🖋️Feature: This exhausted Solopreneur said yes to a sabbatical - Part I
🖋️Feature: This exhausted Solopreneur said yes to a sabbatical - Part I
A sabbatical is the start of smarter work
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Edition #98 is coming from Zaragoza, Aragón, Spain.
🇪🇸 Hey from the windy Spanish Zity Zaragoza.
I am back at my home base after a month in the mountains, based in and around Canfranc in the Pyrenees - experimenting with a budget of €50 costs per day.
I am currently planning some local trips in Spain, to Valencia, La Rioja and Navarra in coming weeks and Bali, Indonesia in June.
Oh, have you noticed the new branding and designs here?
I am playing around with Canva and the result is below:
What do you think? Share in the comments below 👇
Watch this space for more improvements and upgrades.
Yup, writing, editing and commissioning is part of this publication, but admin, design and development is also another huge part of building a Substack stack.
Okaydohkay, back to this week!
Context: After getting some private DM’s and requests to know more about my “async sabbatical”, I decided to share some personal writing on the why’s and how’s of how I got to where I am now, in my taking-a-big-break-mode.
Pressing STOP on work to get my life force back
As a successful Solopreneur for 6 years, pressing stop and pause on my business was scary for the first quarter of 2024.
Really scary for me!
Remote Work, WFA, Global Mobility, Travel and Nomadism are a passion of mine, and often my work is very personal.
Work with passion and lived experience is (by default) personal.
Not only is travel part of my identity for more than 30 years.
Furthermore, global mobility and remote work helped our family survive and thrive, so I do really relish and advocate with a clear sense of purpose.
But work is still work.
🎤 I repeat, work is still work.
Work is what we do, deliver and dedicate our professional lives too.
It is not who we are, as a human being. Our personal lives are just that. Personal.
It is only as full functional human beings that we can prioritise our health, wellbeing and selves.
TLDR: 🫱🏽🫲🏾 In case you don’t know me already, I am Ro, I am based in Zaragoza, Spain with my Location Independent, somewhat Nomadic (4-6 months a years of nomading) family. For work, I am a Remote Work and Digital Nomad Expert, Advisor and Writer, oh and a Linkedin Top Voice.
All my web and FREE resource links are here and you can book a 1:1 here.
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For regular readers, you may know that “I have my menopause upon me” - the term I use to express how most days I am experiencing menopause symptoms too, ongoing for 4 years.
A driving factor in my needing to rest, was to recover from the smothering impact of having my menopause cloud of symptoms “upon myself”.
Symptoms which are cumulative and therefore can be compounding in impact.
So let’s me be clear, I am not saying that I could jump off that hamster wheel easily.
Only now in hindsight, can I see what I was doing on that wheel of routine.
That cycle of just getting up everyday to work, rinse and repeat.
It was WHAT I was doing, not stopping to care HOW I was doing.
How I was doing on the wheel was terrible, on reflection.
An exhausted middle of age woman with menopause upon her, being thrown around it, just because.
Because that was what I had been doing for years, so why not, times had been worse that this, right!?
Voices of doubt in my head:
“You got through Covid, just keep going!”
“Come on! You have 20+ years experience in business, just keep going!”
“You don’t really need to take a break, today is just an extra bad menopause day. Keep going!”
“How much income will you lose! Nonsense. Don’t stop, keep going!”
How could I get to the stage of giving myself the permission to just stop?
Halting the hamster wheel
I was on that wheel, at times crawling and dragging myself around.
I kept on trying to keep up with the pace, the spin was my daily schedule.
It took some real signs of exhaustion, fatigue and potential burnout to get me to a place of being ready to say enough-is-enough.
People who love and care for me, hinting and saying that maybe I needed to take a proper rest.
Plus, not only did I have to say No More to myself and give myself permission.
I had to consider and let my clients and collaborators know.
My freelance team would be impacted, with a lack of earnings too.
After some specific days dedicated to thinking about these practicalities at the end of 2023, plus discussing my options with my accountant, team and support network, a plan started to form.
The “how could I” of the steps to my sabbatical became clearer.
I started to come around to the idea that I could do it, would do it and more importantly, giving myself permission to DO IT.
I had to do it, it was not an option to not to. I reframed it, with my health at the center.
A sense of acceptance also settled, I really had to do it, to stay well, for my health for me, to put myself first.
But not only me mattered….I had to consider the others, didn’t it?
Ro’s many roles in life
Then, there is not just the Ro, that is the Solopreneur.
I have various different roles in my adult life, including partner, parent, caregiver, sister, daughter, friend, etc.
Not much time is left over for me, myself and I.
Or as my therapist says to be “self-full”.
Note: my therapist will always correct me when I use the term selfish and replace it with self-full. A small yet significant change in my mindset, that helps we to put myself first more that I usually would.
Journalling and reflecting on all of these roles helped to also get better perspective, on my sabbatical plans.
Simple prompts in my writing, to include and reflect on those other people and the impact of what a sabbatical would mean to them (if any!).
Make a list of the reasons for taking a sabbatical
This one may sound obvious, but the page in my journal that lists this - from back at the start of December 2023 - has also evolved and be added to over time.
What is fascinating, is that now, in the midst of my sabbatical and with the support of my therapist and others, I can see not only more benefits of taking the time off, but also I have clarity on how to reshape my work life.
For the better.
So not just the why for me and myself, but the how to do better and smarter work, moving forward.
Hint: this does have something to do with how I practically structured my sabbatical, using an asynchronous work approach.
Perspective on how we do things, only comes with real space and time.
Your odd 2-4 week summer break, which as a parent, often includes extra childcare responsibilities, does not often come with a real chance to rest.
In fact, any break of up to a month or even 6 weeks, does not seem adequate if you have been really overloaded, overwhelmed and nearing exhaustion.
I always think of something a friend told me about relationship break up of 5 years, she said “you were together 5 years, you probably need a good year or 2 to recover and be ready to date again”.
Looking at how I now needed to not only recover my health and rest, but also to really see our work model and improve it, we need to take a meaningful step back.
A few days would not suffice or even a month, it needed to be multiple months.
My one-person-business was founded in 2016, surely after 6 years of construction work, I could pause for 3 months?
Slowly but surely, the answer came around to a yes.
Only now, from a rested and in-recovery from exhaustion position, I can see that viewpoint. The main viewpoint and learning.
It all started with giving myself permission to stop and rest.
Simple, yet profound.
Yes to yourself, is something only you can do.
I hope I take this hard learned lesson with me throughout life.
Stay tuned! Part II: how I designed my asynchronous sabbatical - is coming soon.
QU: How do you give yourself permission to rest and recuperate fully?
If so share why below in the comments 👇
May the road rise to meet you,
love n light,
💚 Ro