You get to a point in many professions, maybe you are going through it now, when you feel like there is the most obvious thing to do and at the same time, it is really unsatisfying. Next promotion, next quarterly target, next project launch, all there to see, all logical stages on a ladder you have worked assiduously to climb. However, there has arisen a low constant murmur that rises above the howling of the air conditioner and the constant ping of the new email. It refers to another type of growth, which is not accounted by performance reviews or pay raises. It is more of a whisper, it does not invoke what you would be doing in the next five years in terms of job title rather it is who you will be. It is the tendency that taps on your shoulder and makes you get down the ladder just for a moment to see the world in a different perspective; the one that can be nothing but a journey without a clear ROI on a sheet of paper but the gift that gives a lifetime of inestimable returns: a single trip vacation.
It would be like selling out on ambition, like taking an insane risk with a career you have taken such time and care to build. We live in a society of hyper-productivity and therefore a conscious break is interpreted as a weakness or un-committedness. Even the thought of coming up with a proposal to your boss, your co-workers and even your family to take a solo trip of several months on end sounds too challenging, or even impossible. The natural reaction will be some sense of discomfort and doubt: What of your duty? And will you not lose headway? Do you run away at something?” Write a proposal document is which is the first and most important step in this process. But what is more important is to re frame the whole proposal in your mind. That is not escape. This goes in as a long-term investment in your biggest set of assets namely you. It is a self-led, high responsibility training program in the skills that are said to be most valued by the businesses of the modern world but which can never be fully learned in this seminar room or in an online module.
You have to get away with the notion of a break in your career, thinking like a break to your career. It is a rather unusual, but remarkably effective career growth sabbatical. Successive phases in the career, with any derailment as a matter of shame, is the product of an industrial past. In the modern, fast paced, globalised economy, the best workers will no longer be those who performed by rote but rather those who are flexible, able to take a punch, inventive and who actually have an international worldview. Six months of getting lost in Southeast Asia or South America, and learning how to fix the problems on your own will develop these qualities much better than a six months of the same job that you have been doing over the past three years. This is a dynamite paradigm shift in what you are pitching to your boss and what you are pitching to yourself. This is not a vacation you are requesting; you are suggesting that you go into a learning experience based on a field trip in order to be a better, more capable, more insightful, and more valuable person.
We should develop our business case, the actual return on investment on an apparently intangible voyage. To start with, there is the ability of complex problem-solving. The challenges at work are still there, however, there are defined parameters; you have systems of support with predictable variables. It is now that you can imagine yourself in a new country where you cannot speak the language, where you hear that your train has been cancelled, your phone takes no signal, and where you have to go to a city that you have never heard. At the instance, you represent the whole project team. You are the planner, the crises manager, the negotiator and the implementer. To call, there is no IT team, there is no manager to elevate it to. It is solely your responsibility to make a snap judgment of the situation, consider the information (that has been received at different sources), analyze your possibilities and make a firm decision. A track record of successful maneuvering through dozens of such situations creates a certain degree of resilience and even-keel attitude towards crisis that is created only through heat of true need. Not only will you come back to the office with tales to tell, but you will also have a dissimilarly rewired brain, you will become less shaken up by corporate hiccups and you will strive to come up with creative solutions in pressure situations.
Then there is the matter of cross-cultural communication, the term that constantly appears in the mission statements of companies yet is most likely misunderstood in reality. There is a difference between reading about cultural etiquette and actually managing to negotiate a taxi price in Marrakech, eating dinner with a family in a small Vietnamese village or attempting to find a reason behind a local custom on which you have no idea whether it makes sense and why. Travelling alone makes you leave your cultural comfort zone and needs a lot of empathy, patience, and attentiveness. You are taught to have more listening than talking. You learn to pick up non-verbal signals. You get to know how to establish rapport rapidly with persons of wholly diverse backgrounds. It is not merely a social skill, but it is a very important business tool. It simply means doing a better job as a team player, a more enlightened manager, and a better negotiator with global clients or partners. You will come back with the compounded perspective that individuals are driven by values, a fact that has helped you become a better leader because of the increased levels of sympathy.
More so, an extended independent travel is a lesson in budgeting and financial planning and management. You are basically the chief executive officer and chief financial officer of a complex multi month project with a given budget. You have to cope with logistics, handle costs in various currencies, decide on trade-offs between conflicting interests and adjust your strategy when the unforeseen happens. This is in the least project management. The ability to develop and stick to a multiyear budget and sail through confusion takes a certain level of maturity that reveals a vast amount of financial maturity. You will be able to comfortably inform the employer that you have already handled a large international project with a tight budget and when you say it, there would be life experience to support you in this matter.
