April 7, 2025 • 47 mins
Sometimes a two-week vacation just isn't enough - we all might need to leave our jobs for three months, six months or even a year. Taking an extended break can be great for our wellbeing - allowing us to recharge our batteries and reassess our priorities.
But for most of us taking a sabbatical feels impossible - so live at SXSW Dr Laurie asked the advice of sabbaticals expert DJ DiDonna. DJ teaches at Harvard Business School and founded The Sabbatical Project - but in a past life he established a hectic start-up and eventually found he was badly in need of an extended career break.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin work. It consumes a lot of our time and
a lot of our mental bandwidth. I bet you've had
moments where you've longed for a vacation or even fantasized
about hitting retirement age. But there's another option for taking
a break from the grind, a decision that can help
(00:37):
you recharge and reassess. It's called a sabbatical. As a professor,
I've had the opportunity to take an academic sabbatical every
few years, and I've been very open on the show
about just how rejuvenating and important those breaks were. But
what if you aren't a professor, Can you still take
a month's long break from your job. It may sound
like a pipe dream, but more and more workplaces are
(00:59):
coming around to the idea that extended employee leaves are
a good thing. So to discuss the rise of the
sabbatical and its many benefits, I recorded a live edition
of The Happiness Lab at the twenty twenty five south
By Southwest Festival in Austin, and I got to talk
with one of the leading advocates of the modern sabbatical.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Hello and welcome to the Happiness Lab live here at
south By Southwest. I am here in front of a
fabulous live audience, and we're going to be talking today
about the importance of sabbaticals and taking some rest. And
I'm excited to introduce my guest today, DJ Dedonna. DJ
is senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. In his former career,
(01:39):
he was co founder of ef Global. These days, DJ
spends his time thinking about sabbaticals and their transformative effects.
He's most recently become the founder of the Sabbatical Project,
a nonprofit aimed at creating a world where extended leave
is the norm rather than the exception. This sounds like
a world I want to live in for sure.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
DJ's work on the transformative benefits of sabbaticals has been
labeled Harvard busin if you View's New Idea for twenty
twenty five. So I think we're going to be seeing
a lot more of sabbaticals this year than before. DJ's
work has appeared in The Atlantic Time magazine, Fast Company, Fortune,
in the Wall Street Journal, and lots more. And today
we're going to be talking about the research behind why
an extended break can be so important and what you
(02:19):
can do to convince yourself and your employer that you
might need one.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Please join me in welcoming DJ Dedata.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
So, DJ, I'm curious how you became such a fan
of sabbaticals. As I understand it, this started with a
time when you yourself need a sabbatical, a moment that
you call your ice cream sandwich moment? What was that?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
So I entered sabbatical land as I call it, as
most people do, which is unintentionally. So if you don't
take a sabbatical, a sabbatical will take you likely. You know,
I'd run my company for seven years and I was
feeling lower and lower energy, tough to get out of bed,
and I was growing even worse facial hair than I
have now, And my co founders were like, are you okay?
(03:08):
And I think I think at some point, you know,
when it was your dream job and you can't.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Get out of bed to do your job, there's a problem.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
It brings up all certain types of emotions around, like
if this won't make me happy, what will The ice
cream sandwich moment was on a particularly sad kind of weekend.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
It was Friday, had no plans.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I was watching a very depressing Netflix series and I
was like, I just really want an ice cream sandwich.
I lived in Cambridge, and so there's plenty of like
late night mistakes you can make. But I didn't want
to like walk into the cookie place, you know, late
at night on a Friday by myself. So I was like,
I'll just place an order for this, and I didn't
want the delivery driver to think that I was a loser.
(03:46):
So I was like, I'll place two orders for ice
cream sandwiches. And so I went down and got the sandwiches.
You know, hey, I'll be right down and I come back.
I eat one of them, thankfully not to and then
I'd go to put the kind of pizza box size
thing into the fridge. And I woke up the next
morning and my fridge had defrosted and ruined my floors,
and I was like, Okay, this is the sign that
I needed to take a sabbatical. So that's how into
(04:09):
sabbatical land.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
So you made this decision to take the sabbatical, Like,
but you were the head of this company that you
were loving, Like, was that scary? What went through your
head as you made that decision?
Speaker 4 (04:19):
You know.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
One of the reasons why folks call it a sabbatical
is because it's this tidy term for something that feels
like your life is ending right, And so I think
for me, you know, I talked to my co founder
and he was feeling a little bit burnt out as well,
especially from the perspective of entrepreneurship. I think, if you
can't build up an organization that can survive without you
(04:40):
after seven or ten years, you haven't done an awesome job.
And so we were both you know, acknowledging, hey, let's
let's give some time to step away. But honestly, I
had no idea what was on the other side. I
started it with the pretense that I was going to
come back to the company, but I just I couldn't
really continue anymore as was.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Going, so decided to step away.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Said four months feels, you know, like the longest time
I've ever taken off by a factor of eight.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
But yeah, so that's that's what I decided to do.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
And so what happened.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
So so when I think about how I describe my sabbatical,
because everyone's sabbatical is different, and I don't want to
intimidate folks that might not be able to do or
want to do the thing that I did. There's like
the Marquee events. So I did this eight hundred mile
pilgrimage in Japan. I'd really wanted to investigate on the
spiritual side, something that I felt was important but rarely urgent, right,
(05:31):
So that was kind of like the Marquee event. But
really some of the more impactful moments on the sabbatical
were things that I don't put up on the billboard.
So I was nursing one of my parents back to health.
So I moved back home, you know, at age thirty two,
cooked a lot of meals. I helped a cousin of
mine move and another cousin of mine build a deck,
so I hung cabinets myself and got to have that experience.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
And you know, I wrote my first song.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
I bought a ukulele on Amazon, which is super embarrassing,
and I brought it along on the on the trip,
and so I wrote and performed my first song in
a place where definitely no one would know me.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
So that was that was helpful.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And so I think we're going to talk about what
you learn from this and some of the benefits soon.
But I want to start with some definitions because I'm
a nerdy professor, and that's where I go, And so
how do you define a sabbatical?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
So the definition that I think about is an intentional
extended leave from your routine job. So intentional, not that
you have to have made the decision to take it,
because most sabbaticals kind of happen to you, but that
once you're on sabbatical, you stay there.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
And so as soon as we leave a job, our
new job is to find another job.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
It's like very hard to be in that kind of
liminal state between careers, between jobs. So in order for
it to be a sabbatical, you got to like create space,
not look for another job extended, So it has to
be measured in months, not weeks. I think we like
to say at least three months. I took four. I
wish it would have been six. Most people I think
would like to take between six and twelve. Nine is
(07:12):
very symbolic because you're kind of like creating something new.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
And then from your routine job.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
So most folks, especially type A achievers, probably some in
this room, will say like, all right, I'm gonna go
off work and then I'm gonna learn how to be
fluent in a foreign language, or I'm gonna like write
a book or something like that. And what we found
in the research is actually that active rest. So doing
a job that is not your job can actually be
fulfilling and healing as long as it's not similar to
(07:37):
your routine job at all. Right, So don't do like
consulting projects to make a little bit more money, like
really switch out of your routine job, routine work into
something that feels fulfilling. So write that book, like become
a yoga teacher certified, right, but has to be very
different from what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
It's kind of a funny word, right, you use this
term extendedly. It's not a vacation. It's a sabbatical. It
kind of sounds almost like old school like like the
Bible like a sabbatical, right, I mean is that intentional?
Where did this concept come from?
