🖋️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?
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