If You Read This Post, I Believe You Should Take A Sabbatical

If you are privileged enough to even consider taking a break from your work life for a while … Then I think it’s your duty to follow this hunch. Here are my seven best pieces of advice for anyone thinking about taking a sabbatical.

Last year, when I quit my job to take a sabbatical, I had to create a new ‘job’ for myself on LinkedIn. I invented the position ‘Traveler’ at the organization ‘The World’ and changed my headline to ‘Former project manager attempting to travel without a plan’.

Now, only a year after as I am slowly returning from my sabbatical, LinkedIn has introduced a new feature: You can now add a ‘Career break’ on LinkedIn. How amazing is that! When you add the ‘Career break’ to your experience, you can choose between all sorts of different meaningful endeavors to describe your current activities.

I feel my whole body being lit up by browsing through these options that allow us to show more of who we are! The challenge lies in deciding which one accurately describes my experiences … Gap year? Health and well-being? Personal goal pursuit? Travel? I am still not sure, but I know it has been the best decision of my life so far.

In my opinion, too few people give themselves the gift of a sabbatical. I get that it is not an easy decision, but the Zeitgeist is on your side. Not even LinkedIn wants to hold you back in your job anymore! So let me share my seven most important pieces of advice for anyone considering taking a sabbatical.

1. If You Consider Taking a Sabbatical, You Are Extremely Privileged, and You Should Honor That Privilige

Think about this for a moment. Very few people in the world at this moment can even afford to consider taking a sabbatical. The vast majority of people on this planet will not be able to take a sabbatical because of either economic, political or safety reasons. Perhaps, they lack the freedom (financially or politically) or have such serious responsibilities in their life that the concept of a sabbatical has probably never even crossed their mind. The fact that you are reading this article right now makes you one of the most privileged people on the planet.

What do to with that privilege? When I decided to save money to not work for around a year and I quit my job, I got overwhelmed by that privilege for a while. If I am able to take a year off of any responsibilities in my country, how should I spend this year?

For a while, I almost felt so bad about having this kind of privilege that I considered giving all the money to charity and go back to work again, not take the sabbatical. The thought of being a consumer for a full year, constantly buying everything I needed (food, accommodation, entertainment …) and not needing to put on any contribution myself made me feel pretty strange. I knew that most of the people who would provide me everything I needed on my trip would not themselves be in a position to ever take a sabbatical like me.

There was something about deciding to take the sabbatical that confronted me with my own privilege in way I hadn’t experienced it before. When I was working and being busy with my Danish life I didn’t consider it as much and I would sometimes even get into victim mode and feel sorry for myself about my busy life. I had a huge freedom, but because I didn’t make use of it, I didn’t sense it and I didn’t fully take it in.

Deciding to take a sabbatical means owning and honoring your privilege instead of hiding from it. It is celebrating this unique expression of human potential that is available to you.

2. Don’t Wait For Others to Give You Permission: Give It to Yourself

When expressing your longing for a time-out, you will probably not experience that a lot of people close to you will be in favor of your idea.

A friend of mine recently had a secret conversation with the HR department in the big public organization she is hired in. She had inquired them about the chance for getting a leave of absence for a year. The answer she received was: “You are absolutely not going to get a leave”.

According to the HR professional “around 10–15 % of all employees in the organization need a substantial break from their job”, but logically, allowing all these people to get a leave at the same time would be disastrous for the organization. Therefore, no-one would be allowed to take a leave.

When I heard the story I added that it’s probably not just 10–15% of the employees in her specific organization, but in the whole of Denmark. We laughed about this, and agreed that the command to not give anyone a leave had probably come all the way from the top, from our Prime Minister.

The point is, you should not wait to get the permission to take a sabbatical from anyone else but from YOURSELF. For everyone else, it’s a burden, or at least inconvenient that you consider leaving your regular life for a while. Your employer is going to need to find someone else for your role, your family is going to miss you, your friends are going to be envious of your adventures. That’s okay. Giving yourself the gift of a sabbatical is an act of radical responsibility to yourself, not to others.

3. Bad Timing is Perfect Timing

In Denmark, there is one time in your life as a young adult, when taking a sabbatical is actually good timing.

Right after finishing high school in Denmark, many young adults take a year or two off to work, earn some money and afterwards spend time traveling or following a personal interest for a while before they continue their studies. From the point of view of mainstream Danish culture, taking a sabbatical (or a gap year) at this time is a widely accepted thing to do.

I didn’t do that when I finished high school. I had witnessed my friends who were a year older than me be terribly bored in their gap year. Especially in the part of the year that was about living with their parents and working full time in a very simple job to save money before they could go on their adventure. I had not been envying them one bit. Instead, I was longing to move away from my home town and move to the capital. So I moved to Copenhagen right after I graduated and begun to study at the university.All good, expect that I missed the good timing to take a year off.

The good news it, it’s never too late to take a year off. For those of us privileged enough to consider taking a sabbatical, we just need to learn to discern between very bad timing and bad timing.

There are phases of our lives that seem like very bad timing (due to whatever reasons, you will know for yourself). Do not take a sabbatical at this point in your life.

And then there are phases where taking a sabbatical seem like bad timing. Obviously, this looks different for all of us and only you will know the difference. For me, this looked like my sister being pregnant for the first time and me wanting to be there for her, I had just received an exciting promotion, I lived in an amazing collective (that I had fought hard to move into), I had recently become part of a wonderful community with many new exiting friends, and my dating life was going really well. Leaving my life in Copenhagen seemed like bad timing.

But what you need to understand is that bad timing is perfect timing. Waiting for ‘good timing’ is just waisting your life waiting for a day when you cannot come up with any more excuses. If the timing is only bad, but not very bad, this is your time to fly!

