useful contacts, or maybe you’re simply deeply rested and truly ready to bring energy to a new work challenge. Whatever it is, demonstrate that the experience was valuable to you and hence valuable to them as a potential employer.

Despite that, you’ll sometimes stumble upon employers that still don’t understand the value of sabbaticals. Some of them might see ‘twelve-month sabbatical’ on your resume and decide not to call you in for an interview. This is a good thing. If a hiring manager doesn’t appreciate the transformational value that comes from experiencing that, you probably wouldn’t want to work for them anyway.

For those among you who will not want to return to any form of employed work, the Big Fear of whether your career will take a hit becomes irrelevant. That career belongs to a past version of you. The current version of you can use that career to set itself up for a new phase of work and life. 

To be honest, if you leave your job to go on an extended break from work, there’s a high chance you won’t go back to the working world you left behind. A high chance that you’ll end up doing something completely different instead. If you’ve read this far, isn’t that what you’re looking for? 

What do you think? How tempted are you by taking a leap of faith?

I emerged from a good night’s sleep with thoughts of things I should be doing flowing through my head. 

The flow was slow at first… I want to complete this diagram I’m creating at work. I should talk to this colleague to solve that problem. Oh I also need to talk to the same colleague about that other point.

I could feel the flow increase steadily as I was waking up, like a mountain stream that joins nearby streams to become a more powerful river. I want to go to the market before 09:00 to avoid the crowd. I want to tidy up that bit of the living room because we have guests coming by later. I still want to complete this diagram.

The list was becoming too long for me to hold in my head when one of the passing thoughts caught my attention more than the others: Morning Pages! I should write my Morning Pages. 

I got up, with a clear intention to scribble those three pages which Julia Cameron recommends you write with a pen and paper (not a laptop) first thing in the morning, in her book The Artist’s Way. 

I write Morning Pages to channel the stream of consciousness that seems to be going on in my head most of the time. Putting some of the stream of consciousness down onto paper forces me to slow down because I can’t write as fast as I think, and capturing my thoughts means I don’t have to hold onto them in my head anymore, which creates a wonderful sense of spaciousness inside of me.

This morning I noticed that I was writing fast, as if I wanted to capture every fleeting thought in my head. So fast that some of the letters of the words I was scribbling in cursive were swallowed by the speed of my pen.

I decided to slow down, enough to give myself the time to properly write out each letter that made out the words I wanted to write. As I slowed down, I noticed I wasn’t panicking that I might lose some of the precious stream of consciousness in my head, but rather that the stream was slowing down alongside me. 

By spelling thoughts out I was calming them down, which felt a lot more peaceful than my previous strategy, which seemed to have been to let them dictate the (inhumane) speed at which I should think and be.

Slowing down allowed me to notice the warmth of a ray of sun on my ankle. It tasted of hope, like spring had finally arrived after months of gray winter. And now that my attention had been brought to my legs, I noticed that they were tightly crossed. My right leg was pressing against my left knee as if the two of them together were responsible for creating a tight container to hold onto all those thoughts that had been flowing through my head. They certainly felt like they had an important job and were obviously serious about doing it well.

I smiled to myself, uncrossed my legs and placed both of my feet on the floor. I felt like I was regaining control of my life experience. I could feel myself calm down in real time. It’s like I’d gone from feeling and thinking something new every second, to every ten seconds or more.

I use ‘feeling’ and ‘thinking’ independently as if they were separate concepts but in my experience they are very much the same. My stream of consciousness is primarily made out of feelings and colours, and very little thinking in proper sentences. Sometimes words appear in an attempt to capture otherwise fleeting feelings. Altogether, this looks like an ever-changing colourful cloud of feelings and words. The way it moves resembles a flock of birds that flies—and sometimes swiftly changes direction—in unison.   

Once my feet were solidly placed on the ground I realised I’d been holding my breath the entire time. I automatically took a deep breath in, and let myself take all the time I needed to breathe out. I felt myself slow down even further. Now I could feel myself breathe. My legs felt relaxed. I could sense the sun’s warmth on my ankle and my feet weighing down onto the floor.

