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Today I want to discuss my radical sabbatical and the highs, the lows, the before, the after, the messy middle, and what I thought would be important but wasn’t, and what little things actually came to centre stage in the midst of my sabbatical. But first, my adventures…
I’ve recently had had a wonderful time sharing my new photos. If you head to this blog, I discuss the insights and the outsides of my most recent photoshoot and some of my hot tips on how to create your own vibe and how to make the most of a photoshoot for your business and your personal development.
I also had a wonderful experience recently of catching up with my mentor and my coach and finishing the year of coaching that I have just completed with her with a little mini retreat. It goes without saying that it was amazing. There’s nothing quite like laughing at the night sky, connecting over a fire, talking about the things that you were grateful for, having good belly laughs and solving all the problems of the universe (ha!).
So what is a radical sabbatical?
A sabbatical, by dictionary definition from the Oxford Dictionary, is “a period of paid leave granted to a university teacher or other worker for study or travel”. Traditionally, you get one year for every seven years worked. If you’ve watched any movies about professors (mostly male), you’ll know that they usually go on sabbatical, wander around the world and write their book or their memoir, and then they come back and work again for seven years. I was always a little in awe of this scenario. I mean, what a cool concept!
It actually comes from the sabbath being on the seventh day we rest, or the seventh year we rest. That’s why the seven is in there.
I notice in many ancient traditions, the concept of seven, and particularly the transformation that happens every seven years. Given my upbringing and moving around a lot and doing all sorts of things, when it comes to places I lived, and the work I’ve had, I seem to follow a seven, too.
And if you’ve followed anything to do with childhood development, some of our identity is created in the year we turn 7, 14, 21, and 28, which is around the Saturn return type of time when we really change the way that we show up. That continues on to 35, 42, and so on and so on.
I have noticed it in my work. Believe it or not, I was in a science career (cancer research and pathology) for well over seven years and then I transitioned into naturopathy and my business. The way that I became a clinician and how that evolved, happened over a seven year cycle. And then I became a mentor.
As I was approaching that seventh year, I started to feel and had a sense and an intuition that something was changing, something was coming, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
I knew that:
- How I had been mentoring had to shift and change
- How I had been doing business had to shift and change
- That the way I had been writing my book had to shift and change
It absolutely didn’t help that the pandemic was right in the midst of it all. And so I called it, possibly before I needed to. Side note: All my coaches say I’m a bit before my time! But I called it and I decided that after my third large conference, The Natupreneur Experience (“Natex”), I was going to take the season off.
I do love a season, or a quarter of a year, especially autumn here in the southern hemisphere, which we are just kicking in now. I like it because it’s the preparation time for the quiet, which is winter. And I had been inspired by writers that had taken a quarter or a season to begin their books, finish their books, write whatever it happens to be. So, that’s exactly what I did and called her a radical sabbatical because no one I knew had done it in small business.
I had spent a lot of time in universities, having had two university degrees and been around a lot of research, particularly cancer research, in my life. So I had often seen people who had totalled off for a year on sabbatical, but not in the small business world. It definitely wasn’t present in the online marketing world or entrepreneurship, where it was go, go, hustle hustle hustle, 24/7. It was that kind of lifestyle.
And so I called it a radical sabbatical just so that I could feel confident and it wasn’t just some take the seventh year off type of scenario.
The Before
So I had committed to taking Autumn off and as it approached, it was a lot like I was on my mountain bike and I was going full pelt downhill into where I was going to land, and it felt like my legs couldn’t keep up.
I had quite a few opportunities arise for speaking events and courses that I was collaborating with larger industry organisations and I, oh my goodness, I had SO MUCH WORK! It was actually a really interesting experience because the universe was throwing these things at me to say, “Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”. And I was saying no to them and then all of a sudden everything dried up and I was like, well, “What’s going to happen? Am I going to make any money anyway?”.
I had previously considered all of this and I had decided to do what’s known in the online marketing world as a ‘fire sale’ or a ‘flash sale’. What that is, is essentially I bundled up all of my courses that were collectively worth about $5,000 at the time and made them available for $1,000 so people could do them by themselves from wherever they are.
