.:| THE TURNING POINT |:.

~ circa Oct 2020 ~

A big part of the reason I took a sabbatical is because I was struggling…and that’s not a word I use lightly.

I was highly successful at work, doing things like growing my book 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.

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 dire need of a hard reset.

With the pandemic, my lack of boundaries reared its head in painfully, unignorable (that a word?!) ways because 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 leave the country, regulations state I cannot work — it was the only way I *felt* like I could enforce boundaries. So I did that often, but only for long weekends — which didn’t truly give me the reset effect.

I worked so much that I would often find myself crying (yep, I’m just as surprised as you are that I’ll admitting that publicly) as I completed work AND pulling the weird hours required to run a program, AND grow an account, AND do all the things in between that pop up when you don’t have a full team.
It all came to a head when I was enroute to visit my bestie and godson for some time off (for my birthday) and I got pulled into some work that I couldn’t imagine not engaging in. Real or imagined, I felt like my commitment would be questioned bc what I observed is that leaders plug back in for the *important things* when they’re on PTO.

Then I remembered I’d made a commitment to myself almost 2 years prior when I was in an ER bed — with a potentially life threatening pulmonary embolism, yet on the phone coordinating the next few days with my team — that if my work life came close to impacting my life/health again, that I would quit.

I felt like this was the brink, and while it wasn’t my physical health at stake, I knew deep down my emotional, and overall well-being needed help.
I found a therapist, enlisted my mentors, shared with my close friend circle, and started to formulate a plan…