Recently, I took a career break that was four months long. It started with simply realizing that I was more interested in pursuing personal growth over professional growth as my next step after one of my main freelance consulting contracts concluded. Thus, I decided to take one month off of career work and see where things took me.
This took me down a journey that I couldn’t have imagined at the start, with many twists and turns, including very positive and meaningful experiences of personal growth that feel hard to describe in words. At the end of each month, I reviewed how that month went, evaluated if it made sense to take another month off from a personal growth and financial standpoint, and set intentions and focus areas for the next month.
As I’ve started back up with pursuing career opportunities again, I hope to reflect on my learnings from my time off, give words to some of these experiences that I had, and carry the lessons learned with me into my future.
To give context on where I was at when I started on this journey of taking that first month off, I felt way better off on every level compared to how I felt during my last career break in the summer of 2022. My mental health was better, I had a stronger sense of self-worth, a stronger sense of community in having fellow friends on career breaks, and was in a better position financially too. This made it a lot easier to embark on this journey, and being able to personally witness and feel the growth I had undergone since the summer of 2022 made it all the more fulfilling.
My Career Break Focuses
Writing more
In the months I was working before my career break, something that I kept wishing I had the capacity and time to do was to write more. Thus, I started this Substack that you’re reading now, took an online writing course, and started to write more consistently during my career break.
While I started with just having a few pieces I had been hoping to write, I got something much greater through my adventure into writing more. I learned to become a better writer through the writing course, felt more like an artist than I had in a long time, and felt a deeper sense of connection with others at scale through sharing and discussing my writing. As a result, I counterintuitively felt more connection to others by saying no to some social events to spend more time alone writing.
Initially, I had the intention to write narrative-type pieces sharing my past experiences (like staying on an off-grid farm for a week), but I also ended up finding myself venturing into the beauties of creative self-expression and sharing new ideas too.
Joining The Commons
One of the most important developments that came out of my career break that also wasn’t initially planned was joining The Commons. The Commons is a “community living room” in SF that serves as a coworking space during the day, and turns into a college campus for adults on evenings and weekends with various social events, gatherings, and workshops.
I’ve written previously about how joining the Commons was one of my top 3 experiences of 2023. Truthfully, the positive impact of the Commons on my life has been hard for me to put into words. Overall though, I’d say that the Commons has made me feel a sense of aliveness and belonging that I’ve probably only felt in one or two other communities. It has also served as a great environment for me especially as I embarked on a career break focused on personal growth.
An important part of my Commons experience during this time was Explorer’s Guild, which consisted of a group of people in an exploration phase (many on career breaks as well) that met weekly for various activities and group conversations in a supportive space. At the first meeting, I was in a group conversation where I felt the highest sense of self-worth I had ever felt while not having a job. This felt significant given the challenges I had in my 2022 career break behind my struggles to detach my career from self-worth. And while it’s hard to fully describe in words, my experience seemed to only get better from there.
I felt like we created this special environment where the people who were further along on their career breaks were the most respected, rather than the ones who had the fanciest-sounding position title at the most prestigious company or the ones who were most financially wealthy or most “busy”. My fellow friends on “sabbatical” were the ones who dared to go against societal norms, follow their hearts, and live a life most authentic to their values in this finite life that we have to live. The ones willing to dive into the harder inner work of examining and improving oneself for the long run. I felt like I was able to meet more cool people on sabbatical than I’ve ever met, and had more of a sense of community around it than ever before.
More generally too, I was able to meet and socialize and cowork with truly inspiring people. I’ve had moments coworking at the Commons where I felt in awe of the people walking through the door because of how much I respected and admired them.
All of these positive experiences with the Commons community definitely contributed to me extending my sabbatical. The community of other inspiring people on sabbatical and all of the meaningful community events made me feel like I wanted to double down in investing in my personal growth.
Looking back now at my sabbatical a few months later, I can see the power of the Commons community and its positive impact on my life. It gave me new highs I didn’t know were possible, and served as a buffer to pick me back up during my most challenging times - whether it be someone trusting to talk to, or actionable advice. While it’s hard for me to imagine my life without the Commons now, the reality is that joining the Commons itself was a bet that I made at the start of my sabbatical that was enabled by the extra space I had to try new things as a result of taking a pause on career work.
Inner work on self-trust
The inner work I engaged in around self-trust during my sabbatical is what I believe to be the most important work I did. At the same time, this work also happens to feel the hardest to articulate in words and the least possible to tangibly measure.
