The Power of a Sabbatical

Welcome back to Season 2 Episode 3. Today I am going to talk about the power of a sabbatical.
What I'm already finding just with two and a half months off my business is that I have finally given myself the space to reflect and to look back on all the accomplishments that I've had so far, that maybe, just maybe, I'd forgotten about.
If you are a business owner, you totally know what I am talking about.
How often do we pat ourselves on our back and congratulate ourselves on how far we've come?
Seven years in business, that's how long it's been since I had my business, since I started officially April 2010 and until I took the timeout and time off of my business, I didn't realize all the things that I'd actually managed to do.
The reason why that came about is when I had the down time to not be working on stuff, I took a trip down memory lane and thought about the products and services that I've created since I started, all the blog posts that I've written. I had a few people linking to blog posts from like 2011 and I was like, "I wrote that post? This is actually pretty good.”
Then I just had a chance to reconnect with clients from years ago, from cleaning stuff up and going back through old folders, I forgot that I've coached these people. I wondered, where are they now and what are they doing?
So when I am back online in July, I really want to reconnect with some of my first ever clients and community members.
What it's forced me to do on the sabbatical is actually go back to my roots and think about all the things I loved when I first started out.
If you think back to your business, what were the things that made you so excited and so happy to be doing what you did that got you up every single morning and kept you up late at night when you were hustling and doing everything you wanted to do on your business?
What were those things?
The reason I even needed to take a break from my business is I'd forgotten what I loved about it in the first place. So this sabbatical has helped me to gain perspective.
It's forced me into slightly darker places where I've been playing the comparison game. Because I've been watching on social media from the sidelines, people doing things and launching. And I just get caught up in that and normally my go to is I'd follow that launch, I emulate it, I take notes from it, improve on it and learn from it.
But I don't want any of that in my world! I don't want any distraction. I don't want to know what other people are doing. So I put the Facebook Ad Blocker on.
I just want to reconnect with my friends, get back to my roots and get perspective on how far I've come but also how much more I can do & how much more I can offer.
I needed to reconnect with what it was that I fell in love with at the very beginning.
I just want to have a little insert here from my friend JC Bougle, who actually is recovering from burnout. As I've mentioned before in this podcast, I almost burnout when I first self-published my book, The Suitcase Entrepreneur back in 2013 and I didn't even realize I was so close to it.
The problem is when you don't take a sabbatical, a break or holidays from your business and you just go hard out for years, you burnout.
Then you are forced into a break that you don't want to be on: where your body can't recover, where your mind is jaded and stuck and where you actually physically aren't able to do much work anymore and I just don't want you to get to that place.
This is gold. Here's what he had to say:
"What happened to me last year is that I was very close to burnout and no enthusiasm for business, for entrepreneurship and no energy. And I couldn't take a long sabbatical really to disconnect from the business so I took a short sabbatical for a couple of weeks.
I really disconnected from anything online and after that which was even more important in my recovery after 2 weeks of disconnection, I really paced myself along with the expectations of what I could achieve and I also set a less ambitious goals for myself and worked a little bit more intensely.
This helped me a lot to recover completely from this burnout. Pacing yourself after the sabbatical is as important as taking a real break."
And then I had my friend Jesse Krieger of Lifestyle Entrepreneur Press, who posted on Facebook about a month ago about his retreat away from his business for a week. He wrote:
"I've just arrived back from a week retreat in the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru. Quite honestly, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.
This is the first time I've been offline all year and it was relaxing, reinvigorating and full of insights as I sat deep in meditation in the Peruvian Andes.
My host was Javier Regueiro, author of the two books that I'll be publishing in September, "Ayahuasca: Soul Medicine of the Amazon Jungle” and "San Pedro Huachuma: Opening Pathways to the Heart”.
It's hard to overstate the importance of taking time just for yourself. Not being beholden into anyone, not needing to have any conversation. People just simply sit and enjoy the surroundings and become aware of whatever thoughts and emotions arise.
While deep in meditation, it came to me that my role as a publisher resembles that of a crystal. A crystal such as the quartz is transparent and can be carved in a way that focuses energy, taking diffused light and focusing it on point almost as a laser.
In short, I got the insight that I am a crystal and you are the light and that is my new approach to working with authors and publishing and its good to be home.”
And now I want to bring back in Jason Van Orden who you heard about on the last podcast, "Firing myself” because he did exactly the same thing with his very successful 7-figure business that he ran with Jeremy Frandsen for years.
Here is what Jason had to say:
"Truthfully it was really fast for me. I am not saying it was the right thing to do. In hindsight, there's a lot of realizations here. But basically I was so ready to be removed.
And that might have been maybe a little too fast to remove myself. We probably needed a little more processes in place, expectations set and measurements.
Fast forward several months and it kind of came to this realization that the point of the business is that when I left, when we left or we kind of stepped away, was she was going to be able to maintain it.
But we hadn't changed things over in terms of systems and teams and all the other things that kind of needed to be there for a proper exit or removal of ourselves for it to continue growing consistently like it had been before.
So we are faced with this choice: do we go back in to start it growing again or do we just say, "Okay it is what it is. It's this nice source of income and for now it's going still but we have no more expectations of this actually becoming any bigger than it already is."”
So insightful right? It's really neat to hear from other people who have taken some time out or forced themselves away from their business or literally just shut something down because its not working.
I think as entrepreneurs we need to give ourselves that permission to do that more often than we ever think because it is incredibly powerful and you just don't understand how important it is that we recharge our batteries.
I also like to think there's a bit of a 7-year itch thing going on here. I appreciate Jason and Jeremy it was well over a decade but a lot of people that I've been speaking to recently have been in business for around 7 years and they are tired.
And let's face it, any job that you've been in 7 years is a long time in a job right? These days most people are in jobs for 1, 2 or 3 years in max. It's the norm for millennials to switch jobs incessantly.
Where as back in my Dad's/Mum's days, you'll stay in a job for 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years plus! And you get a little golden watch at the end of it if you were lucky, a handshake and a thank you very much.
But when I was in the corporate world, I'd switch jobs all the time because I would get so bored or I just wanted to change it up. Then I realized I really just needed to be an entrepreneur where I could work on my own projects all the time, change them at a speed of light and work on multiple projects that excited me.
The great news is the whole point of this entire episode is that I found more freedom. It's so good!
I am filling my days with painting and practicing piano. (I lie on that I haven't actually touched the piano but I am going to today.) And training my puppy which is like a full-time job and I am learning so much. Training myself I should really say not my puppy. In training myself, I am effectively training my dog to be more obedient and awesome.
You can find Kayla, the white German Shepherd on Instagram at kaylathemajestic. If you want some joy in your day, go follow her. And you can follow my adventures at nataliesisson or my Facebook page.
For me personally, now that I've eased into my sabbatical, I've had all these opportunities come my way to work with other people on their businesses, help them start businesses, be on teams and I am resisting all of these things until I finish my sabbatical.
I really want to look at where I am heading because I've got the mojo back, people! I have got the mojo back! And I am very excited to bring this back to my business. Natalie is back!
I am super excited to be creating and implementing when I get back into it but until then I am still on a sabbatical.
And in the next episode, I am thrilled to bring you daily habits of freedom. Before I went on a sabbatical, I asked my community about their daily habits that they have to give them a little bit more freedom in life and these are going to apply to you personally and professionally, so make sure you tune into the next episode by subscribing in iTunes and Stitcher.
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