Now you are ready to build the feasible pitch with this new mindset and you clearly understand the value proposition. It is essential to pay attention to time. The best time to put forward your idea on a sabbatical is when you are not forced to but when on a strong platform. Offer it when you have finished an important project or when you are aware of a lapse in seasonal work. It will be better received by you, should you be viewed as a high-performer in need of development, as opposed to a discontented employee in search of a way out. Make a proposal on paper. This is a sign of professionalism and it reflects that you have regarded business implications. The paper ought to be short and have the form of a business case. It ought to stipulate the length of your requested leave, appropriate hand over schedule indicating the route through which your duties could be taken care of, exact description of the capabilities you expect to acquire, and a pledge to the company of your willingness to work with them once you are back. By getting ahead of all the problems it may cause logistically and providing solutions, you demonstrate that you are a business partner of another, not an employee with his personal request.
Be ready to be malleable. All or nothing strategy is dangerous. Your dream could be half a year of unpaid leave and yet the company may feel confident with three months or even gradually coming back to work after a month of the trip, with the advantages first working remotely. It is aimed at the opening of a negotiation which gives a successful result. The very negotiation in itself is evidence to your professional maturity. It also demands that you give your own homework. It is so important that you prepare a good financial plan to accommodate yourself. This is a great tactic to use in the discussion when you bring this up very casually, as it indicates that you are a mature individual who thinks about the future.
Last but not least, you need to remove the fear, first yours and then your employers. The fear of your boss or employer is firstly that you might not go back and secondly that once the team has been able to manage so well, you end up becoming unnecessary. Your response is to present the trip as an instrument of new commitment. You can describe that such adventure will give you the new perception and drive that will enable you to offer even more when you come back to your team and exchange international experience with your local team. The fear that you are probably experiencing is the fear that you will lose, that you will fall back, that you will leave the escalator of the career ladder where others are moving up, and you are not moving up at all. You will have to oppose this by firmly believing on the worth of the other course. Such an experience will not create some form of a gap in your resume it will make your resume to have its own and distinct story that can help you stand out of all the others. You will be able to stand out in a crowd of career similarities with yours being a career of general bravery, wonder and transfiguration. It is an account of a candidate who is not afraid to make some calculated risk in the name of development, which is what every company aiming at progress should value.
To sell a one person travel break is to sell a break notion of what the aim of being ambitious is about. It is to say that these are the most prosperous experiences that really would make us better and wiser human beings, that are most frequently situated out of the scope of the traditional career path. It is a lesson that makes the case of a more humanistic, more walks of life-based professional development. It is not about giving up on anything you have to do, but instead, it is about building character, endurance and wisdom on how to deal with them better. It is the matter of getting out of the map temporarily to learn how to go by the stars. The souvenirs and photos will be your companions when you come back, but not only those, when you come back you will have a newly acquired purpose and a set of skills that will add meaning to your career and your life. What you will be selling them is the possibility to hire you back, however this time as a more skilled, more competent version of the already esteemed person.
It is a thrilling and frightening experience of being accepted in your pitch trying, being granted leave etc. the abstract dream has now become an actual one, a piece of time smashed out at your life, a waiting one to be lived. The first consequence of leaving the corporate side of life is that of being completely lost. There are minimal intrac coaches out there, who, in years, have programmed your life through systems like a 9AM start, weekly team meetings, project deadlines, back-to-back emails telling you what and how to do it next. Instantly, the building is destroyed. During the first few days, you might feel like you wake with a start, a ghostly panic that you are missing some important meeting, or the automatic movement to turn to your phone to see what should appear in your inbox now but does not, a welcome and disturbing silence. This is the start of the great de-conditioning, the gradual but, at times painful process of unlearning the corporate attitude.
You should need to embrace the process of redefining a productive day. In that previously known world, you had more outputs: number of reports handed in, deals sealed, tasks fulfilled. These metrics are useless on the road, when you were lonely in the new city. A good day could be one when you manage to get along a local bus system on the basis of gestures and some few foreign words. It can be hours of sitting in a cafe with nothing to do, but only watch how life of the people around moves on. It could be just three hours of chatting to someone you met at a hostel common room. Initially, there is no concrete achievement and it may have the feeling of laziness or failure. You are utilized to the point where you cannot justify your life through labor to such a degree that just existing is hedonistic. However gradually, you also learn to lose this corporate skin. You find a new and more human rhythm, the rhythm of duty has been replaced with that of curiosity. This rebalancing is one of the biggest and durable results of the trip. You are taught that your value does not depend on your production, which will turn you into a healthier whole, personal and professionally more balanced person and an ironical ritual more focused and successful professional, when you come back.
