The concept of making a long-term solo voyage usually comes flooding in as an afterthought, a regular daydream at an especially boring meeting or a late night in the office. It is a romantic dream of getting rid of duties, putting one bag, and going into the world with no limits. However, to develop the idea to the extent that it can be transformed into the actual reality, a substantial and systematic plan has to be presented. Sometimes the travelers start their trip in the airport; it starts months, or even years ago at your kitchen table with a calculator, a notebook, and a sincere talk to yourself. Selling such a major career hiatus to your boss is not merely a matter of selling, it is predisposing yourself by devising an argument which is so well-documented (i.e. researched) and well-grounded that he or she can hardly say otherwise. It could be divided into two separate but closely interrelated stages the personal planning when you develop logistical and financial base of your trip and the professional pitch where you could translate the personal dream into the convincing business idea.
The initial phase of planning your personal finances will be the most important and in essence the most eye-opening: a thorough exploration of your finances. Dream without a budget is not more than a hallucination. There are three basic questions that you must answer; How much will this trip cost? What are the saving capabilities? And consequently, when will I be prepared? Begin the research of what it is like living in your preferred destinations concerning the prices. A month in Western Europe will cost a fortune in comparison with a month in Southeast Asia. Google, travel websites, and budget calculators will be a useful tool to determine a specific and approximate daily budget of what is planned to spend on accommodation, food, transport, and activities on a day-by-day basis. Be practical and adjust a contingency fund of around 15-20 percent of your budget in something that is not planned because it will occur. After having a desired figure, focus the lens on your present expenditure. Watch each and every penny during a month to ask yourself where money really goes. It is here that the sacrifices start. The coffee you buy every day, the subscriptions to which you hardly ever subscribe to, the dinner outs you frequent, these are the material things you will lose every time you decide to get yourself a sunset in the Andes or to have a bowl of noodles in a large Tokyo marketplace. Open a specific savings savings account and get it on automatic deposit as you receive a paycheck. Seeing the balance rise is a tremendous incentive, and that vague dream of travelling rounds off into a measurable and attainable project.
Having a financial design, you will be able to lay out the troughs of your journey. This is not concerned with forming a strict, step-by-step plan, and would ironically defeat most of the liberating nature of a lone journey, but merely involving having a general bearing and the sense of the logistics. Which are continents or regions do you wish to go? What type of experience do you want, cultural, back to nature, solo solitary reflections? Take account of the climatic conditions and seasons. Due to the sun, you can not only have a more comfortable ride but also decrease the issue of gear you have to carry. Consider the visas you may need as a national age; in some countries, it takes months to apply and you may be required to do that ahead of time. Draw a possible path, keeping in mind the natural direction of travel in order to avoid unnecessary and time consuming travelling back. Consider long-stay travel insurance, which is an obligatory condition entailing medical emergencies and possible inconveniences of the trip. This is a stage of establishing preparedness scaffold. The less you need to research, plan, and organize the logistics on the big scale, the more you will have a chance to be spontaneous and act on impulse and curiosity when you are actually travelling.
Now, having a strong personal plan in place, you are able to build the professional pitch. The only defining factor about this pitch is to reframe the story. It is not a request to get a holiday; it is an offer of a strategic investment in your own professional growth, and an investment that will give the company a payoff as soon as you get back. Start by finding this out: what exactly are the transferable skills your journey will help you develop? Posit your solo experience as a high intensity, hands on workshop of resilience training, cross cultural communications, money biology, and lateral thinking. Consider the travel industry language and convert your travel plans to the industry language. To follow just one example, planning a multi-country trip on a shoestring is not merely backpacking, it is planning a long-term and very complex project with minute resources in various foreign jurisdictions. Having a missed flight in a foreign language is not only a travel disaster but “a moment to moment crisis and a quick change drill”. Framing your story this way helps your manager reshape his or her thinking and no longer view you as an employee who wants a personal indulgence but rather a professional who takes an initiative to develop so-called soft skills that are in higher demand now than ever before.