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Yeah, So the of the word is ancient. Comes from
Hebrew scripture Shabbat, right, And so this concept that you
work for six days and on the seventh day you
devote that to worship. That also expanded out into you're
supposed to till the fields for six years and then
let them lie fallow for one year. And so that's
the notion of the rest right, that you have to
have rest in some sort of period of time.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Then it was kind of taken on by academia.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
So late nineteenth century, the president of Harvard I went
through and looked up the notes, like the minutes, the
meeting minutes, which is fun They had done research on
how much breaks do faculty need in order to replenish
themselves and also to do research, so they would have
to go over to Europe to figure out like what's
actually going on in the academy. And the funny thing
about that was that in the definition there it talked
(08:55):
about rest and recovery and also pursuit of science and knowledge.
And if you look now, like the rest and recovery
piece is totally dubiously absent from all these kind of
academic sabbatical leave policies. But that's the base sick history
of the terminology.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, I mean, as a professor, many people in academia
get something like a sabbatical, think it's going away. But
this is really rare in other fields.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Right, totally rare, and it's increasingly rare in academia, right.
Folks that are you know, are not getting paid for
it or shrinking down into a semester. Maybe we can
talk about your sabbatical later. But it's you know, about
five percent of companies offer this policy. It's much more prevalent,
you know, and kind of like tech and companies where
they're really trying to recruit talent and retain talent. It's increasing,
(09:40):
So it's doubled since twenty nineteen, and it seems to
be increasing over time, but still definitely the minority, especially
paid sabbatical with some sort of benefits and that sort
of thing.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And so you've done this cool project where you've been
studying sabbaticals scientifically, You've done hundreds of interviews, dozens of
different academic studies. From your research, I'm curious who is
taking sabbaticals and why are they taking them.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
So when I first started out, I thought I was
the customer, and so people who are in their mid
thirties forties who burn out take sabbaticals. And then what
I started to realize is that folks are starting as
early as kind of gap years. They're tagging along with
their parents sabbaticals. So when I thought about the research
in the book, it's kind of going from gap years
to twilight careers. So kind of like pre retirement type age.
(10:27):
So it's really anyone that either has something forced upon
them or takes this opportunity to take time off. I
think gap years are a great example.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Of that, and so why are they taking them? Like
what happens?
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah, you know, two thirds of sabbaticals are catalyzed by
a very negative event. So either a personal health crisis
or you get fired, or you know, let's say, like
a global calamity or pandemic forces you to think about
work totally differently. And then there's also positive catalysts, right,
so you sell your company, you know, you get like
a kind of employment leave things like that. And then
(11:00):
I like to say this neutral catalyst of if you
have a company, if you work for a company with
a sabbatical policy, then you get to take that time
off and you don't even have to think about it.
And you know, there are a lot of companies that
offer that, and then also countries that enable people to
do it, Like in Sweden you can take six months
off to try to start a business. In Australia, if
you're a civil servant, you get six months off every
(11:21):
seven years.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Man, I didn't realize there are countries that were doing this.
That is exciting, and that also reminds me that your
research has shown that there's lots of misconceptions when it
comes to sabbaticals. So let's go through some of these.
I think when I think of sabbaticals, I first think,
maybe we're just dealing with like a longish vacation. How
is this sabbatical different than that?
Speaker 3 (11:40):
So everyone who has taken a sabbatical has also taken
a vacation, and they're saying that something profoundly different.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Is going on.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
When you're on vacation, all the things you're on vacation
from are piling up in the back, right, your inbox
is piling up. You know that you have to come
back to work and get things done. When you're on sabbatical,
you're gone long enough so that those things are off
of your plate, so you can actually kind of deepen
into what's going on and you don't have to worry
about like what's happening at work.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So different misconception is this idea of that sabbaticals are
basically a midlife crisis. It's your freak out. You don't
know what you're doing, you're burning out, Like I guess
that's maybe part of some sabbaticals, but that doesn't define it.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah, So we talked about the times when people take
the sabbaticals over the course of their life, and we
talked about whether or not you take a sabbatical or
sabbatical takes you. So that can certainly be the case
where you're living a life that doesn't feel authentic to
you long enough that you feel like you have to
kind of burn the boats and like cast off lines.
I think I was a little precocious in my midlife crisis,
like a little bit earlier than midlife. Hopefully you think
(12:40):
about it like a dental cleaning appointment, Like you want
to take these like cleaning appointments, right, we don't love them,
but you try to take them every six months so
that you don't have like a root canal emergency. So
the whole goal of this is can you identify inflection
points in your life to take them off as opposed
to waiting for some big crisis to pull you into
sabbatical land.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
All right, here's another misconception that I think comes on
the employer side, the idea that sabbatical is basically just
a golden parachute, like you take a break from a
job that you're thinking about basically getting the heck out
of anyway? Is this the case?
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So what we found in the research is that the
super majority of people that take a sabbatical that's enabled
by their company come back, So over eighty percent come
back to their job. So it's not really a golden parachute. Now,
people do leave. But the difference, and we can get
more into this around kind of what's in it for companies.
The difference is you are spending a bunch of time
preparing the company to do all the tasks that you're
(13:34):
doing before you leave on sabbatical, and so you're kind
of like preparing the company for you to be gone,
and you're also like allowing the company to see, like
what are all the things that you do? Who else
could be doing it? Who could be stepping up in
your midst things like that. So not really a golden parachute,
but people do leave. I think the argument is if
someone's going to leave as soon as you let them
out of the door and off the leash, like were
(13:55):
they doing great work?
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah? But do we have data on it, like how
many people actually take off after a sabbatical?
Speaker 4 (14:01):
About twenty percent. Yeah, so it is.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
It's non zero, but it's not like eighty percent orred percent.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
And you know, one hundred percent of the people who
don't have a sabbatical policy at work are taking off
to take a sabbatical.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, right's fair, that's fair. And that gets a different misconception,
which is this idea that sabbaticals are sort of costly
for businesses. But you've argued a better way to think
about them as an investment. What do you mean?
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Yeah, I think listen, as I was saying about an
entrepreneurial company, if if it can't survive without you leaving
it as a leader, that's a problem. Similarly, turnover is
just something that happens, Like how many people here have
left a job?
Speaker 4 (14:35):
Right?
Speaker 1 (14:36):
That was a lot of hands for the listeners that
you haven't.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Left a job.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
So people are going to leave anyway, and as a
company you have to be prepared. You have to be
resilient to survive turnover. People are going to quit, they're
going to go on parental leave, and so it is practice.
It's like building a muscle of figuring out what tasks
you have, offloading them on to other people and really
kind of investing in that muscle as a company.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
So when we get back from the break, we're going
to see why a sabatoput can be such a helpful investment,
not just for the person taking it, but even more
for the company that allows it. The Happiness Lab will
be back in a moment. You're listening to a live
(15:19):
edition of The Happiness Lab recorded at south By Southwest
twenty twenty five with my friend, the Sabbatical Expert, DJ Dedonna.
I started this next section of the show by asking
Dj to give us a breakdown of the average sabbatical
and to explain how the benefits of taking a break
tend to unfold.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
So from a personal perspective, I think you can expect
a lot of things. And if you're coming into the
sabbatical super burnt out, then you probably need to heal
and that's going to be the first thing that you get.
So in the research in my interviews, I talked to
a ton of people that had some sort of physical ailment,
whether it's ulcer's, stomach, gastro stuff, and they've been told
by doctors this is stress related, But until they actually
(15:59):
stepped away from work long enough for that to heal.
They couldn't kind of grock that right. So I think
healing is one of the first things. Creativity is one
of the next things. So you're taking time off and
you're doing whatever you want to do, and that ends
up like kind of reigniting a lot of creativity. For me,
it was writing silly songs on ukulele, but like whatever
you would like to do. We think about like working
(16:21):
on ourselves as work as opposed to play. So there's
this concept of identity play as helping you run little
experiments figure out what you want to do next. And
then I think confidence is a huge one. No matter
if you have a sabbatical policy at your company or not.