I felt grounded and peaceful. The whole experience probably lasted less than ten minutes, from the moment I got out of bed to the moment I felt at peace.

I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like a spinning top

What’s interesting to me is that feeling grounded and present is not the default state I’ve seemed to wake up in in the past twelve years of my life since I started work.

Instead, I’ve mostly woken up feeling like I was a spinning top that didn’t have any other option than to spin faster and faster as the flow of thoughts and feelings I was having to engage with grew as I awakened. On days like that, the only way to get the spinning to stop accelerating was for me to start doing the things that my stream of consciousness was suggesting I do. If I didn’t, it would keep suggesting more and more things for me to do until I felt too overwhelmed to even pick a task.

The stream of consciousness always won. I would always end up picking a task and getting it done.

From the outside, managers and colleagues would describe me as ‘action-oriented’ and ‘productive’. I’d get stuff done and well. All true, but I’d not really been choosing to be that way. It was simply my habitual way of responding to an overwhelming stream of consciousness. I ‘did’ the overwhelm away and was rewarded for it.

At least that used to be my habitual way of responding until I went on sabbatical.

Going on sabbatical taught me what it feels like not to spin

Before I went on sabbatical, I was a spinning top. An overachieving spinning top. And when I left work to go on sabbatical, I cleared my diary of anything I had to do and any expectations from others, letting go of any need to spin. There was nothing for me to spin about!  

In the beginning, the spinning top still wanted to spin. 

After all, it was the only way of being it knew. If you’d been spinning your entire life, you too would probably be worried about what would happen if you stopped! You can’t stop. You’re not meant to stop. If you stop, you might not be able to start spinning again. Best not put yourself in that situation. KEEP SPINNING!

It took me a while to let things slow down, to let go of my familiar spinning ways and welcome whatever new and unfamiliar ways of being would come from not spinning.

As the spinning top was timidly slowing down, I realised that not only was nothing bad happening, but I was also starting to get a sense of the shape of the object, and its colours. What once looked like a constantly spinning blur now felt like a flamboyant piece of delicately carved wood. 

And because I was the spinning top itself, slowing down also meant I was getting to experience the world in a way that didn’t feel like a blur. A way that felt more present, aware, and grounded.

I even let my spinning top come to a halt, not knowing if I’d ever be able to spin it again like I used to. Part of me felt a bit worried in the moment… Spinning tops are a useful way of being in the world: you get things done quickly, with hardly any support, and in perfect balance with the outside world. But now that I’ve found my way back into work and city life again, I can safely say that yes, I can spin like a spinning top again. 

If I choose to.

Now it only takes a micro-moment for me to choose not be a spinning top

Going on sabbatical showed me there are other ways of being that do not involve spinning like the fastest and bestest spinning top. I now know that those ways of being are available to me. I’ve embodied them and I know they are enjoyable and safe.

Coming back from sabbatical has shown me that my old spinning ways are still accessible to me should I want to use them. Discovering new ways of being did not make the old ones inaccessible. Phew.

Knowing that I don’t have to spin to exist—and that good things can also come from not spinning—makes it easier for me to notice moments where I seem to be on the verge of tipping over into my decade-long-practiced spinning mode. It also makes it easier for me to choose not to spin in that moment, if I feel like it would be preferable for me to engage with the world in a different way.

My point is that stepping away from familiar ways of being for months has helped me unlock the ability to choose how I want to engage with the world in any given moment. 

It doesn’t take much to stop the spinning. All it takes is to notice it’s happening and to choose not to spin. But you can only choose not to spin if you know that an alternative way of being exists and is safe for you to use.

This is exactly what happened as I was scribbling my Morning Pages. All it took was for me to notice that I was spinning so fast that I wasn’t even writing my words in full. In the micro-moment I decided to write them in full, everything changed. By stepping away from my familiar way of engaging with the world, I triggered a suite of simple events which made the spinning calm down pretty effectively.

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

It had been 11 months since I’d set foot in an office.