I sold those and it was already automated because I had kind of preempted that I would get into a position like this. And so after I’d run the conference, this sale went up and I had well and truly covered the amount of money that I needed to look after my business while I was away for the quarter.
So, apart from my adrenals being in overdrive from running a 250 person event that had to go hybrid mode because one of the Australian states went into shutdown and a sixth of our participants couldn’t make it and then all the amazing complications that came with running that event, I was also running the courses, selling the courses, writing the book, and finishing off the book.
That feeling of being on a runaway bike and trying to keep up the pedals, is not overly fun. But my feet keeping on the pedals was that little inner knowing that something had to change and something was different, something was coming…
The Messy Middle
The messy middle was amazing and it was something that I didn’t expect. It was like being on that same bike and then just taking my feet off the pedals and trying to balance on something that I had committed to and created and it was going by itself.
My mind was creating so many ideas (million dollar ideas!) that I could run with. So, instead of keeping them in my mind, what I did was I would take out an A4 sheet and write a full business plan and other roadmaps and opt-ins and email sequences and things on this one page, and then I would put it in a folder.
It’s a little bit like the notion of sticking a pin in it or putting it on a post-it note. But I did an A4 sheet for all of these ideas for supplements and powders and I wrote down my resources and how to connect with the people I knew in the TGA realm.
I was writing down logos, drawing logos and other things. I had ideas about fiction books, art books, and health-related courses on looking after yourself as an entrepreneur. There were so many unique ideas that I had to find a container for them and that ended up being a thick manila folder full of A4 sheets.
The other part of the messy middle was that lots of people will have an opinion about what your radical sabbatical should look like. And because this hasn’t been done before – especially in your way, with your particular business and your goals and your things in mind – there is no rules about it.
But I had it in my mind that maybe I shouldn’t answer emails and maybe I shouldn’t do these other things and I should stay off social media and I should do this…should, should, should.
I convinced myself of all the ‘shoulds’ that I was actually feeling bad about doing the sabbatical my way. And when I let all that go after taking a couple of weeks of doing yoga of the morning once a week, catching up with my friend at gardening, watching nature just grow, it helped my adrenals and my nervous system slow down into the whole notion of a sabbatical.
The more time I spent out in nature, the more time I spent in my body, the easier it was to reconnect and let go of the tirade of thoughts and mind and masculine way of doing business and fixing problems and solutions.
I was able to really reconnect with myself.
Initially that was difficult because it was so contrasted to the hustle and bustle of the business world. But it was so profoundly connective and present to my kids, my dog, the sunshine elements, all of that. I’m not going to lie, the messy bit is that I got myself into a bit of a funk.
The way I had always done things was always being on the go and pushing. It’s totally a rejigging of my identity to do things differently. But I’m a fan of doing things differently. So, embracing that uncomfortableness, forgiving myself for the person I had been to get to that point and embracing the next steps forward in a more flowy, more intuitive, more mindful, more easeful way, was the next steps.
I got so used to my radical sabbatical, it actually went for all of winter as well. Guess what happened?
- I completed my book and got it off to my publisher
- I started my art practice again
- I spent a lot of time in my yoga class online
- I really got into mountain biking
- I became a much more present human in my family
- It started to emerge through me that something else was going on with my body
The After
It was at the end of that six months of radical sabbatical that I actually found out that I had the large tumours in my abdominal and pelvic cavity. And just like I mentioned earlier, sometimes I’m a little bit ahead of my time, and in this instance, I was ahead of my diagnosis and then I went into the surgery aspect and the medical model of how to tackle that.
The questions I got asked about my radical sabbatical are what I thought would be important, that wasn’t in the end. What I thought would be important is the automations. I thought I was going to automate and plan all of my social media posts. But the truth is, the people I admire the most on social media have all had time away from socials – whether it’s a month, three months, a year. And then they come back and it’s as though they’ve never been away.