It's pretty scary to launch off for an extended period
of time. Like I'd never taken more than a couple
weeks off work since I don't know middle school, and
(16:43):
so to take four months off that's scary, especially.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
If you're leaving your job. What are you going to
do on the other side of it?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
That sort of thing, And so being able to do
something that seems scary and then come back and say, actually,
I'm fine really builds up people's confidence to take big
steps in big leaps.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
It's also hopefully running.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Experiments on your sabbatical to say like, oh, I thought
that I wanted to write, and I actually like writing,
and so that builds up confidence ability to do it.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
And it seems like from your research when you talk
to people, these benefits are really common, Like this is
just what you hear everybody who take sabbatical saying.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I came back from
my sabbatical and I said that was really changed who
I was as a person. So this kind of identity
was enmeshed with my company, and if the company was successful,
I was successful. If it wasn't, I wasn't. And so
I was able to kind of break free from that.
But I wanted to check to make sure it wasn't
just my experience. And so the more folks that I
(17:38):
talked to, the more you just kept hearing these terms
like peak life experience. It's up there with like having
a child, like getting married. So you're creating an event
for yourself that will be one of the most important
events of your entire life.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
It also seems like you take time to notice the
things that you're not doing. You've talked a lot in
your work about this idea of functional workaholism and how
a sabbatical can help you penetrate into that a little bit.
What do you mean.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah, so we talk a lot about burnout. I view
burnout as a spectrum. So you're kind of like, you're
like burning out right, You're existing on a spectrum where
you're not doing your bath, not feeling great. That's kind
of hard to realize unless you step out from it.
And stepping out I'm assuming you've all had the experience
where you go on a vacation for a week and
right at the end you're like, oh man, I was
just sinking into it, and then you have to PLoP
back into work. So stepping out long enough to say, Wow,
(18:24):
the way that I was working and the way that
I was living was actually not serving me, and I
want to just step out of that for a little bit.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
I might want to make a big change.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
But obviously people's experience of COVID varied widely, but I
think a lot of folks saw, oh man, now that
I'm back at home with my family, I actually want
to do that more. And like the way that I
was kind of returning back to my family or or
you know, even how I was working was not really great.
So you needed like some perspective and like a long
enough break from the norm to understand that.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
And also this seems connected to this idea you've talked
about called regret insurance, right, maybe like a benefit that
comes later in life. What's that like?
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Imagine you're, you know, the age of your grandparents, and
you're telling your grandkid a story, like what do you
want to have in that story? Bronnie Ware, who is
a Pallido care nurse, talks about the five Regrets of
the dying and this notion that you have not lived
a life authentic to yourself. If you close your eyes
real quick and think, like, what would I want to
do with my life? If I could do anything? Can
(19:21):
that happen in the life that you're living now? Maybe,
but probably not, Like it takes a little bit of time,
and taking six months off in the scheme of working
for forty years is just not that much time.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
It's less than like two percent.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
I mean, if you know then what you knew now,
would you still choose the sabbatical? Would you do it differently?
Speaker 4 (19:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Actually, one of the things that spurred me to taking
my sabbatical was advice from a mentor. I went into
that mentor's office and I was complaining, you know, hey,
like this is hard, this is tough. The company's not
working as much as I would like it to be,
or whatnot. And he said, DJ, if you knew then
all the things you know about your life and your company, now,
would you join that company again tomorrow? And it was
(19:59):
very clear. I was like, absolutely not. And so I think,
like the tough part about our lives is lived kind
of with this inertia. You've made a bunch of small
decisions and all of a sudden you find yourself in
this past. So I guess encouraging you to think about
would you want to return to this exact life, and
if not, how are you going to run experiments to
figure out what other track you need to be on.
So long way to answer your question, But I look
(20:20):
back at that time and it's the most dense period
of memories in my entire life. It was eight years
ago right now I was walking in Japan, and so
that will serve me, I think, for the rest.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Of my life.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
So it seems like sabbaticals are serving the people who
take them. But now I really want to jump into
these benefits that employers can get because I think this
is one of the reasons that sabbaticals aren't just equal
for everyone, that not every company is doing this right
is I think employers are really worried about whether this
is going to be incredibly costly for companies. We talked
a little bit about some of these benefits, but I
want to do a deeper dive, like what are companies
(20:50):
really getting out of this when they set up sabbatical policies.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
I think it's a great point in the sense that
the best case scenario is that a sabbatical that doesn't
require you to blow your life up, doesn't require you
to save up for ten years, is possible because your
company values in you enough to do it. So all
of us who work at companies where managers are also people,
so we're taking our people hat off and putting our
company hat on. So this resilience is just a huge
(21:15):
piece like having a company be able to withstand what
they call key person risk. One of the interviewees was
like the principal and founder of this boarding school in
South Africa, and you know he'd been there from day one.
It was ten years in and he stepped aside for
six months because his spouse was doing a degree in Europe.
And by stepping away, he was able to see that, like,
(21:36):
some of the things ran really well in his absence,
maybe even like a little bit better right the operation side,
and then other stuff like fundraising fell off an absolute cliff, right,
And so the organization got to see what it was
like when he stepped away, and you know, junior folks
got to step up into roles and have kind of
career stretch experiences. But also he got to figure out, like, Okay,
(21:57):
if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, like this
thing is going to fail and that's not great, and
so like really developing like the resilience to say, Okay,
if I do want to transition out, what kind of
skills do I need to kind of manage? And said
the organization. So I think tenure and loyalty to the company.
We talk a lot about people finding meaning at work,
but at the end of the day, I'm sorry, like
most companies cannot provide a ton of like meaning and
(22:19):
purpose and so yeah, yeah, and that's fine, that's fine,
But I think what the company can do is they
can give you time to yourself to do the thing
that's meaningful for you. And I think the impact of
that is that people have more loyalty to the company.
One of our interviews was from the US Treasury, where
they had this long service leave policy where you can
take six months off and she got to go and
(22:41):
do like mountaineering and trekking in Latin America, and it
was long enough to say, I like trekking, I like
being on vacation, but I also really like the work,
you know, international development work. She was not planning on
having a family. She's like, I appreciate the ability to
step outside of my work for a stretch and become
kind of appreciative of that work again. And I know
I can do it every seven to ten years. So
(23:01):
that kind of like loyalty. And I also think that
creates authentic company culture. Because there's a financial advisory start
firm in Seattle called Brighton Jones that has these sabbaticals
every ten years, and people come back and they're doing
like a slideshow of their sabbatical, and everyone's excited for
those folks because they know they get it as well.
And so the company values you as a whole human
(23:23):
being and also like they get to celebrate your experience
because they know they get to take it, which is
different than someone being like I had a great honeymoon.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
You're like, oh, man, I didn't you know.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
You've also argued that it can help employees like increase
their innovation over time, and it's not necessarily that their
skills building, although that happens in some cases with sabbaticals,
it's more just that like time off builds this innovation.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah, So one of the interviewees was the CTO of
a tech company Stepped Away and was engaging this kind
of identity play I talked about, so, you know, was
a developer in college but had really not played around
with like mobile app development, and so it was like
futzing around and created this app to help text to
speech folks, right, And so that turned into being a
(24:07):
company that he started started from just wanting to learn
and play. I think this like play muscle, is really underutilized,
and I think it's really important to have folks like
step away and regenerate their ability to solve problems creatively
because you don't know what's coming around the corner. As
technology kind of accelerates, so you have to be able
to see outside of the box.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
And that's helpful for companies when people come back to
I soon totally.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
I mean you have to solve problems inside of companies, right,
And so it's starting.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
To seem obvious that sabbaticals are a good idea for workers,
They're a good idea for companies, probably a good idea
for like society and us as people, right right, right,
But only five percent of non academic companies are doing this,
and so DJ this is now your life's mission, your
dream to make sabbaticals more equitable. But to do that,
(24:55):
we have to overcome all the barriers that we and
our employers feel when it comes to giving us a sabbatical.
