Inside A Black Woman’s Annual 3-Month Sabbatical
I shared this tweet earlier today and a few folks asked for more details on how I manage my annual three-month sabbatical.
Why I refuse to work for anyone else unless that benefits package is HEFTY. I've built in a 3-month sabbatical every year into my business and I can't do it on less. https://t.co/6zpBTX6SNJ
— Tara Jefferson (@WhereWomenBloom) June 29, 2021
So here it goes:
The biggest event of The Self Care Suite is our annual retreat, Here We Grow. We typically gather in the fall, somewhere between September and November, and the planning process generally monopolizes most of my year.
When I work, I am all in.
I’m drafting and analyzing pre-event surveys of attendees, running an attendee community group so the women get to know each other before they step foot in the same room, and doing the heavy lift of running the agenda from top to bottom.
After the retreat, in late fall, I’m spent and the only thing I want to do is rest.
And so I do.
That is how my sabbaticals began.
After the first retreat back in 2015, I took two days off. I was riding high off the event and was still very much in workaholic mode. I was acting president and volunteer coordinator of Team Do Too Much.
After the second? I felt a little more freedom (and a little more run down) so I took two weeks.
By the third and fourth, I had planned to be out of office for a full month. But it felt so good to step away that I stretched it to two months.
In 2019, our fifth year, we had just come back from Puerto Rico and that trip was life changing. It gave me clarity on exactly how much I had accomplished in my five years of building The Suite. I decided to gift myself time - in this case three months - to figure out what comes next.
Another factor was that I live in cold, blustery Northeast Ohio. While I know I have seasonal depression (I need the sun!), one of my telltale signs is decreased creative and mental output. I’m just not firing on all cylinders.
One extremely cold, quiet winter morning, I took a look around and realized that my decreased energy in the winter might not be a flaw but a feature. I joked for years that my sabbatical was my “hibernation” but maybe the bears are on to something.
I decided to honor and accept my slower pace instead of banging my head against the wall for weeks at a time. My body and mind are simply following nature’s lead: slow down, rest up and recharge.
So what does my sabbatical look like?
Typically it stretches from late November until late February, with a few more weeks sprinkled throughout the year. I love that the holidays are tucked in there and I can be fully present with my family as we celebrate the end of a long year.
My sabbatical is about tending to myself in ways that are difficult when the majority of my waking hours are about work. In previous years that has looked like:
Getting a huge pile of books from the library (I love books and libraries in equal measure) and striving to read one each week
Spending extra time loving on my husband
Working on home renovation projects like my bedroom and home office makeovers
Pulling out my cookbook collection and making dishes that are usually too fussy to make during the average weeknight or trying to perfect some of my favorite family recipes
Assessing my wardrobe and personal grooming to see what needs to be adjusted
Catching up with friends to lay eyes on them and see how life has shifted since we last spoke
Sleeping as much as I can and lounging around the house in the softest, coziest clothes I own
This, truthfully, is not much different from how I approach my day-to-day life. I’m a self-care coach and community leader and I take that shit seriously. I do my best to practice what I preach and that involves having ample time in my life to rest and do what I need to do to feel centered. I take mental health days as often as needed.
Finally accepting that a must-have in my business structure is regular, scheduled downtime.
— Tara Jefferson (@WhereWomenBloom) November 18, 2020
I can’t create for months on end without a significant break.
That’s how I recharge + let the great ideas separate themselves from the clutter.
But while I love my daily bits of ease (I write a daily #comfortlist), by the end of the year I’m craving something more substantial.
My sabbatical helps me get a broader picture of where I’m at in my life. It’s my yearly timeout. I can take my time because I know there’s no big project on the horizon that I need to be preparing for. I can let my mind wander. I can explore things that are important to me without feeling like it’s getting crunched in the endless list of More Important Things.
It’s an opportunity to just be. I wish every Black woman had the opportunity to have an extended leave from work to just be.
My goal — and I’m pretty close — is to rest more than I work and to help other women figure out how to do the same thing.
How can I afford it? First, a few notes: I am married to a man who lives in my house and pays bills with me. I do not carry the full weight of our financial responsibility. Other than our mortgage, I don’t have any debt. No credit card bills, no car notes, and miraculously no student loans, which lowers our monthly expenses considerably.
The real answer is that I have one relatively passive income stream that has covered our mortgage, consistently, for the past decade. And once I know my mortgage is covered whether I’m actively working or not, it makes it easier to step away for a few months to recharge. In the months leading up to the sabbatical, I cut back on my spending and take an extra project here or there to give me that cushion.
It’s also important to remember that I am a solopreneur. So what do I do with my current projects when I’m on sabbatical?
For my community group, I — gasp! — let them know it’s sabbatical time. I preschedule content so it doesn’t go completely dormant and I will drop in on a weekly basis to see how it’s going. But I release myself from the pressure of being present for everyone else when I know my tank is empty. Social media gets a few sporadic prescheduled posts, but for the most part, I show up when and where I can and the rest will fall where it may.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Well, this must be nice but it sure as hell won’t work for me with the way my life is set up,” please know that I didn’t come to this place overnight. I’ve been working for myself for 13 years and it’s only within the last three that this sabbatical has been even remotely possible.
But even if a three-month sabbatical is out of reach, is a three-day version possible? One week? A smattering of mental health days spaced throughout the year so each day doesn’t feel like a constant grind?
Whatever frequency is accessible to you, claim it. Walk in it. Understand that building a rest ethic is just as, if not more than, important than our work ethic. Rest will comfort us when we’re tired, to replenish us when we’re spent, to boost us when we’re uncertain.
Rest well.