The last time had been on my last week of work just before I left to go on a twelve-month sabbatical. And now here I was, standing outside a tall off-white building in one of the busiest areas of London, ready to chat about a cool project that I might want to take on.

I was curious about the job I was there to discuss. Not only did it feel like something I could do well, the experience it would give me was perfectly aligned with where I wanted to take my work. 

One thing was certain, though. Even if it was the most interesting job in the world, I wouldn’t take it if it were  full-time. I wanted to work four days a week, no more.

I’d been working full-time for more than a decade

As I waited at reception, I reflected on how different I was compared to before my sabbatical.

I used to work full-time which, contractually at least, is 37.5 hours a week.

I don’t think I’d ever worked a 37.5-hour week in the last five years of my career. The bare minimum was 45 hours. More often than not, I would work 55. There were periods where I’d work 80 hours a week because the job required it. That’s more than double the hours I was technically contracted to work! There was a clause in my contract that made it all okay, though. Legally, at least.

There are 168 hours in a week, 112 waking hours when you discount eight hours a day for sleep. On a normal working week, I was spending roughly half of my waking hours working, which meant that I could spend the other half exercising, seeing friends and family, and doing general life admin.

That doesn’t sound too bad, but the problem with that way of thinking is that it’s not time you need to factor in this equation, it’s energy. 

While it’s true that I was ‘only’ spending 50% of my waking hours at work on a normal working week, I was actually spending closer to 80% of the energy that was available to me in a week on work. Sure, I could technically spend my evenings and weekends on whatever I felt like doing, but I’d often feel like resting following a heavy working day, or because I knew the following week was going to be particularly intense.

In those 80-hour a week months I pushed the concept of ‘full-time work’ to the extreme, spending all of my energy on work. I was even borrowing some of that energy from my future self, knowing fully well that I’d end up having to take leave to recover.

At some point, it hit me.

By signing a ‘full-time work’ contract, you are committing to spending 37.5 hours per week at work at the times of the day when you are naturally the most awake and effective. You aren’t really committing your full time to work otherwise you’d be spending all your waking hours working, but you are committing your best hours and your full energy to work.

There are no full-time jobs, but there are many full-energy jobs out there. Some might say it’s semantics, but calling it a full-energy job would make it clear what you are expected to do once you sign the contract.

I took an extended break from work

Taking a step away from work for an extended period gave me the space I needed to spend time and energy on other things than work. 

In the beginning I was so used to not having much energy to spend on my own stuff that I didn’t even know what to do with this big bucket of energy that I now had access to. I wasn’t feeling strongly driven to do things now that I wasn’t working anymore, which made it even more obvious to me how much of a ‘worker’ I had become. An excellent worker, sure, but a worker nonetheless. 

I felt terrible. Imagine if that had been my way of being in the world my entire life… maybe that’s what my epitaph would have read.. “Excellent worker. Delivered an incredible amount of value to shareholders.”

I shivered at that silly thought and felt grateful for having given myself a chance to take a break away from the whirlwind of work to shape the next phase of my life more intentionally.

As my sabbatical unfolded, I learned how to follow my curiosity and ended up rediscovering long-lost facets of myself and unveiling new ones. Like an archeologist who’s progressively and carefully uncovering an old mosaic that had ended up being buried in the ground over time.

By the time my sabbatical came to a close, I had discovered many new facets of myself that I wanted to keep giving more of my attention to. I felt like they were an important part of my character and I was adamant that I wanted them to live on, even if I ended up taking on a job again.

As it turned out, I was interested in taking on a job at my old company. A meaningful and fast-paced project that would give me useful experience to build the future I was imagining for myself, and that would bring a bit of stability after twelve months of being entirely self-directed.

But I didn’t want to define myself as a worker again. 

I was slightly worried that joining that fast-paced project would trigger my old workaholic habits and quickly decided that I would put clear boundaries around the project to protect the other parts of me that had nothing to do with it. I wanted to be a person that happened to have a cool job, not be the cool job.

So I decided to accept the project as long as my employer was happy with me working four days a week instead of five. I also decided to pace myself on working days such that I would still have energy left to give to other parts of myself once the working day was complete. 