And we're going to get to those barriers when we
come back from the break. The Happiness Lab Live from
south By Southwest will be right back. Sabbaticals seemed like
(25:16):
a good idea, But let's go through some of the
worries that people have when considering a sabbatical or just
like the actual barriers that come up when you like
detonate your life for six months. In some ways, one
of these barriers is the optics.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I think people are really worried about what this is
going to look like. Is that something that you experienced When.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
I first thought about what the barriers were, you know,
around seven years ago, optics was one of the biggest ones, right,
So what are people going to think about the fact
you took time off? That has changed significantly since then.
I think one of the enabling features is that LinkedIn
introduced a career breaks role that you could put in,
which is tremendous. So like hundreds of thousands of people
now like proudly kind of talk about their career breaks.
(25:58):
The other thing is just like this story about a
successful business and a successful life is also changing. So
people are starting to hear in addition to the CEOs
running multiple companies sleeping under the dea thing, they're starting
to realize that folks like Steve Jobs right was studying
calligraphy for a year, and you have the CEO of
Impossible Foods figured out his company on sabbatical, Like, there's
(26:18):
actually like a lot of roles for you to kind
of find that creative energy when you step away. The
other thing I think about if you're interviewing for a
job and you tell them that you took a career
break and they disqualify you for the position. That's a
great sign that maybe you didn't want to work at
that company. It's like a kind of a revealed preference.
And also I've also found that in interviews, people want
(26:40):
to talk of, oh, like you traveled for six months,
Like what did you do? What was your favorite Like
that makes you an interesting person, and it also shows
that you had the courage and self confidence, like to
take time off and do something for yourself, which I
think the majority of people are going to be like,
that's awesome, Like I want this person on the team.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
So it seems like the story is changing, but it
also seems like we need to change the story in
our own heads. Like part of the problem of optics
seems like it's what we think other people are going
to judge us about, but it also is a lot
about what we're judging ourselves about too.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
I did a study of my Harvard Business School classmates
ten years out, and ninety percent of people were concerned
about how a career break would look, and less than
five percent of people actually cared whether or not someone
took a career break. So it's this weird dynamic where
you assume that people might take you less seriously, but
it's just not the case. And the way to kind
of solve that in our research, we identify this concept
(27:31):
called exemplars, which is fancy for examples, So like, find
an example in your life, someone that looks like you,
someone that has a similar job to you, who has
taken this time off so you can actually see for yourself, like, oh,
I'll be fine on the other side.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
I love that example because it seems like part of
the problem with sabbaticals is like for many people, this
is just going to be the first time you're letting
yourself do something that's not like work for any any
stretch of time whatsoever.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
It's very uncomfortable. It's not a natural feeling.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
It kind of creates a vacuum, right because you had
all these responsibilities and even though you want to not
be checking email, when all of a sudden you're cut
off from email and your calendar, Like, the first part
of sabbaticals can be difficult, and that's one part I
think folks don't get, like, you're on sabbatical must be amazing,
and you're actually like beating yourself up about leaving not
knowing what you're going to do next, and so it
(28:20):
is like an identity transformation. And in order to transform yourself,
you've got to really do some you know, like some
thinking and some breaking apart of who you are.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Okay, So that's the optics, like internally and externally. Another
big one, just practically is responsibility. Like we have professional responsibilities,
personal responsibilities, we're parents. There's like logistical challenges. How did
you navigate this stuff? And what are some suggestions?
Speaker 3 (28:46):
So I think that almost no one can throw all
of their responsibilities off tomorrow, right, And so if you
treat it like an emergency root canal, like that's difficult.
If you say, what is everyone here in this room
doing in twenty thirty one, Like, no one has any idea, right.
So if you say, like, in twenty thirty one, I'm
taking six months off and you work towards that, man,
(29:06):
twenty thirty one's coming up.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Actually, yeah, twenty thirty one is not very far away,
but it's gonna be awesome for the folks in this room,
because everybody started nodding when you said that twenty thirty one. Right.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
So if you can set some time in the future
and say, like I'm committing to take six months off.
Then all of a sudden, you can save up for it,
you can signpost it with your employers, and it's not
a big deal. This is just part of who I am.
I take six months off six years from now. The
other thing is you hear a lot about responsibilities. I
have kids, like they have, like, how am I I'm
going to pull them out of school to put them
back in school.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
Time and time again.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
It's it's difficult, But the people who have children who
take sabbatical have the most inspiring stories, hands down, because
they'll say stuff like I just had begun to think
about my kids as a set of responsibilities and tasks
like take them here, pick them up from here. When
in actuality, what's happening is people are showing their kids
what is astronomy? Oh, you're seeing the stars from Patagonia,
(29:58):
seeing them and getting excited about that.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Like what is zoology?
Speaker 3 (30:02):
And you're going to the Serengeti and you're seeing like
animals up close?
Speaker 4 (30:05):
What is geology?
Speaker 3 (30:06):
You're in like the Grand Canyon, And so it enables
you to see the world through their eyes and actually
give them an experience that will sit with them for
their entire life. There's a movie called Blink that we saw.
I don't know if you've seen it, but distributed by
nat Geo, and it's this family in Quebec where they
have I think three or four kids that have this
kind of ocular degeneration disease, and so they only have
(30:26):
a certain amount of time that their kids are going
to be able to see the world, and so they
decided to take a year off so the kids could
like absorb as many images about the world as possible.
So I think about that like taking it from a
responsibility that you have to take care of to a
responsibility to allow your kids, or you and your spouse
or yourself to get to experience the world in a
(30:47):
different way than our just routine life.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I also think that it's probably really great for parents
to show kids and to model like be that exemplar
for taking some time off and also just like not
be so burned out around their kids. Like I do
worry with some of like my adult friends with kids,
that those are kids that have only ever seen their
parents super stressed out, and I feel like it must
just be rejuvenating for kids to see parents it's taking
time off too.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Absolutely, you have to model this behavior right And I
actually have two good friends who are on sabbatical and
Kenya right now, and just seeing them kind of go
from having groceries delivered, meals delivered, like no time to
do anything, into like teaching their kids how to ride bikes.
You know, it's just it's really inspiring and life is
too short. Right Again, a silver lining of the pandemic
(31:30):
for many people is that you realize that life is
fragile and it's short, and you just can't bet on
twenty thirty one even who knows, so maybe she said
it to twenty twenty nine.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
When you take your sabbatical, Yeah, we gotta get it
in as soon as possible. Okay, So we've talked about optics,
We've talked about responsibility. I think the elephant in the
room when it comes to sabbaticals is cost right, just financially,
I think if you survey most people, my guess is
most people are going to say that sounds awesome, but
it's just completely out of reach. How do we solve
for this?
Speaker 3 (32:01):
So, I mean, the first and obvious answer is that
if this is supported by companies countries like our culture,
then it's not a problem at all, and if you
can plan it in advance, right. So a couple people
from the study were teachers. They had taken a sabbatical
right before they got married and backpacked around around the world,
and so it's like, we want to do this when
(32:21):
our kids are a certain age. So they saved up
for ten years because it was important to them, and
they did it and it turned out, actually they drove
a land rover across to the tip of South America
from Arizona, and it turned out that there was so
much maintenance with the land rover that the guy got
really good at it. And he came back and he
was like, I actually want to start a land rover business.
So now he like refurbishes land rovers and takes people
(32:44):
on tours. But yeah, so if you're thinking about it
as something that has to happen tomorrow, very few people
can afford it. If you're planning it out and saying
this is important to me, I'm going to save five
percent a year, then it's not that big of a deal.