Self-trust was the overarching intention I set for myself during my sabbatical. I realized that while it was going to be hard to predict exactly where my explorations would take me, the important thing was that no matter where I ended up, I hoped that I would improve my ability to trust myself and be okay with simply being kind to myself no matter how things ended up.
While one’s level of self-trust can be hard to quantitatively measure, upon a personal reflection 2.5 months into my sabbatical, I wrote in a journal writing and shared at the final Explorer’s Guild circle at the Commons that I felt that I had developed the highest sense of self-trust I’ve ever had, and that I was only getting started. I further wrote that “In terms of how this self-trust plays out in practice, I’ve just felt more secure about following my explorations and passions without a specific end goal in mind, and just enjoying the process and trusting that the dots might connect somehow in the future.” During this time, I also had moments where I’d feel a tremendous sense of feeling extremely full, happy, and free in ways I’ve rarely felt before, especially while not working a job.
While my former self (that was largely conditioned by academic and career success) would find not having a specific end goal in mind and talking about feeling free while not working a job to sound irresponsible and worrisome, my heart felt called to try a new approach rooted in self-trust. I feel that for most of my life I’ve tried to have a clear plan, but eventually it came to the point where the rigidity of those plans and my lack of self-kindness and self-trust felt like the biggest blockers to my manifesting my most authentic dreams. The draw of this new approach included how I felt the adult world I lived in seemed to have so many more components outside of my control that life would inevitably throw at me, compared to the more structured and sheltered academic environment of my childhood living as a dependent to my parents.
There’s also a quote I read in this piece online that puts words to some of this topic that not having a plan can actually mean you’re aiming higher: “To actually accomplish at your full potential, you have to start doubling down on particular bets long before you know that you can follow through. You won’t see the whole path when you begin. You will have no way of knowing whether it exists, or whether what you are pursuing is even possible. If you have more certainty than that, you aren’t aiming high enough. You have to bet your life on faith that the universe will provide if your vision is good enough.”
Miscellaneous
Outside of my main personal growth pillars of writing more, joining the Commons, and inner work on self-trust, I also felt more space to explore many other avenues and plant seeds for the future. In my experience of taking career breaks, I’ve found that the extra space made from not working allows me to try and make bets on way more endeavors than if I were working. As an example, I might be able to try 10 different new pursuits and have 2-3 of them end up changing my life. I wouldn’t have known which of those 2-3 would have ended up changing my life though until I actually tried each of them. Joining the Commons was an example of this.
Some other things I was able to do included going on more solo nature hikes, reading whatever interested me the most, getting COVID for the first time and using that opportunity to “be” and trust myself, having more time to spend with my sister over the holidays, and having more space to figure out more “adulting” responsibilities that I previously had little patience for. As I mentioned in a previous article about my 2022 career break, “While none of these pursuits are technically impossible to do while working a full-time job, I felt like I had a lot more capacity to explore and experiment on my terms, and allow little possibilities to have the space to blossom into big actualizations.”
Just as important as all of the pursuits I tried were the ones I said no to that didn’t feel as aligned. I tried to use a framework of “Hell Yeah or No”, focusing on the activities that were a “Hell Yeah” for me to do. This was especially helpful since I realized that while on sabbatical, everything suddenly feels like it becomes an option with the space that opens up and it can feel overwhelming. Saying no and focusing on the things that aligned most with me helped on this front.
My Lessons Learned
There are so many lessons that I learned from my sabbatical that it’s hard to tell where to start. The top two that stick out though revolve around topics of balance and money. An important component behind both of these lessons is that they both started as challenging moments that catalyzed me to investigate what was going on, learn from them, and develop a new tool or mindset that ended up being really helpful for me in the future.
Balance
During my sabbatical, I learned the importance of managing my time and energy on a day-to-day basis, and in particular how important finding a balance between different tasks and activities was for me. I felt I was at my best when I was able to do one type of activity for 1-2 hours, come to a natural stopping point, and transition into something else. An ideal day might have consisted of doing a session of writing, switching to reading some articles on topics I felt called to learn more about, then socializing with friends at the Commons as a break, as well as having time to exercise and relax.
