Permission to pause

What happens when you take a break from the week-in, week-out, monotony of work? Britt Coker talks to three Nelsonians who leapt into the wide-open space of a sabbatical and landed somewhere entirely new.

It had been years since Suzi McAlpine had felt the disquieting pang of boredom. Years of being a self-employed leadership coach, a mother, a partner, an author, a person who got out and did stuff, who made things happen. Happening things included starting a business thirteen years ago and embracing the freedom and fear of being self-employed. But she took a risk, leaned into life, and her hard work has been rewarded. She has become successful – a highly respected leader in her field. Then early last year, Suzi began to feel less inspired by the daily ideas and challenges.

“Since I've been running my business, I’ve never found it difficult to get motivated towards a great goal. Writing my book was one. Creating and launching an Emerging Leaders programme was another big mountain to climb, then over the last two years, I had been finding it difficult, which is really unusual for me.”

There was one lightbulb of an idea which kept getting brighter – to take a temporary breather from work. It was a crazy idea surely, to stop the momentum – especially when you are your business brand. But the longest break she’d had in all her years of being a grown-up was four months’ maternity leave a couple of decades ago. While the thoughts did not quieten, it still took her about a year of mulling them over and pushing them away before she finally acted on them. “It was a sort of a growing intuition that that's what I wanted to do and then I sat bolt upright three o'clock one morning and went, actually, I can do it.”

She had found a compromise solution to the work/break conundrum, which was to take a semi-sabbatical, continuing to do one day of work a week for three months. She also made a strategic decision not to tell people, and to stop at a time when work was quieter (summer). She prescheduled posts on LinkedIn so that she was continuing to have a presence while she wasn’t working full-time. When she returned, not only had no one noticed (which she was pleased about) but when she revealed it, there was an overwhelming response from her LinkedIn connections. Versions of envy, mostly.

“There must have been lots of interest in it because it got thousands of views and comments. Everybody that I spoke to thought it was an amazing thing. They were very intrigued and somewhat wistful, I think that's part of the reason why my LinkedIn post went viral, because I think there is an increasing interest in how people can take sabbaticals. People were like, Oh, my God, that's fantastic. And what did you learn? And how did you do it?”

So what did she learn? Learning doesn’t always get a mention in sabbatical circles, but not one to miss an opportunity, Suzi used her three-month break as a chance for personal growth and to gain perspective. Reflecting on the way she had been living her life, she realised her career had taken up too much of it.

“I think – this is deeply personal – but because I wasn't working, it forced me to value who I am outside of that. I've always had an identity around achieving professionally and it forced me to look at non-achievement, valuing myself in a different way that wasn't attached to that, which has been quite confronting… It gave me perspective of my professional life, and my personal life, and I rediscovered the value of space – not jamming my life full to the gunnels.”

“What I found really challenging was that – and I hadn't realised this until I went on sabbatical – just how much of my identity was tied up in my professional identity. Who am I if I'm not out there, whatever out there is? Who am I if I am not producing as Suzie McAlpine Leadership Development? That was actually far more confronting than I had anticipated. It was very good for me to experience that.”

As a result of her time spent reflecting, Suzi says she works differently now. “It's changed some of the operating rhythms of the way that I work and what I delegate.”

Suzi is the first to admit she needs a bit more practice at taking a sabbatical, “I was addicted to busyness – my executive assistant had to tell me off for checking my emails”, and it took her three weeks to settle into the downtime. Eventually giving herself over more fully to the freedom of it allowed her to experience something she hadn’t felt for years: boredom.

“Quickly on the heels of that epiphany – ‘I'm bored’ – two things. One, is how long it had been since I had experienced a sense of boredom (which turns out to be about 23 years), and two, how delicious it was. It was a great feeling.”

“I realised how important non-doing is versus doing. I think I recognise that I and society, we worship work, we worship doing an action. And yet, there is something incredibly joyous and important in being. So I learnt not to fill up my diary with things to do, but one of the joys was to wake up in the morning and go, ‘what wants to emerge today?’ and just following what I wanted to do. It felt a little bit indulgent, but actually really lovely.”

If there is a next time, Suzi says she’ll embrace the experience 100% and down tools completely. She’s already considering it, aware that if she wants to go full-immersion, and for longer, she’ll need to plan well in advance. Travel is a big part of her work, so she didn’t feel the desire to get away, but with hindsight now believes that distance creates perspective, so it’s another element she would include in her next break.