The other thing I would say is that I've heard
this over and over again, where when you're at a company,
your raises are kind.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
Of on a schedule.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
It's like you get a five percent raise or here's
what you're eligible for. When you switch jobs, you actually
get paid a lot more because you're being valued at
the market rate for your skills. And so lots of
folks are saying, I quit my job, they wouldn't give
me a sabbatical. I joined another company and I got
a raise, so that essentially made the sabbatical free. So
your mileage may vary, but that's a dynamic that we
(33:25):
kind of get trapped in as we've been at a
company for a long time.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
You've also noted that it's also just worth asking because
lots of companies have policies that are like this that
might be hidden or not talked about too.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Yeah, there's these secret policies. I think that if you
want to do it and you're kind of set on it,
and you're like, listen, I'm either leaving or they're giving
me a sabbatical. Like at that point, you're going to leave,
and so you can talk frankly with your manager about this.
And I've seen this many times where someone says, all right,
let's work this thing out. Can we wait a year
so we can prep the team Okay, cool, how about
like we're not going to give you full pay, but
(33:57):
how about partial pay or how about just retaining benefits?
And what we find is that most people if you
just retain benefits, because that's the scary thing, they can
save up for it. And so again like how far
in advance are you planning on doing it? But I
would talk to people who aren't your manager first and
try to find an exemplar, and then you can kind
of broach that subject. And one of the reasons why
(34:17):
we have like a like a kind of a support
group on Facebook and LinkedIn where you can ask other
people what their best practices were in doing it. You
can find people who maybe worked in your industry or
in your company who have taken it.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
So that's helpful.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Okay, So this is how kind of personally we can
sort of fight some of the barriers. Let's talk about
maybe some of the structural barriers. Hopefully there are folks
in the room who are themselves employers, maybe big CEOs
of companies who are hearing about these benefits and want
to start offering sabbatical policies and want to develop a
company policy that can help folks do this. What do
employers actually need to make sabbaticals a thing.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
So in order to make it equitable for folks, it's
got to have to be paid, right, So allow people
to be able to take it and not take a
huge financial hit. I think in order to make it successful, Like,
the worst thing that can happen is you roll out
a sabbatical policy and it's too short or you don't
allow your employees to disconnect, and then you've had people
who are gone from the workplace and then also haven't
(35:10):
gotten the benefits. And so give folks enough time ideally months.
You know, what we found in the research is that
it takes about six to eight weeks for you to
really like become yourself again. Think about that, you take
a two week vacation up to two months to really
feel like, oh, I'm me, I'm not just this collection
of jobs and responsibilities. So give them enough time and
(35:31):
ensure disconnection. So best practice disable the email auto respond
You'd be surprised if you have an auto response that says,
I'm coming back to the office in September. I'm deleting
this entire inbox like emailing you in September. Folks will
just email you in September. It's not the end of
the world. So disconnection, I think duration and support.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
So you've also talked about some ways that companies can
make this the norm or make this scene is like
not a bad thing to do. What are some ways
that companies can do that?
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Yeah, So the norm that exists is this so called
work devotion norm where people are kind of like feel
like they have to be devoted to work. They can't
be seen as taking time off. This is why things
like unlimited vacation, which is a total boondoggle, like doesn't
work because you don't see people taking time off and
so then you don't feel like you can take it.
So I think the first thing that leaders can do
(36:18):
is take the breaks themselves to kind of model this.
So Sweden also has man Sweden's getting a lot of
love this episode. Sweden also has like kind of world
leading paternity leave, and what they found is that like,
even though you get paid paternity leave, fathers wouldn't take
it unless their bosses took it. You've got to model
that behavior, you've got to celebrate it inside the company
in order for folks to take it.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
What are some examples of positive impacts on organizations for
their leaders, like is it just the people that talk
the benefit from this or do you also see like
frontline workers taking these things and benefiting.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
Yeah, so it's a lot more rare to have folks
across the spectrum of the organization just because of the
financial responsibilities and things like that. So I talked to
this startup called Skylight. At the beginning stages of a startup,
if you've ever worked for one or started one, no
one's taking a sabbatical at the beginning. But if you
can get through the first like four or five years,
then you can make some space. And so the CEO, Michael,
(37:09):
their first employee, was just really burnt out, and so
allowed her to take two months off, come back and
then during that time it's a little bit cheating on
the sabbatical, but she had investigated a bunch of AI
tools and like got trained up, and so she was
able to bring that back, which was integrated into the
product and actually made it quite successful and kind of
changed the trajectory of it. The other example that I
(37:32):
like to tell is there's a CEO, Cheryl Johnson, of
this organization in Detroit. So, like the Coalition to End homelessness,
and there's funders that fund nonprofits in places like Detroit,
La San Francisco, Boston. They convinced the boards of nonprofits
to allow their leaders and their employees to take time
off and they fund it, right, And so the point
(37:53):
of that again to prevent this key person risk at
a nonprofit where the leaders super important, charismatic. And so
they're like convincing these boards to let these nonprofit employees
leave because like burnout started in the care sector, right,
I'm onlike nurses, healthcare workers, nonprofit leaders. If you really
care about your job, you don't want to leave it
because you feel like you're letting people down. And so
(38:15):
I think in the nonprofit industry, actually you see that
a lot as well.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
You've also seen some of these creative solutions that some
like jobs have come up with. You talked about this
idea of a prebatical, which I think is actually a
kind of clever one. What's that?
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yeah, So this came from the great resignation. Everyone is like,
I quit my job, It's amazing, and then a lot
of people got really nice offers that other companies and
other jobs, and so like, actually, I'm just going to
start this other job, And I think it's kind of foolish.
I think that you're burnout from a job is going
to like end just because you joined another job.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Yes, you take your box and by the time you
get to the car, the burnout's over it.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Right, Yeah, you're running on adrenaline, right, so you're bringing
like the adrenaline over. But I think companies actually benefit
from ensuring that people take time off.
Speaker 4 (38:56):
And the easiest.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Sabbatical to take is if, like, you have a job
so I teach at a business school, Like you get
a job at a consulting firm, and you can push
your offer so you know that you have a job
coming out of it and you don't have to worry
about money. And so I think like allowing folks to
make sure they come into your organization not burned out,
excited to hit the ground running is a great one,
all right.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
So let's say somebody's listening right now and they're convinced
it's time, they're ready to overcome all these barriers. The
extended break is what they want to do. What are
some practices for the sabbatical curious who are ready to
hit go on actually taking a break.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
So I think the first thing is you got to
ask around, so try to find an exemplar. I think
setting the container for a sabbatical is super important.
Speaker 4 (39:38):
So I don't really.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Want to give people guidance on their particular sabbatical, but
you got to like set enough time. You have to
ensure that you are disconnected enough. And partially that means
traveling if you can, so getting out of your geographic space,
and partially that just means getting out of your routines
because that's a vacuum at the beginning of your sabbatical,
when you subtract all of your responsibilities. It can help
(40:01):
to have some structured things, especially at the beginning of
your sabbatical, like you want to do something gets you
out of your head and into your body. Yoga, teach
your train, pottery like stuff where you're using your hands.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Hiking, building cabinets.
Speaker 4 (40:13):
We heard ye, yeah, exactly. Do not suggest going to ikea.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
It's not stressful getting out of your head and into
your body. And thinking about the phases of a sabbatical
as healing at the beginning and then experimentation in the middle,
and then integration at the end. So really like finding
these what they call like counterfactual experiments, like what would
my life be like if I did this versus what
I'm doing now. One of my favorite stories was a
(40:37):
consultant who would take a sabbatical every four years, and
he was like, when I retire, I want to run
an eco lodge. And so you spend a sabbatical volunteering,
like working in the kitchen and working in the back
office of eco lodges. And was like, this is actually
not for me, right, and so like running these experiments
so that you don't have regrets later in life.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
You've also talked about the importance of using your sabbatical
to focus on relationships. I know why this is so
important from the happy to science. The science just shows
that social connection is so critical for happiness, But why
can this be so important and transformative?
