Practical Magic | How I Took a 1-Month Break From Work
My biggest commitment yet to magical living was to proactively make space for magic...by taking a 1-month break from regular life. In this episode, I share how I designed my life and work to make that possible and what I learned from the experience. (Hint: I still want to work, but differently).
The Biggest Commitment I’ve Made to Magical Living
In August of this year, I took a one-month sabbatical away from work. This was the first time that I’ve taken one month off work in my whole working life since I was 17. In this episode, I share how I made it possible, what I’ve learned, and why I will keep this commitment going forward.
All of the tools I share with you on this podcast have helped me become more embodied so that I can see, feel, and hear synchronicities and magic in my everyday life.
Magical Living is also about deliberately creating space for opportunities to occur; getting out of the day-to-day and getting in touch with different parts of ourselves.
I'm well aware that in many countries, a key example being the United States, the statutory vacation is two weeks for the entire year. Where I live in France, the minimum vacation time that your employer will give you is more like 30 days, which means that's about five weeks of vacation.
It's very common in France for many people to take three weeks of summer holiday in July or August. After living in France since 2011, it felt like high time to try this experiment and see what might happen if I took a month-long break in August.
I’ll start by sharing how it was possible for me to take one month away from work.
5 Actions That Made It Possible for Me to Take a One-Month Break From Work
1. I created my business by design.
When I was 24 and in full-time employment, I read an online article called Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed.
This article talks about the economic benefit of the eight-hour workday, not because it makes people productive but because it’s so uncomfortable and dissatisfying for someone to give so much of their time to their workplace that they will spend a lot of extra money in the economy to alleviate that discomfort. The theory put forward in this article is that the culture of the eight-hour workday (or 10 or 11-hour workday for many white-collar workers) is big business’s most powerful tool for keeping people dissatisfied, exhausted, and spending money in the economy.
When I read this article, it made a lot of sense and it also made me angry. I decided then and there that I didn’t want to continue this pattern or be a cog in the machine. I didn’t want to be a consumer who is so exhausted that I never had enough time to exercise, enjoy free time, lazily read a book, or relax.
The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.
I also realized that I recognized myself in that caricature. At age 24, I decided that I wanted to do something about this. I wanted to be an anomaly.
So in 2014, I began a journey of investigation into alternatives to this paradigm.
It led me to places like the Digital Nomad Conference in Berlin in 2015, where I first discovered people who were running online businesses from their laptops from around the world. It also introduced me to people who were CEOs of successful companies but all of their workers were location independent. Rather than making everyone come into one centralized office every day, every quarter they would fly everyone who worked in the company to some amazing location for two weeks to do deep work together. This was so original; I never considered that it’d be possible. Seven years later, especially having just done remote work from the pandemic, I think that we can all agree that this reality is becoming more possible.
At this conference, I also learned from people who had successful businesses, but their lives as adventure sports fans, athletes, or travelers came first. Their businesses were designed to deliver the conditions needed for them to thrive in their other passions. That was very new to me. It had never been demonstrated to me that one could put their life first, and have their work deliver the conditions to enjoy that life.
Committing to one month off in the summer has been in the works for a long time because it required me to leave corporate employment, start my own business, have the right kind of clients, have the right kind of sustainable income, and have the ability to delegate to my team while away.
2. I planned out my time before my holiday to make sure I took care of everything before leaving.
3. I batched content that would need to be released while I was away.
I got focused and purposeful about what I wanted to accomplish before I left and what would be okay to leave until I got back. I batched podcast episodes, social media content, newsletter creation, and online course creation. The more focused attention I brought to one session made the whole process much faster than doing the work sporadically when I felt like it. Batching is a lot more efficient, and it's something I want to continue to do throughout the year.
4. I got organized with my team.
I got organized ahead of time, knowing exactly what I wanted my team to work on while I was away. I made sure they were well briefed, had all the information they needed, and clarified how we would communicate during my time off.
5. I simply decided it was happening.
Ultimately, the biggest thing when committing to taking a large amount of time off work is to simply decide it's happening.
Understand you won’t get as much done in your business or job that you would if you weren't taking that month off. Make peace with the fact that not much is going to happen for a month. And that’s okay.
This was one of the things that I found the hardest: making peace with pausing my usual pace and allowing things to go slower than I would normally like. I had to trust that if I stepped out of my regular production, it wouldn't all collapse. I could keep a loose grip on my goals and move forward slightly slower than is humanly possible.
I also had to trust that taking time away from work and resetting would create space for deeper kinds of thinking. And that it would benefit everyone in my business – my clients, my team, myself – to be well-rested.
3 Things I Learned From My One-Month Break
During my one-month sabbatical, my husband and I put a roof tent on the top of our car and drove around the south of France and northern Spain and went rock climbing, wild camping, road-tripping, discovered new places, and met up with friends and family we hadn't seen in a long time because of Covid. We spent every single day outside and it was so wholesome and nourishing to be able to move our bodies every single day.
1. It felt so good to be in my body and not staring at a screen for hours each day.
One of the major things I learned was how good it felt to be in my body and to not sitting in front of my computer most of the day every day. It felt natural to be active and outside, and I was quite shocked at how my body felt when I came back. I struggled with getting back into the flow of work, not because my mind didn't want to get on board, but because my body was rebelling against being in the same place for hours every day. My eyes were sore from staring at a screen. I had a visceral sense of rebellion and anger in my body. What are you doing? This is not what we’re designed to do.