But they’ve come back with a presence and a ‘give no f*cks attitude’, that it’s so good and refreshing to see them again and see them telling their truths.
So, I was obsessed with pre-planning all of these social media posts, and the truth is, you can just take time away. The algorithm doesn’t completely forget you. You don’t completely disappear. It’s actually rewarding for everybody. I found that to be the case personally, and I also found it really amazing watching other coaches and people who I’m inspired by (my role models), do exactly the same thing.
Other things that I thought were important that weren’t in the end, is making whole schedules for myself while I was on sabbatical. The truth is, creating time for serendipity and creativity was important, and having one anchor a week for me was important, and that anchor for me was going and gardening with my friend one morning every week.
Because honestly, that time in between Christmas and New Year’s, sometimes you forget what day it is. Same thing happens on radical sabbatical. Sometimes you’re like, what day is it? But if you have at least one anchor a week, it brings you back to have a cadence that helps you slow down. Whether it’s yoga class, a pottery class, something you’ve always wanted to do, or something that’s the exact antithesis of what got you into this situation in the first place. For me, gardening, slowing down, watching the seasons.
A little things that came to centre stage was self care. Now, I understand this is a really easy term to just flippantly throw around. We use it in marketing, you read it in things, it’s a clickbait, really. But what does it truly mean to take care of yourself?
Putting yourself first is not something that we’re taught. It’s certainly something I wasn’t taught as a privileged white Australian mother. I grew up in a family where self sacrifice and martyrdom was the model of mothering. Don’t get me wrong, my mum is amazing, but gee, she gave up a lot for us and continues to because it’s become a habit of hers.
And I think as empaths, we can over dial it. And I certainly had. The funny part is, I hadn’t even noticed I’d overdialed it or that I was overdoing it and putting everybody else’s needs first. Even in the smallest, smallest ways, it had become such a habit that I couldn’t even see it.
There’s a notion in NLP and other ancient traditions that the nose can’t smell itself and the fish can’t tell it’s in water. This is a similar kind of scenario when we go, go, go, and put everyone else’s needs first. It was those small, tiny things that made the difference in the end on my radical sabbatical.
It’s the thing that I started to notice the most. When I took care of myself, I gave myself the type of care that I was giving to other people.
- Then I could thrive.
- Then I could feel better on that particular day.
- Then I could start to notice things that were coming through me, not things that I was thinking about or things that I could do.
For me, what was coming to the surface was having to look after my health.
- It was how I had ignored something that large in my abdomen for such a long time.
- It was how I was connecting with my clients and putting their needs first, even before my own, let alone my families.
- It was starting to listen and rehear the intuitions that were available to me all along and probably set me on the last seven years of goodness and it was starting to rehear them for the next seven years.
That’s the type of thing that came centre stage for me. If you are considering doing your radical sabbatical, you can do it your own way. I invite you to consider:
- What does it look like?
- What are non-negotiables or your anchor for the week?
- What are the things that you’re not going to do?
- What are the things you’re going to say no to?
- Is it client facing hours? Is it new research projects? Is it doing more courses? Or is your version of a radical sabbatical going and studying something completely different to what you currently do? Or is it not studying at all?
You can choose it and I would love to hear if you have taken some time out for a radical sabbatical. What does it look like when you’ve come back? What have you taken from it moving forward? I am so grateful I got to do this. And if you are going into it, I highly suggest doing some form of a ‘flash sale’ or a ‘fire sale’ on anything you have that is home study or passive income. It’s one of my reasons that I talk about passive income on creating your own courses or memberships, because you don’t have to be there to do it.
I think it’s a really important part of running a service-based business, especially when you have knowledge to share and wisdom to share, that you can package that up and it can be available even when you’re not available, necessarily 1:1.
If you get the nudge sometime in the future, that internal fire, that little knocking on the back of your head that says, “Remember when that notion of a radical sabbatical came up? How about we do that?”. When you get that little intuition, I highly suggest you follow that thread and see where it takes you.
If you got something out of this blog or you know that somebody else will, please share it.
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