Returning to work part-time was the best decision I ever made

I’m now two months in. Reporting back. I’m working four days a week, and not a week goes by where I don’t thank myself for having made that decision.

Being paid less than my colleagues who work more hours than I do gives me permission to stick to working 80% of their hours. It would be ridiculous for me to work full-time hours while only being paid for 80% of those.

Because I spend fewer hours at work, I can’t afford to do any work that is not genuinely useful. I spot ineffective meetings and useless tasks from a mile away and don’t engage with them.

I have less time and energy to spend on my own stuff compared to when I was on sabbatical. As a result, ‘my’ hours feel even more precious than they used to feel when I had an infinite amount of them on sabbatical, and I feel regular waves of gratitude for having given myself the clarity and motivation to use that time well.

I have projects of my own that I want to play with when I’m not at my job, and I spend the extra time I’ve gifted myself every week on them. This means that it’s easy for me to not let a bad day at work define me.

I am not my job. I am a full individual with a rich identity and a variety of interests, who happens to have chosen to spend part of their energy on this job.

Best decision ever.

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

I laughed. I’d never thought of myself as a ‘sabbatical consultant’, but as she said it, I realised that there was probably some truth there.

In the past six weeks, I’ve spoken to a bit more than forty people about sabbaticals. Half of those people were thinking about taking time off work, a third had already taken the leap and the rest were actively planning their upcoming time away, trying to figure out how to “make the most of it”.

That’s roughly 30 hours of uplifting conversations in which I was given a window into people’s lives, their unique and complex love-hate relationship with work, their excitement at stepping off their familiar life path, and their fears at the idea of diving into the unknown. 

65% of the people I talked with were calling in from the US, 15% from India, 10% from the UK. Half men, half women. They were coming from everywhere in the business world, from big corporations like Samsung and top consultancies like Bain to start-ups and not-for-profits. Some were software engineers and product managers in tech, others worked in finance, strategy or marketing roles. Some had only been working for a few years while others had been thriving in the business world for twenty years until something started feeling so off inside them that they could no longer ignore it. 

Every single one of their journeys was unique. 

It felt obvious to me that each of them had unique gifts to share and that taking proper time off work would allow them to grow and unleash them.

When I started talking about using movement to reconnect with our bodies such that they can help us make decisions that feel truly aligned with our deepest wants, Zoe, a professional dancer turned marketing professional, lit up. It reminded her of the Feldenkrais technique that is used in dancing, where dancers lie on the floor and tune into their bodies until their intuition guides them into moving—and they follow that intuition, sometimes for hours at a time. The deep connection she had with her body was stunningly obvious to me, even through Zoom. I felt energized and more connected with myself after speaking with her for 40 minutes. 

Amit was only a couple of months into his sabbatical, but he had been churning through the to-do list he had set up for himself at the start of his sabbatical. He’d done loads, yet felt neither refreshed nor content. If anything, he felt just as exhausted than on the day he left work. He realised through our conversation that he had been keeping himself incredibly busy because he was worried that not working would make him lazy. But the busy-ness he was imposing on himself and his fear of laziness were precisely what was keeping his curiosity away from guiding his explorations. 

Julie and I riffed on how spending time in nature makes us feel grounded and alive. The day after our conversation, she went for a long walk somewhere in California early in the morning, shared a gorgeous picture of the hills she was exploring on social media and went on to have a creative and productive day. Her post inspired me to do the same thing the next morning—albeit in London, where it was slightly less sunny—and to write a few thoughts on how powerful nature can be in helping us regulate our nervous systems.

After forty calls, I’ve realised I can help in a better and more sustainable way.

These conversations gave me the energy and the inspiration to create something that I know will help people shape their sabbatical in a way that feels aligned with who they are deep-down, independently from the job they’ve just left behind.

I’m building a self-paced ‘guided journey’ that covers everything I’ve learned about sabbaticals from my own and others’ experiences. My long term plan is to create a series of modules covering each part of the sabbatical journey over the next few months, from the moment you start thinking about going on sabbatical, all through the sabbatical itself and up to when you start thinking about returning to some form of work.. 