Speaker 3 (41:09):
Sabbatical specifically, A, I think you can go too far inwards,
and so I think about sabbaticals as having three archetypes.
There's like the achievers that really want to get something
done kind of type A. Folks be the explorers, so
people that just want to like see the world and
explore outwards.
Speaker 4 (41:25):
And also like more seekers.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
That want to find out, like I wanted to do
that spiritual journey so like, and then there's like folks
that need kind of healing and so, you know, one
of the tough things is that you spend so much
time thinking about yourself and what you want, because like
you're parched, you want to like go out and do
all the things that you end up just focusing solely
on yourself for happiness, Like, focusing on relationships is important.
(41:47):
It gets you out of your head and into more
like what do we actually care about?
Speaker 4 (41:50):
Like what are we doing here?
Speaker 3 (41:51):
And then second, I think as you as you get older, right, like,
everyone has their own schedules and you're trying to like
align stuff, and so this allows you to take the
scheduling hassles of one side of that equation and take
it away so you can actually plug into someone else's
life in their convenience. So it can kind of like
and catalyze and refresh these relationships that might have run
(42:12):
a little dry.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
That's so interesting is some of the happiness lab fans know.
I quite famously took this my own zabbatical when I
was feeling really burned out, and I think one of
the unexpected benefits was this sort of relationship building mostly
because of that schedule issue that you just mentioned, right,
I wanted to see your friend or catch up, and
they were like when can you meet? I was like
one any time, Like I got nothing going on, right,
(42:33):
you know? And that was just transformative, right because it
meant that those meetings and those relationships actually got built
and that those connections actually happened.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Yeah, there's all these things that we say are importance,
we know are importance, but we don't make time for
I talked briefly about this urgent versus important kind of dynamic.
So it to urge you to think about, like, what
are important relationships that you haven't given a lot of
love to, Like what are important things that you want
to do in your life? And take stock like how
old am I? Like, how many years have I been working?
(43:02):
How many times have I taken the chance to do
some of those things? And I'm guessing the answers like
pretty pretty rarely, and so like, okay, like you have
to make the time to do it. So relationships are
one of those.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
And so any advice for how to pick what to do,
because I think especially if you're entering the sabbatical for
that period of healing, if you're feeling really burned out
and you're thinking like, now's my time to find my passion.
That can kind of feel a little bit exhausting. But
you've talked about we shouldn't be going for passion, we
should focus on tiny curiosities. How does that work?
Speaker 4 (43:30):
Yeah, so full disclosure.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
I took this from Elizabeth Gilbert, Like she talked about
like chasing your passions is stressful. What if you don't
know what your passion is? What if your passion doesn't
fulfill you and instead just thinking about what you're curious about.
And so if you're like I've always wanted to be
a master potter and then you like spend your entire
time trying to find someone to like apprentice with, that
can be devastating when it turns out you're not good
at pottery. As opposed to saying like I've you know,
(43:54):
what is it like to travel on this part? Or
for me, like what would it be like to hang
cabinets even though I have no idea what I'm doing?
Speaker 4 (44:00):
And it was okay.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
It seems like it's kind of getting back to that
play mindset, like you don't have to do your sabbatical
perfectly to kind of get some huge benefit out of it.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Yeah, And I think, actually this is going to sound tripe,
but the mistakes are part of the thing, right. So
there was a person from our study who was like,
I really want to learn backcountry skiing, and so they
moved to British Columbia for a couple months, I got
these lessons, got certified, and then they eventually found themselves
tracking like how many vertical feet have I skied each day?
And they had like a spreadsheet and then they realized like, oh,
(44:33):
like I'm the problem here, Like like the way I
attack things is the problem, not like the job. And
so even if you sub out of that job, do
you want to work on yourself or do you want
to just take who you are and say like, Okay,
I want to actually attack some other problem I'm passionate
about with the same energy and vigor.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
And so as folks are thinking about sabbatical right now
in the middle of twenty twenty five, when we're having
this conversation, I think there's also an interesting question about
not just how do we take sabbatical, but should we
be taking sabbatical when the world feels like it's like
literally on fire? You know what's the advice for that.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
I think this goes back to the burnout and caretaker piece, right,
So like put your oxygen mask on before your kids,
Like you need perspective as to like what's actually going on,
what's important for you, and to get the resources to
kind of like take a different tack, right, And so
I think it's an opportunity to step back, And I
think it's a great opportunity in a time of like
(45:28):
where you're feeling not so great to say, like, who
do I want to be in this next phase of
my life and what skills or like direction do I
need to take in or ready to get there?
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Okay, so I'm watching the clock tick down in like
extreme way, which means we've got to get to our
parting thoughts. So parting thoughts on why we need this
life in career investment and why we should take sabbaticals
more seriously.
Speaker 4 (45:49):
I mean back to the regret insurance.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I would just really think about what are some things
that you would like to have as a part of
your life story and actually document those, like write them
down in a journal, and then think about, like when
are you going to actually be able to do them?
I think often we live in this inertia.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
Oh well, this is the life.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
I'm looking two weeks ahead, right, but really trying to
take a step back and say, like, what are things
that are important to me that I won't be able
to do. A stat that I looked up that was
kind of surprising was, if you're like a forty year
old male, which is what I am, I use mail
because our stats are worse, your chances of making it
to retirement age are five and six. So your chances
of not making it are one and six. If you're
(46:27):
a fifty year old couple, you have less than fifty
percent chance of both partners reaching retirement age and being
able mentally and physically to travel.
Speaker 4 (46:38):
Yeah, I'm great at dinner parties.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
And so like this we're going to wait till retirement thing,
this bucket list thing is not guaranteed. And I hope that,
like the pandemic gave us this like touch of like
life is precious, but like waiting until you can retire
is just not guaranteed. Both what are the things you
wish you could do? And then also, oh my gosh,
like I might not be able to do them. Hopefully
we'll like spray all into action. Twenty thirty one.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Twenty thirty one, who's putting in their Google calendar today?
Speaker 4 (47:05):
Right?
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Thank you, thank you for joining us for Happiness Lab live
at south By Southwest.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed my chat
with Sabbatical expert DJ Dedonna. But that's not the end
of the live show fun because I had a chance
to record several other podcasts at south By Southwest, and
next I'll be sharing a show I did with a
new voice in podcasting, but a voice you might already
know pretty well well. Hey Professor, Hey Michelle. That's all
(47:37):
next time on the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie
Santos
Pushkin work. It consumes a lot of our time and
a lot of our mental bandwidth. I bet you've had
moments where you've longed for a vacation or even fantasized
about hitting retirement age. But there's another option for taking
a break from the grind, a decision that can help
(00:37):
you recharge and reassess. It's called a sabbatical. As a professor,
I've had the opportunity to take an academic sabbatical every
few years, and I've been very open on the show
about just how rejuvenating and important those breaks were. But
what if you aren't a professor, Can you still take
a month's long break from your job. It may sound
like a pipe dream, but more and more workplaces are
(00:59):
coming around to the idea that extended employee leaves are
a good thing. So to discuss the rise of the
sabbatical and its many benefits, I recorded a live edition
of The Happiness Lab at the twenty twenty five south
By Southwest Festival in Austin, and I got to talk
with one of the leading advocates of the modern sabbatical.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Hello and welcome to the Happiness Lab live here at
south By Southwest. I am here in front of a
fabulous live audience, and we're going to be talking today
about the importance of sabbaticals and taking some rest. And
I'm excited to introduce my guest today, DJ Dedonna. DJ
is senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. In his former career,
(01:39):
he was co founder of ef Global. These days, DJ
spends his time thinking about sabbaticals and their transformative effects.