4. It Is Much Easier Than You Think (But Not in the Beginning)

The hardest part is taking the decision. My decision to take a sabbatical was overwhelming at first. Because very few people do it, it seems both strange, hard and a bit crazy. You might get really anxious at times and you might have to face a lot of questions from others and fear and limiting beliefs in yourself, while not being able to seek support from anyone, because probably you don’t know anyone who has done it.

The next hard part is all the logistical and practical stuff you need to take care of before you begin your journey:

• Potentially packing stuff in boxes
• Calling various government agencies to understand the implications of not earning a salary for a while
• Solving the Tetris calendar game to say goodbye to all your loved ones at home before you leave
• Figuring out what to pack in your bag
• Buying the first train or flight tickets to get to a desired destination

Phew, not the fun part of the sabbatical for sure.

Then, you begin your journey. If you are similar to me, it’s not going to be easy for you to transition from ‘normal life’ to ‘complete freedom’. If you are used to being productive and to earning money, it can be pretty scary and difficult to begin being a full time consumer. Plus, the freedom of how you want to spend your time might paralyze you for a while (it certainly paralyzed me!).

But then, once the sabbatical really begun, once it was really happening, I was overwhelmed by how easy it was. How fun. How joyful. How right it felt. I started to meet people who had done the same, and I became part of the norm again. “Ohh so you quit your job to travel? Like everyone else in this place?“. I was no longer special, and that made it much easier for me to just flow with time and space.

5. Start Off by Leaving Home With an Open Mind and Continue to Follow Your Curiosity

The best part about taking a sabbatical is that you get to choose how and where you want to spend it. You do not have to travel far away, you can also stay at home and simply spend your time at home differently than you were used to when you had a job.

That being said, I have personally enjoyed traveling as part of my sabbatical. An amazing advantage about traveling is that it usually comes with a different and very useful mindset: that of an open and curious mind. Most people experience being more curious about their environment if they are in an environment that is not their home.

Curiosity is perhaps the most important skill to nurture during a sabbatical, in my opinion. When you all of a sudden have a lot of free time ahead of you, you can turn it into anything you want. You can make it hard and challenging. Or you can make it easy and comfortable. You can make it about seeing the world outside of you — or seeing within. And the best part is — you don’t even have to know what you want beforehand! And you can change your mind and your preferences as you go along!

You probably start out with some ideas about how you want to spend your time during your sabbatical and that’s lovely. But I’d really encourage you to not over-plan this free time. Allow yourself not to know all the answers. I begun my sabbatical with a one-way ticket to Brazil and everything was open after that. This allowed me to be open to experiences I would not have known back home that I was curious about.

There is a beauty and wisdom in knowing that there are things about yourself and life that you do not know yet and therefore cannot plan. Stay open to the magic of discovering.

6. Go Alone and Be Open to Return as a Different Person

In my experience, traveling alone was key to having such a transformational sabbatical. Being alone forces you to make decisions based on what feels right for you. It’s an amazing practice of integrity towards yourself and an powerful practice in taking radical responsibility for your own life. Taking a sabbatical that only you could take, not one that would be right for your friend or your Instagram followers.

When you go out in the world without having anyone around you who knows you, it automatically sets you free. No one you meet will have very fixed expectations about you, and that might make it easier for you to experiment with who you are.

When your friends are not around to potentially judge ‘the new you’, it can be easier to let go of the fear of change. At home, we might feel like we have a lot more to lose if we change (or at least, that’s the story we tell ourselves).

During my own sabbatical, I have met several people who have been able to completely transform themselves and their lives. This is obviously not a goal in itself — if you are happy and fulfilled in your current life, there is no need to take a sabbatical with an intention to change that.

But if you are curious about what else is out there — in the world — or what else in in there — within you, then I encourage you to follow that voice. And the best conditions for doing that is by going alone.

7. Ask and Answer Existential Life Questions in No Rush

In an average busy lifestyle with a job, friends, family and hobbies, there is not automatically a lot of time for reflecting on life’s big questions. Juggling all life’s responsibilities and trying to constantly prioritize and re-prioritize how the limited free-time get to be spent is usually already enough. Sometimes, existential questions push themselves forward at night when we can’t fall asleep, but that rarely is a pleasurable experience.

When you take a sabbatical, you turn off (most) obligations for a while. This creates space in the mind. During my sabbatical a lot of existential life questions came up.

The initial set of questions seemed rational for my context:

• How do I like to spend my time when I do not have any obligations?
• How much money am I willing to spend daily on accommodation and food?
• What people do I like to connect with?

Valuable questions, and I spend many hours contemplating them. Until a new layer appeared, and this was even more juicy:

• What is time?
• What is money?
• What is connection?

Asking yourself these questions, ladies and gentlemen, is where the golden insights are found! (And I am not going to spoil your experience by sharing my answers with you.)

I really enjoyed being able to take my time with these questions, knowing my answers could change and evolve over time. Maybe the questions you will explore in your sabbatical will be very different from mine. No matter what, really taking time to ask, sit with and move with these kind of questions has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have had during my sabbatical.

Take a Sabbatical to Fall in Love With Life

The most important thing that happened to me during my sabbatical was that the time off made me fall madly in love with life again.

Experiencing new parts of the world, meeting so many different people, seeing myself in a new light, reminded me of the beauty and magic of life. Life is vast. Life overwhelms me. Life continues to surprise me. Life continues to have amazing surprises waiting for me around the corner.

So many times during my sabbatical I have been thinking to myself: “How I love my life right now. How I wish everyone would give themselves this gift.” If you have been waiting for a sign to do it, this is your sign!

You can read many more articles by me on: https://medium.com/@annestensgaard/