I’m planning on releasing the first of those modules, ‘On Sabbatical’, in a few weeks.

In this module, you’ll find structure you can lean on when you feel you’re going adrift, pointers towards exciting explorations that have helped fellow sabbatical-takers shape their journeys in a meaningful way, guided exercises to help you reflect at critical moments, and a wealth of resources that are bound to ignite your curiosity. You’ll also find comfort in the fact that the challenges you are facing are challenges that others have faced before and there is a way around them, although usually the only way out is through.

Last, but not least, many of the people I’ve spoken with have reported that one of the toughest bits they have found about being on sabbatical is that they often feel misunderstood by their families and friends, so I’ve also decided to build a community of people around the course so that you can meet others who are on similar journeys, share stories and cheer each other on.

I’m planning to release early access to the ‘On Sabbatical’ guided journey to people who follow this Substack in the next ten days.

Independently from that project, I’ll write about a few common threads that came out of those forty calls as well as some of the common stories we seem to be telling ourselves that stop us from immersing ourselves fully in the sabbatical experience.

Stay tuned. I’m excited about this!

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

When I turned seven, my parents started giving me pocket money. Not much, it was something like a pound a week, just enough for me to learn that I could trade money for things that I wanted. I could either spend it immediately on sweets or save up for weeks to buy a more expensive thing, usually some kind of toy. 

I was a natural saver. 

I slowly amassed the pounds into a neat little pile at the back of a shelf in my room. 

I’d sometimes give in to the temptation of spending some of the money on sweets. The pleasurable sugar-rush was short-lived and it was almost always followed by a lingering feeling of guilt. What if I ended up wanting to buy something I really wanted later on and I was missing precisely the amount that I’d just spent on sweets?!

A few years later, I got myself a piggy bank. I wasn’t at risk of spending my coins on sweets anymore (phew) but I was spending some of it on CD singles… this would sometimes trigger the now-familiar feelings of guilt. 

In the first twelve years of my career, the unconscious money script that was running in my head was simple: I spent very little and saved as much as I could. Any unnecessary spending felt bad and wrong. Why spend now when ‘future me’ might need it for a house deposit? Or when ‘future me’ might need a buffer after being made redundant and struggling to find another job?

I saved money up in the bank like squirrels bury nuts in preparation for winter. Of course I sometimes ate some of the nuts instead of burying them, but not many. I'm sure squirrels do that too.

***

By the time I turned 35, after years of hard work, career progression and increasing pay, I had a house deposit. But instead of looking out for the next promotion and thinking of buying a house, like I’d always thought I’d want to do, I felt a calling to stop working so hard. I wanted to step out of the ‘always-on’ mode that comes with having an intense full-time job and give myself space to follow my own curiosity wherever it led me, at least for a while.

I started thinking about what I would do if I went on sabbatical…

I wanted to live in another country, learn a language and explore the local landscapes, culture and cuisine. I wanted to start writing and publishing online. I was curious about design and video-editing. I’d also spotted a few online courses that I wanted to go on.

As my excitement was ramping up, so was my internal agitation.

This meant I'd have to buy flights, visas, and probably vaccinations. I'd also have to spend a decent amount on accommodation if I didn't want to end up living in a place that made me feel miserable. I'd probably need to buy myself a proper laptop. And the courses I wanted to go on were not cheap.

I estimated I would probably end up spending something like 30,000 USD over twelve months.

Ouch.

That would make a serious dent in the house deposit I had spent years amassing conscientiously. It felt indulgent, unsafe and wrong, and it certainly went against the script I'd been religiously abiding by for decades. 

***

I could feel myself being very protective of the money.

Up until now, the money had just been a number on a bank statement. When the number went up, I felt safe and happy. When the number went down, I felt vulnerable and agitated. But the number had never really gone down meaningfully, so I had never felt meaningfully agitated.

For the first time ever, I was feeling *hugely* agitated. 

And vulnerable like I’d rarely felt before. 