Then a formal, written proposal needs to be prepared. This action itself proves you to be serious and be professional. This writing must be clear, short and not be time-wasting to your manager and the company. There are some important sections that should be presented in it. Then there is the Executive Summary: a short summary of your request, the dates you propose to have your leave of absence. Second, the “Professional Development Rationale”: it is here when you expound the business case statement, which includes writing down the skills you would get and how they will match in the values of the company and your career growth. Third, and the most importantly is the “Work Coverage & Transition Plan.” This is where you demonstrate that you are not getting off your duties. Provide a careful plan on how your absence will be used to relieve your responsibilities. Recommend the people among colleagues who might take over some specific tasks, volunteer to writing your training manuals or standard operating procedures, and take the responsibility to achieve all the big project and deadline before you leave. Getting ahead of the curve by fixing the logistical issue before it even occurs to your boss can be seen by providing tremendous insight to the boss and the entire team.
Lastly, you should have a section of your Commitment to Return in your proposal. Among the greatest concerns of all employers is the possibility that by taking a long break, an employee will not resume working. This is to be faced squarely. Restate your interest in working in the company and show how excited you are to come and use your skills and international outlook in your work. It is also important to time your pitch right. Choose a time when the business is doing well and you have the upper hand in the situation e.g. after having a good performance review, after completing a major project etc. Do not take your manager lightly about the proposal and discuss it at a formal meeting. Be composed with your case and argue with confidence in the meeting, view it as a negotiation and be willing to compromise. They will respond with a smaller period of time or other terms. The fact that you present a solution, which is beneficial to the business and yourself will be a point of good measure to the business and it will be interpreted as your maturity and useful nature in the organization.
The whole procedure, stretching between the initial line of your budget to the last handshake to your boss, is the practice of the same skills in which you want to develop during your trip. It involves a thought-through planning, a scrupulous research, strategic communication and broad shouldered negotiation. it is the initial part of your quest. Treating this discussion with the same degree of professionalism and effort you put onto your work, not only you will up the chances of success, but you are going to strengthen your image of a serious, thinking, useful member of your team. You are not even requesting to be let out through you are divulging a rational arrangement about your personal development where you can prove that you have the ability and vision to deal not simply with your career, but your life. This holistic way of seeking a leave to work turns an innocent leave request into a plea with strength to time to work. Not merely to reach the top of the corporate ladder but a greater person as a more rounded, better equipped, and more worldly human being who will eventually be a better asset in any organization that they happen to be a part of.
Having had that successful meeting is not the goal; it is only the gateway. The instant when you break out of the previous form of your working routine and become open to the absolute liberty of open road is a shattering and substantial experience. Weeks that you spend at the beginning of your journey are not so much about discovering the world but discovering the silence left behind by your old life. Your professional identity that is built over the years, your job title, your position the office hierarchy, your expertise in a certain area, and have become no longer relevant. You are not a Senior Marketing Manager or a Lead Software Engineer, you are plain-old traveler and a whiteboard to the street seller in Hanoi or bus driver in Peru. This peeling away of your working mask is the initial and maybe, the hardest step in the curriculum. It causes you to ask a challenging question which is, Who are you without your job?
This nicely-worked-out budget that you presented now became your everyday reality, a daily project in discipline as well as choice. Managing resources is an activity you are currently engaged in daily, which you said you would become better at by means of the trip. You will experience the real-life consequences of your decisions: the choice of eating street food which costs you two dollars a day during a week rather than spending the same money on a scuba diving course; the calculation whether to take an agonising 18-hour bus ride or a one-hour plane to make your money last another month. It is not purely academic case study; it is the financial management of direct and personal essence. In a similar fashion, the rough itinerary that you drew becomes a living document. So you had drawn out a one month plan in Thailand and you end up listening to other tourists who have had a great experience trekking in Laos and you can learn to adapt. You learn to plot research as you go, to shift your priorities and priorities and to make bold decisions using unfamiliar facts. This is not travel, this is live simulation of the agile flexibility that you told your employer you would develop.
