How to plan your sabbatical leave | mid career break | adult gap year

hi and welcome to my channel my name is hannah and in this video we will talk about how you can plan your own sabbatical aka mid-career break aka adult gap year in my previous video i was sharing my reasons to take a sabbatical as well as how i was able to take a year-long break from work and right now i'm in a beautiful city of batumi georgia where i came to spend three months of winter because the weather here is amazing is 16 degrees outside and this is where i'm recording this video it's all part of the plan of my sabbatical year off if you're watching this video it is likely that you are thinking to take a sabbatical as well you might be thinking is this right time to do it and how on earth can i pull it off i will share with you a few steps that you can keep in mind when you are preparing for your sabbatical number one the reason for your sabbatical usually sabbatical lasts from three to six months or up to a year and there might be multiple reasons why you want to take a sabbatical maybe you feel stuck at work you lost all the passion and you're just going through the motions you don't see your next steps you don't know why are you still there taking a sabbatical can be a good time to step back reflect on your career and your life and decide what you want to do next or maybe you decided you want to change your field and to to transition to new field you need to take some time off to learn new skills or let's say you want to pursue a creative project that you always wanted to do for example it can be a hobby writing a book starting your own business or traveling the world you may be also wanting to spend more time with your loved ones for example with your children or taking care of your family members and finally you can just be exhausted or even burned out and you feel like this is the only thing that you can do to improve the situation whatever your reason may be it's very important to be intentional with your time off it's important to know what are your reasons and it's important to know what kind of outcomes you want to get out of your time off number two plan your budget it's very important to prepare yourself financially for your sabbatical leave and if you don't have an employer that offers you a paid sabbatical leave for a couple of months and most of us we don't have such employers we have to prepare for this ourselves and how to do this the first step in creating your budget is to calculate how much money exactly you need to live for a month and if you have not been tracking your expenses in the past and you don't know this number you can start now by tracking your expenses during the next three to six months so every time you go out every time you buy something doesn't matter with your card or with cash or online you have to put this amount in the money tracking app in the end in the end of three to six months you will have a pretty good picture what you're spending spending your money on and how much money you're spending after tracking your expenses for three to six months you will have an average number and you will understand how much money you need to spend per month to live your life comfortably it's very important here to include seasonal expenses such as trips to visit your family or christmas gifts so now when you have your monthly average what i suggest you to do and what i did in my own sabbatical planning is to add another 30 to your monthly expenses in this way you will feel more psychologically comfortable with any unpredictable situation for example you can spend additional 30 every month if you want to or if you're not spending it because you already should be having a pretty comfortable budget to work with you can have additional money put aside every month and then you have additional buffer budget in case of any unpredictable situation or in case you want to take a trip or you want to buy something or you are looking for the next job a little bit longer and you still need a little bit buffer money in the future and the last thing i suggest you to do is to add one more month of available budget for yourself so for example if your sabbatical is 12 months long you would add one more 13th month for yourself in my case i decided to do this because i wanted to take a trip somewhere a holiday so that was enough money for me to cover that again you can have that as just a buffer budget for any unpredictable situation so now when you have your target number you will have to calculate how long you need to save this much and maybe you already have some savings or maybe you would need to save from scratch so in this case you have to put aside some money every month towards your target number and the faster you can do it so meaning the more you can save every month and put it aside to this target number the faster you will be able to take your sabbatical number three communicating your decision let's say you decided that you really want to take a sabbatical you have your solid reasons for it it can still be tricky and scary because you might think what will other people think what will other people say and it can be your parents your significant other your friends your colleagues your manager what will they think of you are you lazy are you not able to cope with everyday stresses or are you irresponsible and just want to run away and chase your dreams the truth is all these people every person they all have a piece of piece of the puzzle but no one knows what's really happening with you how are you feeling every day in your life how are you feeling when you're sitting and doing your work and what is happening in your mind and in your heart what you would rather do what you want to do in your future and if the current situation you're in is not contributing to your desired future it's only natural that you want to take a break get yourself out of this situation reflect on what's happening and come up with a better plan to achieving the future you want to see every person around you can have different thoughts and feelings about your decision but ultimately the way they feel about your decision it's more of characteristics of them and not you and those people who love you and want the best for you will support you in your journey when it comes to your work environment your colleagues your managers your network it's very important to keep warm relationship with these people and communicate to them why you decided to make such a decision why is this important to you and what you're trying to achieve it's important to keep the door open so when you come back from your sabbatical you can come back to your position if you wish to number four very important thing that i want to highlight is that you have to guard your time when you're getting off from a busy work schedule and now suddenly you're waking up in the morning and you have nothing to do it's very easy to start distracting yourself with unproductive things such as scrolling social media hanging out with your friends all the time binge watching tv shows or doing things around the house running errands for your family etc and it's just natural right you just have all this time and other people are busy so maybe you could do it it's important to remember that when you were deciding to take a sabbatical you had specific intentions and goals in mind so you have to make sure you're guarding your time and setting clear boundaries so you have time to actually work on those things another thing to remember is that coming from a very structured lifestyle that you had at work entering in sabbatical space can be like diving into unknown there is no highly structured schedules routines and expectations it's very important that you create rules for yourself on how you want to spend your sabbatical so let's say you want to write a book then schedule in two hours in the morning that you will be writing your book and two hours in the evening that you will be doing research or if you want to improve your health make sure that you write down and implement the healthy routines that will help you achieve your goal create achievable goals for yourself and make sure you stay on track so you can have a yearly goal and then you can break it down in smaller goals you can have monthly goals and you can have weekly routines to make sure you are achieving your goal and you are staying on track i can share with you my personal experience with planning my sabbatical my goal was to become healthy in every way physically mentally emotionally and i knew that i really needed time to recharge and really unplug from the busy world so i gave myself six months of doing nothing routine i was reading a book i was playing with my cat i was going for walks i was exercising so this was my doing nothing routine for six months at the same time i was working with a coach who helped me release a lot of mental blocks limiting beliefs fears and insecurities and all this work that i did for the past six months really helped me to come back to who i am to have more positive outlook on life and to supercharge my personality for the next six months of my sabbatical i plan to travel and to work on my content projects so right now i came to the beautiful city of batumi in georgia that is overlooking the black sea i literally can see it from my window and i decided to spend winter here because the weather is much warmer and work on my content project here not pressuring myself not creating rigid schedules but still keeping myself on track every day working toward my goals thank you for staying until the end of the video let me know in the comments below what you plan to do during your sabbatical if you like this type of content please like this video subscribe to my channel and hit the notification bell so you can be notified when my new videos go out [Music]

Channel: Hanna Flores

Views: 16,741

Keywords: career break, sabbatical, gap year, mid career break, i want to quit my job but i'm scared, i want to quit my job and start a business, i want to quit my 9-5 job, i want to quit my job but i need money, i want to quit my corporate job, I want to take a sabbatical, how to plan a sabbatical, how to plan a career break, how to plan a gap year, how to take a sabbatical from work, planning a career break, taking a career break

Id: YQ6E46UrvPM

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 28 2021