I discovered this learning early on when one day I didn’t have any plans and allowed myself to do whatever I felt called to. I decided to go to a coffee shop to read a friend’s Substack. I ended up being fascinated by the writing and how aligned I was with it. After 1-2 hours there at the coffee shop though, I felt like I wasn’t feeling great for some reason as I tried to do more reading. I ended up texting that friend who was also on sabbatical about how much I resonated with the writing, and we ended up meeting up at the Commons and grabbing lunch, which made me feel a lot better. Looking back, it makes sense that I didn’t feel great because I was doing one thing for too long without giving myself a change of pace. Switching over from reading to socialization helped so much - in my case I got to socialize with the author of the writing I was reading himself! I learned that for me it was best to switch between activities like reading, writing, and socializing. When I’d go back to reading more the next day, I’d feel a lot more refreshed too. This may sound like a simple realization, but from that moment on it became a guiding principle behind how I structured my days during my entire sabbatical.
On a day-to-day basis, I learned the importance of finding a balance between the activities I was doing. On a broader level too, my sabbatical itself was a rebalancing of what I felt to be an overemphasis on career work in 2023 and wanting to spend more time on personal growth to become more balanced. As my yoga instructor once said while we were finding balance during tree pose, life itself can be viewed as a constant journey of balancing and rebalancing based on needs and circumstances that arise.
Money
I learned a lot about my relationship with money during my sabbatical. I didn’t feel super securely knowledgeable about money management in the first place without being on sabbatical, so being on sabbatical led me to feel even less secure initially.
In one particular moment, I had a challenging thought arise while eating out at a restaurant that I didn’t deserve to eat out while I was not working. After the fact, I was able to realize that the thought wasn’t that much rooted in reason, as I had already expected to spend that money since it was budgeted into my expenses for that month in my end-of-month sabbatical evaluation.
This challenging thought that came up was an example of how my brain would often default to worst-case scenario thinking if I hadn’t looked at my finances in a while. Each time I’d actually look at the numbers, I’d realize that I was doing better than I had thought. But at the same time, I felt an aversion to ever looking at the numbers because it felt scary and intimidating. This left me in a loop where my fear of checking my finances would make me check them less, which gave my mind the time to string together a bunch of distorted thoughts into a delusional story about how my finances weren’t doing well since I wasn’t working, and that I wasn’t a worthy person as a result.
My lesson learned here was that I am worth it, and that I’m worthy enough to invest in and treat myself. While it feels like it’s a lifelong journey to fully understand this, I’ve improved my ability to recognize, acknowledge, and understand this negative thought loop.
I was also able to have meaningful experiences that were enabled by removing the pursuit of making money. For example, one of the things I wanted the most was to spend more time with my sister. I was able to have a lot more capacity to do this while I was home over the holidays because I had so much more time and space. Even after already experiencing the benefits and space gained from only working part-time 25-30 hours a week this past year at a company with a good work-life balance culture, I could feel the stark contrast of the added freedom gained from being on sabbatical.
While I do have insecurities when my efforts to live my most authentic life go against societal norms like how you “should” work in a full-time job and not take career breaks, I feel that at the end of the day, I’m making choices that I’ll feel proud of when taking into account that all of our lives are finite.
Conclusion
For most of my time off, I felt like I was building the plane while flying it. While I did have initial intentions of what I wanted to work on, I was often troubleshooting challenges that came up in real-time and finding mindsets, people, and processes to help alleviate them. This wasn’t a sabbatical where I planned to leave my job months in advance and had plans lined up like traveling. I was very much just following my heart and trying to listen to what my body wanted to do. I started with simply wanting to take one month off in what I was calling at the time a “short career break”. When I asked my heart what it wanted to do at the start of that period, I was drawn to reading a bunch of articles about other people’s sabbatical experiences, which ended up being pretty telling of what was to come.
In a lot of my previous adult life, I had a lot more of my self-worth attached to my career. Career opportunities that came my way were an obvious “yes” especially because I didn’t have many strong things to say yes to in the non-career parts of my life. During this career break, I felt that for the first time, I had a strong enough yes outside of my career to say no to career opportunities.
I look back at these four months in hindsight as a beautiful time, especially since now I’m able to have distance from all of the worries and fears I had during the sabbatical. I’m now able to see the positives that came out of that time more vividly, and am starting to see some of the seeds I planted starting to sprout and blossom. In my experience too, it will also take time for these seeds to sprout. If this sabbatical is anything like my last, the more time that passes, the more my sabbatical will make sense and the better I’ll feel that taking this time off of work was a great decision.
Ray thank you for sharing your experience on your sabbatical! It's so interesting to read about. The "self-trust" is such a key component!
Fantastic post. Took notes and really appreciate this wisdom for my own journey.