The term sabbatical originates from the Hebrew word shabbat,meaning rest, in reference to resting cultivated land for a period of time. These days, it is most commonly used by scholars for research or further study, but it has since worked its way into the lexicon to describe anyone who steps away from work for a period of time. Depending on your age, the timeless, halcyon days of the unburdened past can sometimes seem more like a vague dream of youth than a tangible memory – so even just saying, ‘I’m going on a sabbatical’ probably fires up the endorphin levels. Temporarily free, the weight of responsibility falls away from the shoulders, replaced by a daypack full of healthy snacks and blissfully uncertain plans.

Something didn’t add up

For Daniel Ewers, his sabbatical was, in a way, forced upon him. He recalls going straight from university into a career in accounting, with only a few days’ break between. With time and experience, his career progressed – eventually to the position of chief financial officer in a business that was going through a massive growth period. He found himself deep in it, working too hard for too long. Then, in one moment, everything changed.

“I had my first panic attack at the end of 2019 and I couldn't work for two months after that – I couldn't get out of bed without crying. So I went through quite a dramatic thing, although it's burn out, I usually call this more of a spiritual dislocation, like it was really eroding me at a soul level.”

He returned to work, but he was going through the motions, his resilience was low. One month good, the next not. “And then I got to about 2021, I was feeling much better, actually on top of things. Then as my energy was getting back, I started wanting to do heaps of crazy, cool things and literally, the next day, I had another panic attack. It was like a metaphorical kick to the head to say, ‘hey, you're not quite through this and don't go back to what you're usually doing.’” A crucial realisation that triggered his resignation. But not just the end of a job – the beginning of a different person.

“It's at that point I dived into a sabbatical for myself and spent, I'd say technically, six to seven months just figuring things out and really going a bit deeper within myself. And it's through this I discovered the next journey, which I've been on for the last three years with a completely new profession and completely different lifestyle and really loving it.”

Daniel spent those first few months together with his wife and preschool daughter enjoying Nelson’s great beaches and rivers. They bought bikes, cycled lots, and had a “really nice, connected, simple summer.”

“The interesting things from the burnout experience was that although I couldn't get out of bed during those two months, there was only two things I could do, and that was a little bit of personal development, like YouTube clips. Certain topics would resonate and give me a little bit of energy. And the other thing was walks in nature. So as I got into a better and better [mental] space, I spent more and more time in that personal development space. I had more time to read books and just really enjoy my young family, and there wasn't the pressure… just in a space of, whether you call it grace or freedom, to just explore and discover. And spend some time just understanding my own values.”

“As I had that time to explore, different things would pop up, and it's from that suffering from the mental aspect and burnout, I had to use journaling as an outlet to express myself and express my thoughts which was really helpful. So, during that sabbatical period, I was able to reflect on some of those journals, see some patterns within myself and some things that just continually popped up. And I guess through the exploring, through the reading, through having some really nice times in our New Zealand summers, a few things started to click.”

For Daniel, a discovery of high-performance coaching began a new life purpose. He describes it as a hybrid of several different coaching styles (business, life, mindset, leadership) creating a holistic view of the individual. He’s not sure if he found coaching or coaching found him, but the career change had sparked something in him that created coherence between his heart and his head. He’d found a desire for work again.

“When we start having a reinforcement around who we are and what we do, that's where that love and that passion and that excitement and some of those more high frequency emotions come into play, and it's those that drive us forward... When we're in that zone, that internal congruence or integrity sets up a little mini energy factory within our being, and it just keeps propelling us forward.”

“I look back on that period of time [working as a CFO], I was doing a lot for my role, some of its expectations of myself, or they could be perceived expectations, or social or cultural expectations. You just keep grinding on. I guess it's a vulnerable space to ask for help, especially being a man as well. Those vulnerabilities don’t show, so reflecting on that, having that courage to put your hand up. A lot of these are leadership principles that I teach today in my coaching too. Just to have that vulnerability.”

Unhappy convergence

Augusta van Wijk’s decision to go on a sabbatical came about through a similar experience to Daniel, in that she found herself trying to keep going in a world of converging and stressful life challenges.