In my mind, the abstract number on the bank statement had now become a big and shiny pile of gold. I felt so strongly about keeping that gold right where it was that I was visualising a dragon sitting on top of the pile, protecting it from the most dangerous of intruders: me. 

I really didn't want to spend a large chunk of that ‘dragon pile’ on a sabbatical that might yield nothing in return.

***

It took me a few months to calm the emotions and disentangle the old script that was running in my head. 

I wasn’t sure how to address the problem so I didn’t tackle it head on. Instead, I carried on with my life and made sure to give space to the excited part of me who wanted to go on sabbatical explorations to express itself. I also gave a similar amount of space to the scared part of me who wanted to keep accumulating money (and safety) month after month.

Over a few months, I signed up for a neuroscience course by Harvard EdX and had fun learning a bit more about how our brains and bodies work. I participated in an online workshop in which I was guided to reflect about my life goals as well as the steps I could take to progress towards them. I bought the Life Calendar by Wait But Why for $20 where each circle represents a week of your life and each line represents a year, and proceeded to colour in the weeks I’d already lived. 

All of those things felt useful. But they didn’t help me scratch the itch.

***

It’s only when I stumbled upon Tim Ferriss’ fear-setting exercise that something clicked in me. 

It’s a powerful exercise, based in Stoicism, where Tim invites you to address your fears head-on through a masterfully-crafted three-step process. You can apply it to any decision that you feel reluctant to make. In the context of that decision, you list your fears, you figure out how you’d prevent them from happening or how you’d repair the situation if they did and, importantly, you write about what the future would look like if you didn’t overcome your fears and didn’t make the decision.

I reached out for a pencil and notepad, calmly wrote ’should I go on sabbatical?’ at the top of a blank page, and started scribbling my fears down, bullet point after bullet point. 

As I made my way through the exercise, it became obvious to me that I was letting myself be run by my fears of bad things happening at some point in the future. I could lose my job. I could become chronically ill. The money I had invested in stocks could come crashing down unexpectedly. Or all at the same time.

In my mind, ‘dragon pile’ was there to protect me from those bad things. 

It made me feel safe. 

But there was only so much ‘dragon pile’ could do, really. It couldn’t actually keep me safe from some of the bleak futures I was imagining, like being diagnosed with a serious health issue. 

Once I’d reached the conclusion that I couldn’t solve all future bad things by piling up as much money as I could in a savings account, I felt both disappointed and relieved. Disappointed that I couldn’t protect my future self from all the bad things that might come up. Relieved because I was now free from trying to solve a problem that couldn’t actually be solved. And free to trust my future self that she could take care of herself too.

That’s when another thing clicked in me.

***

I’d been working so hard over the past few years. I wasn’t exercising consistently because I was too tired from work. I was using sugar as fuel for energy whenever I felt down or tired. I’d also been socialising less because of work and the pandemic.

I had money but I was stressed, energy-depleted, and running on sugar and adrenaline.

If I was made redundant, ‘dragon pile’ would make the process of finding a new job less stressful because I’d be able to pay rent and bills for a long time before it became a problem. But my levels of stress (high) and energy (low) would definitely make networking and interviewing much harder. 

The process of accumulating money was actually making me more likely to need that money in the future.

If I wanted to be able to trust my future self that she could take care of herself in a healthy and open-minded way, I needed to make sure that I was taking care of myself right now. 

I’d been investing in ‘dragon pile’ for such a long time, it was time it returned the favour.

***

In the end, I spent more than 30,000 USD during my sabbatical. 

On most of those spending occasions, the dragon would happily lift her protective tail to let me grab the gold coins I wanted. It felt like she was protecting me rather than the pile of gold, which was a nice change.

I spent 1000 USD per month on accommodation in Mexico and Hungary to live in welcoming homes located in neighbourhoods that were central and safe. This only cost 350 USD per month in Indonesia but I spent just as much money in three days on a hotel in Singapore en route.

I spent less than 1,000 USD on return flights to and from Mexico and the same amount on the single ticket that would take me back to Europe from Bali. I paid 300 USD to rent a scooter in Bali for six months and 500 USD to secure a 6-month visa. I signed up for various online courses which cost anything from 25 USD for a 20-day email design course to an eye-wateringly-expensive 4500 USD for Write of Passage, a brilliant writing course.