Instead of the skills that you mentioned in your professional pitch, there is another, unverbalized curriculum. This is the place where the greatest change takes part. You will understand how to be a lone person and not a lonely person. In the busy corporate sector of one of our metropolises such as Lahore, there is hardly a time where you are not encountering a person in meetings, bossing around in an open-office, and fighting through a commuter rush. There is another thing about true solitude. Evenings when you are in strange towns and you suddenly get a taste of the worst kind of loneliness and the freedom you have been dreaming of being like a gloomy burden. The ability to move through all of that without being distracted, become your own support and driver, creates the solid foundation of inner strength that no one can disrupt. You find a silent satisfaction that is not based on what other people say or what a group of people can do with you, but by mere fact that you are able to continue with yourself and survive as well as succeed.
You also learn how to utilize the power of weak ties, something which is alien to corporate world practices of creating strong and long-term ties. You will measure your path by a bunch of small, but usually significant, encounters with people you will never see again: the shop assistant who will teach you a few words of the local language, the family that shares the meal with you onboard a long train, the fellow traveler you will enjoy life stories in a single evening, never to see each other again. You pick up the ability to establish rapport and trust relatively fast, analyze social interactions, and establish common grounds with someone of every possible background. Such a talent a chance to establish a real human contact within a very brief period of time is invaluable. It makes you a more empathic and sensitive and dynamic communicator that can reach any person, whether being a new client or a junior staff, with more ease and genuine manner.
The ability to survive on little more than one backpack at a time, months on end, is something that rewires the relationship you have with the concept of materialism as well. Soon you understand that there is a gap between what you should take to live and prosper, and the mushrooming relations of wants laid out by the consumer culture. Each thing you carry with yourself better have a reason to its weight. Such unnecessary regimentation of essentialism is emancipating. You become aware of how much you need to be happy. This outlook is not only the way of how you could save money; this is the way which also makes your brain less cluttered. However, you will now have a fresh sense of direction when you come back to the world of corporate benefits and consumer demands. You will better be able to tell the difference between a strategic business requirement and a useless cost, between a career objective that has to contribute to your life and one that merely indulges your ego. The thinking of minimalism allows concentration and strong immunity to the unimportant things that may cause loss of direction to land and career.
Throughout your journey, you need to take care of the relationship to the professional world that you left behind. It is important that you had established clear communication limits prior to the time you left. To be really immersed and de-conditioned, a great disconnect is essential. Nevertheless, professional check-ins at the right time may be shockingly effective. A little email to your manager on day four of your vacation can do miracles, without any demands, just a useful piece of information. It might even be that basic, “I have got an interesting idea with how we streamline our own project workflows based on what I have seen regarding the hyper-efficient street food logistics in Bangkok. Here looking forward to tell more on my return.” This shows that you are not out to pasture yet, that you are not sitting on the fence but vigorously working on translating your experiences, and that you are no joker as far as your commitment to returning values to the company is concerned. It helps you to continue writing your professional story, though being thousands of miles afar.
The last and probably most important step of your journey is the art of re-entry. Your journey can not be over when your plane lands; there is need to plan your departure back same as you would plan the first journey. You will need to have a least a week or two before you swing back to the office. It is necessary to allow this much time to digest the enormous experience you have had, to once more adjust to the rhythm of your home city, and to make a deliberate choice as to how are you going to incorporate your new personality into your old life. This is when it is time to revise your work story. Refer back to resume contents and on linkedIn. Take a column on your sabbatical, and put it in the context of the strong, are-oriented language of professional nurture. Provide the examples of the practiced skills: “cross-continental budget management,” “independent market research,” “advanced cross-cultural negotiation.”
To be on the safe side have a preliminary meeting with your manager during your first week. This is the culmination of all your quest. During this meeting, you will be able to deliver what you have promised during your first pitch. Maintain a brief, compelling presentation on what you learned, and not about the adventures in your life, but what you learned in it. Relate what you do to the objectives of the company. Share the stories about the resilience you developed, the skills of communication you practiced and the creative solutions at which you had to arrive. This encounter loops it up. It shows your level of responsibility and makes the investment of the company on your part of leave a sound investment. The process that started as a farfetched duet has become accomplished as a physical resource that has the potential to benefit the business. You are not that one who has gone and here are the stories and the lessons to prove it. The holiday was not a vacation of your career, it was the time that your career, as well as your life, needed to have.