He's most recently become the founder of the Sabbatical Project,
a nonprofit aimed at creating a world where extended leave
is the norm rather than the exception. This sounds like
a world I want to live in for sure.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
DJ's work on the transformative benefits of sabbaticals has been
labeled Harvard busin if you View's New Idea for twenty
twenty five. So I think we're going to be seeing
a lot more of sabbaticals this year than before. DJ's
work has appeared in The Atlantic Time magazine, Fast Company, Fortune,
in the Wall Street Journal, and lots more. And today
we're going to be talking about the research behind why
an extended break can be so important and what you
(02:19):
can do to convince yourself and your employer that you
might need one.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Please join me in welcoming DJ Dedata.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
So, DJ, I'm curious how you became such a fan
of sabbaticals. As I understand it, this started with a
time when you yourself need a sabbatical, a moment that
you call your ice cream sandwich moment? What was that?
Speaker 3 (02:47):
So I entered sabbatical land as I call it, as
most people do, which is unintentionally. So if you don't
take a sabbatical, a sabbatical will take you likely. You know,
I'd run my company for seven years and I was
feeling lower and lower energy, tough to get out of bed,
and I was growing even worse facial hair than I
have now, And my co founders were like, are you okay?
(03:08):
And I think I think at some point, you know,
when it was your dream job and you can't.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
Get out of bed to do your job, there's a problem.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
It brings up all certain types of emotions around, like
if this won't make me happy, what will The ice
cream sandwich moment was on a particularly sad kind of weekend.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
It was Friday, had no plans.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I was watching a very depressing Netflix series and I
was like, I just really want an ice cream sandwich.
I lived in Cambridge, and so there's plenty of like
late night mistakes you can make. But I didn't want
to like walk into the cookie place, you know, late
at night on a Friday by myself. So I was like,
I'll just place an order for this, and I didn't
want the delivery driver to think that I was a loser.
(03:46):
So I was like, I'll place two orders for ice
cream sandwiches. And so I went down and got the sandwiches.
You know, hey, I'll be right down and I come back.
I eat one of them, thankfully not to and then
I'd go to put the kind of pizza box size
thing into the fridge. And I woke up the next
morning and my fridge had defrosted and ruined my floors,
and I was like, Okay, this is the sign that
I needed to take a sabbatical. So that's how into
(04:09):
sabbatical land.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
So you made this decision to take the sabbatical, Like,
but you were the head of this company that you
were loving, Like, was that scary? What went through your
head as you made that decision?
Speaker 4 (04:19):
You know.
Speaker 3 (04:19):
One of the reasons why folks call it a sabbatical
is because it's this tidy term for something that feels
like your life is ending right, And so I think
for me, you know, I talked to my co founder
and he was feeling a little bit burnt out as well,
especially from the perspective of entrepreneurship. I think, if you
can't build up an organization that can survive without you
(04:40):
after seven or ten years, you haven't done an awesome job.
And so we were both you know, acknowledging, hey, let's
let's give some time to step away. But honestly, I
had no idea what was on the other side. I
started it with the pretense that I was going to
come back to the company, but I just I couldn't
really continue anymore as was.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Going, so decided to step away.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Said four months feels, you know, like the longest time
I've ever taken off by a factor of eight.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
But yeah, so that's that's what I decided to do.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
And so what happened.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
So so when I think about how I describe my sabbatical,
because everyone's sabbatical is different, and I don't want to
intimidate folks that might not be able to do or
want to do the thing that I did. There's like
the Marquee events. So I did this eight hundred mile
pilgrimage in Japan. I'd really wanted to investigate on the
spiritual side, something that I felt was important but rarely urgent, right,
(05:31):
So that was kind of like the Marquee event. But
really some of the more impactful moments on the sabbatical
were things that I don't put up on the billboard.
So I was nursing one of my parents back to health.
So I moved back home, you know, at age thirty two,
cooked a lot of meals. I helped a cousin of
mine move and another cousin of mine build a deck,
so I hung cabinets myself and got to have that experience.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
And you know, I wrote my first song.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
I bought a ukulele on Amazon, which is super embarrassing,
and I brought it along on the on the trip,
and so I wrote and performed my first song in
a place where definitely no one would know me.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
So that was that was helpful.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
And so I think we're going to talk about what
you learn from this and some of the benefits soon.
But I want to start with some definitions because I'm
a nerdy professor, and that's where I go, And so
how do you define a sabbatical?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
So the definition that I think about is an intentional
extended leave from your routine job. So intentional, not that
you have to have made the decision to take it,
because most sabbaticals kind of happen to you, but that
once you're on sabbatical, you stay there.
Speaker 4 (06:47):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
And so as soon as we leave a job, our
new job is to find another job.
Speaker 4 (06:52):
Right.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
It's like very hard to be in that kind of
liminal state between careers, between jobs. So in order for
it to be a sabbatical, you got to like create space,
not look for another job extended, So it has to
be measured in months, not weeks. I think we like
to say at least three months. I took four. I
wish it would have been six. Most people I think
would like to take between six and twelve. Nine is
(07:12):
very symbolic because you're kind of like creating something new.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
And then from your routine job.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
So most folks, especially type A achievers, probably some in
this room, will say like, all right, I'm gonna go
off work and then I'm gonna learn how to be
fluent in a foreign language, or I'm gonna like write
a book or something like that. And what we found
in the research is actually that active rest. So doing
a job that is not your job can actually be
fulfilling and healing as long as it's not similar to
(07:37):
your routine job at all. Right, So don't do like
consulting projects to make a little bit more money, like
really switch out of your routine job, routine work into
something that feels fulfilling. So write that book, like become
a yoga teacher certified, right, but has to be very
different from what you're doing.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
It's kind of a funny word, right, you use this
term extendedly. It's not a vacation. It's a sabbatical. It
kind of sounds almost like old school like like the
Bible like a sabbatical, right, I mean is that intentional?
Where did this concept come from?
Speaker 3 (08:08):
Yeah, So the of the word is ancient. Comes from
Hebrew scripture Shabbat, right, And so this concept that you
work for six days and on the seventh day you
devote that to worship. That also expanded out into you're
supposed to till the fields for six years and then
let them lie fallow for one year. And so that's
the notion of the rest right, that you have to
have rest in some sort of period of time.
Speaker 4 (08:30):
Then it was kind of taken on by academia.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
So late nineteenth century, the president of Harvard I went
through and looked up the notes, like the minutes, the
meeting minutes, which is fun They had done research on
how much breaks do faculty need in order to replenish
themselves and also to do research, so they would have
to go over to Europe to figure out like what's
actually going on in the academy. And the funny thing
about that was that in the definition there it talked
(08:55):
about rest and recovery and also pursuit of science and knowledge.
And if you look now, like the rest and recovery
piece is totally dubiously absent from all these kind of
academic sabbatical leave policies. But that's the base sick history
of the terminology.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Yeah, I mean, as a professor, many people in academia
get something like a sabbatical, think it's going away. But
this is really rare in other fields.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Right, totally rare, and it's increasingly rare in academia, right.
Folks that are you know, are not getting paid for
it or shrinking down into a semester. Maybe we can
talk about your sabbatical later. But it's you know, about
five percent of companies offer this policy. It's much more prevalent,
you know, and kind of like tech and companies where
they're really trying to recruit talent and retain talent. It's increasing,
(09:40):
So it's doubled since twenty nineteen, and it seems to
be increasing over time, but still definitely the minority, especially
paid sabbatical with some sort of benefits and that sort
of thing.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And so you've done this cool project where you've been
studying sabbaticals scientifically, You've done hundreds of interviews, dozens of
different academic studies. From your research, I'm curious who is
taking sabbaticals and why are they taking them.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
So when I first started out, I thought I was
the customer, and so people who are in their mid
thirties forties who burn out take sabbaticals. And then what
I started to realize is that folks are starting as
early as kind of gap years. They're tagging along with
their parents sabbaticals. So when I thought about the research
in the book, it's kind of going from gap years
to twilight careers. So kind of like pre retirement type age.