Any money that felt like an investment in myself was money that I felt not only happy but encouraged to spend. 

I wasn’t always happy to spend, though… 

I frowned at the cost of our three-day stay in Singapore. I tutted at the 200 USD birthday dinner that had turned out to be underwhelming. I also emitted some sort of annoyed grunt when paying 1000 USD on some flights that would have been much cheaper if I’d booked them earlier than I did.

The only time I felt meaningfully agitated was when I was trying to figure out whether I should spend 4500 USD on Write of Passage or not. That was a lot of money to spend in one go, when I didn’t know how much value I would get out of it. It took me a few weeks to calm the alarm bells that were ringing inside of me and to decide the course was a worthwhile investment if I wanted to make meaningful connections online through my writing.

***

Now that I’m closing off the sabbatical chapter, I’m curious how my relationship with money will evolve.

Interestingly, I’m quite reluctant to spend. It feels like I need to prove to myself that I still know how to bring money in after demonstrating for twelve months that I am now fully skilled at spending it. 

I started a new job in February and money will start coming in regularly, which will help with that.

And then? 

I think I’ll be more relaxed…

Sure, ‘dragon pile’ is now smaller than it used to be but the money I spent on my sabbatical has made me much more confident in my abilities to tackle any Big Life Problems creatively and with energy. I am healthier than ever, I learned new skills, and I made friendly and business connections all over the world. 

I don’t feel the need to hoard money any more. I trust myself to spend. I also trust that I will be healthy and strong enough in the future to be able to make any money I need.

(Photo by Ryan Moulton on Unsplash)

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience

Since my partner and I had landed back in London after spending six months in Indonesia, we’d been staying at friends’ houses while they were on holiday. 

While I’m incredibly grateful for having such generous friends, their houses were not our house. We lived out of our suitcases. We were cautious with their belongings so that nothing ended up out of place, or worse, damaged. And when our friends came back from holiday to their home, we tried to make ourselves scarce so that they wouldn’t feel like they were being invaded.

Being able to live in London without having to stay in an expensive bland hotel felt good. Yet it also felt incredibly disempowering to be a guest in my own home city, particularly at a time when we needed to sort out a bunch of high-stakes life admin that required me to demonstrate high levels of decision-making and agency. 

In the weeks that we spent living in friends’ homes, I was figuring out whether I was going to commit to a new job or not, negotiating a specific job offer that had sparked my interest, deciding whether we wanted to stay in London or move to one of the commuter suburbs, and ultimately flat-hunting in an incredibly competitive rental market where rent was almost $1,000 higher than when we had left London.

I was living a whole lot of life in a very short period of time, and so busy that I felt I didn't have time or headspace to sit down and write anything I could share with the world. 

***

Two weeks later, all the urgent life decisions had been made. 

I started writing this piece from my parents’ house in Brittany, France, where I was spending the last ten days of my nomadic travels before I moved back to London permanently and started a new job. 

After having spent the past year of my twelve-month sabbatical living in Mexico, Hungary, Singapore and Indonesia, I was very grateful to be able to spend time in my home country, in a region I’d spent all my childhood holidays in, and in a house that I knew like the back of my hand. 

Nothing about this place was unfamiliar or scary. I could meet all my essential needs with very little friction: I knew where to find food, I knew how to get to the beach and the shops, I had found a space where I can exercise, and there were a bunch of tables around the house on which I could put my laptop on and immediately start working. A far cry from having to get used to driving a scooter around Bali immediately after landing on the island so that I could buy food and a local SIM card, or from having to speak Spanish for the first time in my life at the local market in Mexico to get a hold of enough vegetables for lunch.

For me, being in Brittany was like playing the nomad game on ‘easy’ mode. 

I had decided I would use this time to write a short series sharing some of my experiences while on sabbatical from the corporate world. So on the second day after we arrived, I found a small room in one of the corners of the house and sat down at a desk with my laptop, hopeful that words would simply start flowing.