Our bodies are designed to be outside moving every day like the rest of the animal kingdom. It took me a few weeks to find my flow from a bodily level again; to be able to sit at my desk and look at my screen without my eyes hurting after just a few hours.
That's been sobering because it reminds me of how wrong it is. I don't work as many hours as most people and I do spend every single day doing some kind of movement. I work outside quite a lot in the summer months. Even with all of that my body was unhappy about the conditions I was putting it in because it's so unnatural. I don't think there’s a way we’ll ever convince ourselves that our modern desk-based lifestyles are healthy. I don’t think they can be.
This has given me food for thought. The long-term consequences of this kind of lifestyle worry me.
What can I do to mitigate these conditions?
How can I move more throughout the day?
By having more walking calls?
By having less time sitting and more time standing to work?
By working fewer hours and being more focused on how I use my time?
2. I had a chance to connect with who I am outside of work.
Something else I learned was that I had a chance to connect with my other selves, who I am outside of work.
I’ve worked since I was old enough to work. I’ve always wanted to be earning my own money and to be learning from people. Work has been a big part of my identity. I love my work, and I love the opportunities it brings me.
But it is true that by prioritizing my work identity, I’d lost touch with some of my other selves.
On this holiday, I remembered there's also the Imogen who’s the sportswoman, the athlete, the adventurer of the outdoors, the one who loves nature, the voracious reader with the powerful imagination, the fun-loving one, the hedonist one. All of these selves had a chance to come out and play in this month-long sabbatical in a way I hadn’t seen previously.
My work self is just one part of me. Is it even the most important part? Is it actually the most interesting self that I bring to the world? It could be, but this is something I'm interrogating right now.
3. I want to make more time and space for these other parts of me on a regular basis.
One thing I'm doing is committing far more time every week to sports, and allowing myself a couple of hours a day to do sports. Trusting that this commitment is only going to be a net benefit to my other selves, including my work self.
I remember once having a conversation with senior leaders in a corporate job I had. They were talking about how they didn't like going on holiday because they were thinking about work anyway. They would get bored quickly and want to return to the office to get things done.
When I think about that now, it portrays that they had completely lost touch with their other selves. Their work self was so dominant, it had killed off all of the other personas that made them who they were. The childlike self, the playful self, the sport self, the philosophical self, the friend self. That saddens me and it’s something I want to avoid. I don't ever want to lose touch with all of the selves that make up my identity.
A Fear I Had About Taking My One-Month Break
Finally, one of the fears I had about taking a one-month break from work was what would happen if I loved it so much I never wanted to work again. It wasn’t a big fear, but it was a possibility.
What actually happened was that around the 25-day mark of our trip, I started to have organic feelings of excitement to return to my work. I started to percolate with ideas.
One month was the right amount of time to really rest and get away, but also to feel the tug of loving what I do and feeling excited to go back. To go back differently, embodying all the things I learned, but to go back. Maybe it's simply because we were camping out of our car, but it felt like one month was the right amount of time.
I’m committed to making this possible every summer. Designing my life and work accordingly so that August is sacred.
I'd like to take it further and work towards a scenario where I'm working nine months and off for three months of the year. That way I’d get time in the spring, summer, and winter (because I'm a skier) to play with my other selves effectively. This will take more designing, strategizing, and building my business to get to the point where I can work only nine months each year, but it's totally possible. I'm already on that path.
Your Invitation: Trust That You Can Work Toward This Vision if It’s Your Legitimate Desire
If taking a long break from work doesn’t feel like a possibility for you right now but it’s something you know you would like to do, trust that you can work towards it.
For some of you, there may be no major blockages. It may be simply deciding that this is something that's happening and working around it.
For some of you, there may be various infrastructure, logistics, childcare, or other things that are preventing you. But if this is a legitimate desire, you too can work towards this.
Seven years ago, I decided that I did not want to be part of the 40-50 hour workweek and become a perfect consumer in a society that's always working. It's taking me a good while to design my life so that I feel like I'm no longer part of that. These types of big visions can take time.
Start Small
I encourage you to start small. Start taking longer breaks. Decide to take X amount of time off work every year, and block that time off and making it happen.
Seek Out Expanders
My world expanded when I went to the Digital Nomad Conference in 2015 and met people who are living lives that I'd never imagined were possible. Now I'm surrounded by people who are living unconventionally. People who are making commitments to themselves about how they want to spend their lives and doing the hard work of creating, designing, and structuring things differently so that it’s possible for them. There are people like that everywhere if you know how and where to look.
Seek out expanders. Find people who are living evidence, demonstrating that this is possible for you too.
I hope this episode has given you some interesting nuggets to think about. Maybe you too are inspired to take a one-month break from work every summer.
Or maybe you’re simply interested in connecting more with your other selves, and you can start that today.
Who am I outside of work?
What are the other parts of myself that I want to stay in touch with?
Who do I want to be on my round table as I move through this magical life?
Listen to the Full Episode:
Episode Resources:
The 2013 article that inspired me to design my life differently, Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed
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