The journey is also made to cause transition of a team person into become a sovereign person. The spirit of collaboration, building consensus, and teamwork is touted in the modern corporate culture. These are important, but also they contribute to a spreading out of responsibility, and a blunting out of personal instinct. This is because when you are on your own there is no committee to consult. All the choices big or small are now yours and yours alone. And where are you sleeping to-night? Can I walk in this street? Of what use is the person giving directions to you? What will you do with the money, buy museum ticket or save it now to spend on your train ride tomorrow? This unending series of choice in note of uncertainty is an excellent furnace of character. You get to learn how to trust your instincts whereby there is a kind of learning that cannot be taught in situations where you allow everybody to decide everything you do anytime you want. At this point, you start being the CEO, COO, and CFO of You, Inc. This extreme independence does not turn you into a lousier team player when you come back; it turns you into a superior one. You also have a more confident feeling of what you think about things, and are more prepared to take a grip and to make a decisive contribution, knowing that you can defend what you have done.
The long silence is a condition you dread, and it turns out as the best teacher. On a silent, long ride in this bus or in the anonymity of an unfamiliar urban setting, the sounding noise in your life, what the people at the office are saying, what your boss is expecting or requiring, what your peer group wants you to do, et cetera, finally disappears. Instead it leaves you alone with your inner self. This may be challenging. Everything is stripped down to be able to look at your ambitions, your values and your fears. You start wondering why you followed the career. Did you scale that ladder in a true spirit of loving the view, or did you scale that ladder assuming because you have been told, that was the ladder to tack up? It is a great step of introspection, and this time of strong reflection can not be more valuable in getting in touch once again with your real motivations. It is an opportunity to check your life audit. In others, it simply validates their career choice and they get out with a new sense of self and an eminent sense of purpose and passion that had been buried beneath the cloak of desolation. It may show to some people that they want something more, a move towards a career that better reflects their true selves. It is not a gamble on your career, it is a very necessary correction that will see you through the remaining years of professional life doing something that makes a difference to you.
This sojourn turns out to be a working PhD in the art of improvisation. As every company likes to think, corporate life is all about risk mitigation and outcome control when it is carefully planned. The very essence of a long-term solo trip is of the contrary: ideas of life-deepest growth and of the most significant experience in our life, in many cases, originate right in the smoke of the failing scheme. Chaos is the author of the curriculum. You will reserve a hostel only to find out that it is terrible, and you will need to get a room at the moment, where you stumble upon a rather pleasant, family-owned guesthouse that you would never have found on the Internet. You will hop on the wrong train and arrive at a small non-touristy village where you may be invited to a local wedding, which no guidebook could ever show you. You get to know how to take a setback not as any disaster, but as a twist in the unexpected plot, not a disaster, but an opportunity. This skill to not only survive, but to thrive on the unexpected is a creative and executive super power. You will go back to a working environment where a small shift in the scope of a project can launch the teams into a tail spin and you can be the calm at the eye of the storm that can see the potential in the mess and understands how to improvise, adapt and overcome.
Lastly, the re-entry and re-integration process is a process by itself. In most cases, you will encounter what is known as a reverse culture shock. The things which are obsessing office people, the little people play, the insane attention to insignificant details, can be viewed as ridiculous once you have had to face the real world. The trick is to direct this new outlook to positive ways. You will also need to learn on how to translate the value of your non-translatable experiences. Don not merely decide to show your friend pictures when asked what you did during your holiday. Talk to them about things that depict the abilities you have acquired. Replace the expression, I was lost in Hanoi, with this one, I have learned a lot about finding my way in gray areas with little information when I was lost in Hanoi, and I learned to be more resourceful. Put things in the terms of professional growth. You are a storyteller now, and you will have the best case study defining your journey.
You will come back as a cultural interpreter of your team. By venturing beyond the confines of your bubble you are now able to appreciate assumptions and biases contained in your bubble. You will be able to go against the flow, present new ideas that may have never been thought of, and be a source of communication in a more global work environment. What matters is not only the job you will be doing but also the view you bring. The career break that at first sight appeared to be the dangerous formation now turns to be the smartest investment you might have ever made. It has not cost you anything, it has got you moving on to a new, higher track. You have realized that a career is not the whole book but rather one of the important chapters. This attitude will free you in your process of doing a job that is less egoistic, less fear-driven and more purposeful. Now you have shown your company, and more so to you, that you do not have as much value as you would be useful in line behind someone who is obviously having a path that will be predictable, but rather that you have power in the fact that you have been brave enough to walk your own path.