But they didn’t. 

I was struggling to get words out. 

There was still something standing in my way… and I wasn’t sure what it was so I kept trying. And failing. Words came out incoherently. I bounced from one idea to the other, losing any sense of focus I had managed to build. I got distracted by feelings to the point that I would lose my train of thought.

***

Feeling unsettled is a familiar pattern I’ve experienced many times during my year of nomadic travels. Many times that feeling has prevented me from being able to read, write or do any kind of creative work.

And it makes sense! Getting used to a living environment takes time. 

It would take me two weeks on average to get used to a new place that I was discovering for the first time. Two weeks to get used to the roar of heavy duty diesel trucks from the 1960s driving past our flat in Oaxaca, Mexico. Two weeks to get used to driving a 150cc scooter in heavy Bali traffic while avoiding stray dogs and unexpected potholes. Two weeks to get to the point where my nervous system would stop being hypervigilant.

It never took as much time for me to get used to environments I already knew well, but I’d still have to go through some form of transition to get to a point where I was sufficiently settled in a routine such that my creativity would start emerging again. I had only just arrived in Brittany, and I was also still feeling wired from all the life-shaping decisions I'd had to make in the previous couple of weeks. I was probably expecting too much from my writing too quickly. My nervous system was still in hypervigilant mode.

***

As the days went by and my nervous system slowly returned to its baseline, my writing slowly unblocked itself. Too slowly to my taste. 

This slow process reminded me of something I’d learned as I was doing increasingly creative work like writing and designing while on sabbatical. Creativity doesn’t just appear on command, even if the environment is favourable. To me, creativity is like a muscle. You need to train it to see it grow. And you need to grow that muscle before you can visibly flex it.

As I was sitting at my desk in Brittany, I realised that the busy-ness of the past few weeks had not allowed me to do much creative work in a while… Yet there I was, expecting the same extraordinary levels of creativity as the ones I’d experienced during the most creative phases of my sabbatical. 

My expectations were even higher than usual because I was worried that the new job I was about to start would make it hard for me to keep doing my own creative work on the side. 

I wanted the last phase of my sabbatical to be an explosion of creative output, and I was trying to grind my way through my writer’s block knowing very well that the only thing this would lead me to was a miserable halt.

I felt disheartened. 

***

I still do. But I also feel like I need to do something to get out of this disheartening swamp. Something to make space for my creativity to express itself both now and once I had started the new job. 

So I’ve just made a few promises to myself.

First, I am building a daily writing habit, which is something I’d been meaning to do for a while. Minimum fifteen minutes of writing every day, within the first two hours of waking. This will allow my mind and body to get used to writing as a means to work through ideas and feelings consistently again.

I’ll also publish at least one post a week on a substack I’m creating for this occasion. Minimum 500 words. Publishing will help me connect with others and is an invitation for them (you!) to build on the thoughts I am sharing. Writing for and with a community will motivate me to write more than if I was simply writing for myself.

And I will not put pressure on myself to be creative. I recognise that my creativity flywheel has come to a halt and I will slowly but consistently put in the work that’s required to get it going again. Bit by bit. Every day. Hopefully it’ll be spinning with minimal effort by the time I start my new job.

In the meantime, I will find joy in the process I am starting now. Even if my writing is not where I want it to be, I’ll enjoy it because it means that I’m flushing out the dirty water from the pipes so that crystal-clear and clean water can start flowing through them again when the time comes.

I look forward to having you along on this journey! 

Onwards.

Want to read or hear more from me?

You can check out my website and sign up for this newsletter.

More about sabbaticals: whether you're thinking of going on an extended break from work or you’ve already taken the leap, you are right in the middle of an experience that can transform your life in a truly meaningful way. It’s exciting of course, but it can also feel scary, lonely and a bit overwhelming at times.

I’ve created two playbooks to help you on your journey:

• Thinking of a sabbatical will give you everything you need to consciously decide if going on an extended break from work is the right move for you

• On Sabbatical is a self-paced digital experience with insight, structure and resources to turn your sabbatical into a life-changing experience