On career breaks
What’s the most important project you’ve worked on in your career?
I know mine.
I turned 30 this year and with that brought a lot of reflection on my twenties. It was a big decade. I started my career. I got my masters degree. I started a business. I got married.
This will be a gross understatement: I’m (very) proud of all of those milestones. But something else happened in my twenties that I never predicted would be one of the most meaningful developments of my career.
The truth is, I spent a lot of my early career feeling like the only way to succeed at work was to play up aspects of myself that would please others (work ethic, ambition, flexibility, dedication) and play down those that I felt only served me (authenticity, mindfulness, courage, boundary setting). I worked a lot of late nights and volunteered for a lot of extra stress and responsibility, and on paper, those choices paid off. But my sense of balance was essentially nonexistent.
As you might expect, showing up this way was fundamentally unsustainable for me.
Flash forward to 2021: I was approaching burnout, and when some unexpected bad news came up in my personal life, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t deny anymore that what I was doing wasn’t working. I needed to take time to step back and get clear on my values and how they applied to my career.
Reflecting back over all of the projects I took part in during my twenties, I can definitively say that my intentional career hiatus stands out as the most important one. I took myself out of the work and observed who I was without the deadlines. Without the stress and the predetermined sense of purpose. And I learned a LOT about my internal beliefs around productivity and why we work. I got clear on my values and started to focus on what it is that I need out of a job, rather than just what the job needs out of me.
It is undeniably a huge privilege that I was able to do all of this reflection without working. I had the support of my husband and relied on my savings to make it work. It felt really scary at the time, but reflecting on the decision now in 2023, I can confidently say it was a hugely successful investment in myself and in the work I’ll do for the rest of my career.
At the height of the pandemic, there was a lot of conversation among my generation about taking career breaks, but I haven’t heard much discourse about them lately. Have you ever taken or considered taking a hiatus? What was the impact of that break on your mindset?