Augusta had reached a career peak in 2021 that she found rewarding. She was working remotely though and experiencing significant changes in management. She also had an elderly mother who was struggling through lockdown isolation, then deteriorating health, and finally her mother passed away. As well as the grieving, Augusta needed to be in administration mode as the executor of her estate. Her teenage son was also navigating a fraught last year of high school, and she herself was going through perimenopause and other health issues (sidelined by multiple distractions at the time). All in all, a hugely difficult and emotional period of time, with a cluster of responsibilities putting a massive strain on her inbuilt resilience.

“There was quite a significant amount of pressure for me to go back to work full-time. They've given me reduced hours during the time that I was looking after mum, but I was still trying to hold down a 30-hour a week job. I said to them, I need a little bit more time and they basically said “no.” Then I was talking to my son, who had finished school, and he said, ‘Look mum, I'm off to Europe and if you want, we could do some of the travelling together’. And I decided, actually you know what? I'm going to take this opportunity. I only have one son, and it really helped me to make the decision to quit my job and take some time off to do a reset. Taking a break was a significant step for me after 20 years of working full time as my family's primary breadwinner.”

“I don't think I would have given myself permission if it hadn't been the opportunity to travel with my son, and I knew that would only come up once in our lives, probably. My mum passed away having lived a full life with very few regrets, and I thought, ‘I want to make sure that when it's my time, I don't regret having not taken these opportunities.’

But Augusta’s responsibility was hardwired into her brain’s circuitry. She admits it took about three months to fully allow herself this time away from working. To travel, to step into the unknown with only a hazy, intangible form of the future lying ahead. Disquietening, if you let it. But as the saying goes, things don’t happen to you, they happen for you.

Augusta headed off to Europe and Canada for four months. As well as travelling with her son, she reconnected with her ancestral roots, meeting up with relatives in The Netherlands, her parents’ homeland. She also cycled in Croatia and went hiking in the Alps with a friend. She’d encouraged her husband to join her but he decided to remain behind, the upside being she could relax fully into the experience. “I feel very fortunate that he kept the home fires burning and just supported me in taking this time.”

When she returned in the spring of that year, she got straight into project managing a home renovation which kept her busy for the next five months. While her fitness levels were good, she also got out into the great outdoors, hiking the Old Ghost Road and cycling the Alps to Ocean. By April the following year, her thoughts turned fully to work, mindful that this was a complete reset as much as a complete rest.

“I wanted to do something that was aligned with my values around giving back, but also around helping become a more sustainable society. I knew that I needed to give myself time and that just applying for a job for the sake of applying wasn't going to work for me. Also, it became really clear to me that I wanted the flexibility of being a contractor as opposed to being an employee again. So that was an important part of the process of discovering what I wanted to do. I'm at a time in my life where I need to be able to move things around and do things I want to do, if I want to.”

Through Nelson’s two-degrees-of-separation network, Augusta eventually found two contract roles in the not-for-profit sector that aligned with her values. One at the Nelson Women’s Centre and the other working for Nelson Tasman Cycle Trails Trust. The sabbatical had been a leap of faith. A convergence of difficult challenges that eventually forced her hand because no one thing would have done it. But it was this catalytic nudge from the universe which ultimately gave her special memories with her son and overseas relatives, and work that she now truly enjoys.

All three interviewees acknowledged that they wouldn’t have been able to go on a sabbatical if they weren’t in a financial position to do so. ‘It’s a privilege’, Suzi admits, while Daniel is an advocate for people taking mini-breaks if a sabbatical is impossible. Even just an hour every week, to reflect or review, he suggests. But if you can, to plan a sabbatical for the distant future and save towards it because he thinks that just as there is the theory of a seven-year itch in a marriage, that something similar happens with work and rather than waiting for it to get to you, you plan for a decent break first. “It can be really difficult financially, and taking that leap, especially the change, can be incredibly difficult. You can either go quite deep with it and make a big shift, or you can make these shallow adjustments as you go deeper and deeper. So whether it's a weekly reflection for an hour, or every day, you have one of these and you start to get some of that reprieve, or having a holiday. A lot of us speak now around having these mental health days, whether it's one day a month, we have this annual leave, just for ourselves. You can sort of have these little mini sabbaticals too.”

If you are inspired to go full shabbat and let the proverbial land lie fellow, what you cultivate when you return could be something you hadn’t ever anticipated. A heads-up from Suzi, “You will come out different in some way, shape or form from who you were then when you went into it, so be prepared for that.”