.:1:. Introducing the #sabbaticoolife
Dear Self, If work ever jeopardizes your well-being again…Quit.
Those were the fateful words and the first turning point for me.
I spoke them to myself weeks after realizing the seriousness of my January 2018 hospital visit. Without warning, I’d developed a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) that broke loose and traveled, via my bloodstream, through my heart and broke apart into my lungs as three pulmonary emboli. If you know what that is, you get that this was serious.
Yet, here was ya girl…on email, coordinating the team to get ready for some big briefing and trying to do hand-offs from my hospital bed.
Why?!
Fast forward to the fall of 2020, to the observer I was *highly successful* at work, doing things like growing my portfolio of business by incredible amounts — think 3000% over the course of two years — in an area that had been previously untapped. Yet, I didn’t *feel* successful and I was very ANGRY and had this sense of pressure and unfounded fear of failure driving me. I would come to understand these to be my human design “not-self” theme and transferred motivation — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The things that I desire and aspire to in life weren’t aligned to what I achieved at work. I was running myself into the ground and in dire need of a hard reset.
With the pandemic added into the mix, my lack of boundaries reared its ugly head in painfully, unignorable (that a word?!) ways. Except this time, I couldn’t just hop on a plane and escape the country for a long weekend — which I did often as a coping mechanism. You see, in my role at the time, when I left the country, regulations mandated that I could not work — it was the only way I *felt* like I could enforce boundaries. So I did that often, but only for long weekends, which rarely provided the full reset effect that I needed.
I worked so much that I would often find myself crying (yep, I’m just as surprised as you are that I’m admitting that in writing) as I completed work WHILE pulling the weird hours required to run a program, AND grow an account, AND do #allthethings that pop up in between when you don’t yet have a full team.
It all came to a head as I was enroute to visit my bestie and godson for some time off (might I add, for my birthday) and I got pulled into a proposal and the launch of our first competitive win on my growing account. At the time, it was work that I couldn’t imagine not engaging in, despite being on vacation. Real or imagined, I felt like my commitment would be questioned because of what I observed is that leaders plug back in for the *important things* when they’re on vacation.
Sometime on that trip my body started to send me warning signs that I was stressed. My heart raced at odd times and my skin got all itchy — a classic body stress response for me, even if I don’t mentally feel or register stress. It was around this time I remembered the mental note to myself from more than two years prior. And while it wasn’t my physical health at stake — not yet, anyway — I knew deep down that my emotional and overall well-being needed help.
And while I didn’t outright quit, I did find a therapist, enlisted my mentors, shared with my close friend circle, and started to formulate a plan…for what I would later dub the #sabbaticoolife.
* * *
The series of posts that will ensue are part my story, part a guide. If you are experiencing burnout, it’s my goal that this story & this guide will help you acknowledge your own burnout, plan a sabbatical, and return to your life in alignment with your design and never *need* a sabbatical again.
In my story, I will share 1) how I came to recognize that I was burnt out, 2) how I learned that my burnout wasn’t an outcome, but a symptom of work I needed to do to live in alignment and 3) the things I wish I’d known when I returned to work to keep me aligned and my boundaries in tact.
In the guide, I enable you to be the hero of your own journey. Why? Because at some point I realized that no one is coming to save me and I needed to get smart and save myself. I’ve crafted paths modeled after hero archetypes — you pick the one that sounds most like what you need — and we’ll explore burnout, your burnout symptoms according to your human design, and then prepare for and take the sabbatical you need to design & align your life.
Are you ready for the #sabbaticoolife? Let’s go!