(10:27):
So it's really anyone that either has something forced upon
them or takes this opportunity to take time off. I
think gap years are a great example.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Of that, and so why are they taking them? Like
what happens?
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Yeah, you know, two thirds of sabbaticals are catalyzed by
a very negative event. So either a personal health crisis
or you get fired, or you know, let's say, like
a global calamity or pandemic forces you to think about
work totally differently. And then there's also positive catalysts, right,
so you sell your company, you know, you get like
a kind of employment leave things like that. And then
(11:00):
I like to say this neutral catalyst of if you
have a company, if you work for a company with
a sabbatical policy, then you get to take that time
off and you don't even have to think about it.
And you know, there are a lot of companies that
offer that, and then also countries that enable people to
do it, Like in Sweden you can take six months
off to try to start a business. In Australia, if
you're a civil servant, you get six months off every
(11:21):
seven years.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Man, I didn't realize there are countries that were doing this.
That is exciting, and that also reminds me that your
research has shown that there's lots of misconceptions when it
comes to sabbaticals. So let's go through some of these.
I think when I think of sabbaticals, I first think,
maybe we're just dealing with like a longish vacation. How
is this sabbatical different than that?
Speaker 3 (11:40):
So everyone who has taken a sabbatical has also taken
a vacation, and they're saying that something profoundly different.
Speaker 4 (11:47):
Is going on.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
When you're on vacation, all the things you're on vacation
from are piling up in the back, right, your inbox
is piling up. You know that you have to come
back to work and get things done. When you're on sabbatical,
you're gone long enough so that those things are off
of your plate, so you can actually kind of deepen
into what's going on and you don't have to worry
about like what's happening at work.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
So different misconception is this idea of that sabbaticals are
basically a midlife crisis. It's your freak out. You don't
know what you're doing, you're burning out, Like I guess
that's maybe part of some sabbaticals, but that doesn't define it.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah, So we talked about the times when people take
the sabbaticals over the course of their life, and we
talked about whether or not you take a sabbatical or
sabbatical takes you. So that can certainly be the case
where you're living a life that doesn't feel authentic to
you long enough that you feel like you have to
kind of burn the boats and like cast off lines.
I think I was a little precocious in my midlife crisis,
like a little bit earlier than midlife. Hopefully you think
(12:40):
about it like a dental cleaning appointment, Like you want
to take these like cleaning appointments, right, we don't love them,
but you try to take them every six months so
that you don't have like a root canal emergency. So
the whole goal of this is can you identify inflection
points in your life to take them off as opposed
to waiting for some big crisis to pull you into
sabbatical land.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
All right, here's another misconception that I think comes on
the employer side, the idea that sabbatical is basically just
a golden parachute, like you take a break from a
job that you're thinking about basically getting the heck out
of anyway? Is this the case?
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So what we found in the research is that the
super majority of people that take a sabbatical that's enabled
by their company come back, So over eighty percent come
back to their job. So it's not really a golden parachute. Now,
people do leave. But the difference, and we can get
more into this around kind of what's in it for companies.
The difference is you are spending a bunch of time
preparing the company to do all the tasks that you're
(13:34):
doing before you leave on sabbatical, and so you're kind
of like preparing the company for you to be gone,
and you're also like allowing the company to see, like
what are all the things that you do? Who else
could be doing it? Who could be stepping up in
your midst things like that. So not really a golden parachute,
but people do leave. I think the argument is if
someone's going to leave as soon as you let them
out of the door and off the leash, like were
(13:55):
they doing great work?
Speaker 1 (13:56):
Yeah? But do we have data on it, like how
many people actually take off after a sabbatical?
Speaker 4 (14:01):
About twenty percent. Yeah, so it is.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
It's non zero, but it's not like eighty percent orred percent.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
And you know, one hundred percent of the people who
don't have a sabbatical policy at work are taking off
to take a sabbatical.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Yeah, right's fair, that's fair. And that gets a different misconception,
which is this idea that sabbaticals are sort of costly
for businesses. But you've argued a better way to think
about them as an investment. What do you mean?
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Yeah, I think listen, as I was saying about an
entrepreneurial company, if if it can't survive without you leaving
it as a leader, that's a problem. Similarly, turnover is
just something that happens, Like how many people here have
left a job?
Speaker 4 (14:35):
Right?
Speaker 1 (14:36):
That was a lot of hands for the listeners that
you haven't.
Speaker 4 (14:38):
Left a job.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
So people are going to leave anyway, and as a
company you have to be prepared. You have to be
resilient to survive turnover. People are going to quit, they're
going to go on parental leave, and so it is practice.
It's like building a muscle of figuring out what tasks
you have, offloading them on to other people and really
kind of investing in that muscle as a company.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
So when we get back from the break, we're going
to see why a sabatoput can be such a helpful investment,
not just for the person taking it, but even more
for the company that allows it. The Happiness Lab will
be back in a moment. You're listening to a live
(15:19):
edition of The Happiness Lab recorded at south By Southwest
twenty twenty five with my friend, the Sabbatical Expert, DJ Dedonna.
I started this next section of the show by asking
Dj to give us a breakdown of the average sabbatical
and to explain how the benefits of taking a break
tend to unfold.
Speaker 4 (15:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
So from a personal perspective, I think you can expect
a lot of things. And if you're coming into the
sabbatical super burnt out, then you probably need to heal
and that's going to be the first thing that you get.
So in the research in my interviews, I talked to
a ton of people that had some sort of physical ailment,
whether it's ulcer's, stomach, gastro stuff, and they've been told
by doctors this is stress related, But until they actually
(15:59):
stepped away from work long enough for that to heal.
They couldn't kind of grock that right. So I think
healing is one of the first things. Creativity is one
of the next things. So you're taking time off and
you're doing whatever you want to do, and that ends
up like kind of reigniting a lot of creativity. For me,
it was writing silly songs on ukulele, but like whatever
you would like to do. We think about like working
(16:21):
on ourselves as work as opposed to play. So there's
this concept of identity play as helping you run little
experiments figure out what you want to do next. And
then I think confidence is a huge one. No matter
if you have a sabbatical policy at your company or not.
It's pretty scary to launch off for an extended period
of time. Like I'd never taken more than a couple
weeks off work since I don't know middle school, and
(16:43):
so to take four months off that's scary, especially.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
If you're leaving your job. What are you going to
do on the other side of it?
Speaker 3 (16:48):
That sort of thing, And so being able to do
something that seems scary and then come back and say, actually,
I'm fine really builds up people's confidence to take big
steps in big leaps.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
It's also hopefully running.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Experiments on your sabbatical to say like, oh, I thought
that I wanted to write, and I actually like writing,
and so that builds up confidence ability to do it.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
And it seems like from your research when you talk
to people, these benefits are really common, Like this is
just what you hear everybody who take sabbatical saying.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I came back from
my sabbatical and I said that was really changed who
I was as a person. So this kind of identity
was enmeshed with my company, and if the company was successful,
I was successful. If it wasn't, I wasn't. And so
I was able to kind of break free from that.
But I wanted to check to make sure it wasn't
just my experience. And so the more folks that I
(17:38):
talked to, the more you just kept hearing these terms
like peak life experience. It's up there with like having
a child, like getting married. So you're creating an event
for yourself that will be one of the most important
events of your entire life.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
It also seems like you take time to notice the
things that you're not doing. You've talked a lot in
your work about this idea of functional workaholism and how
a sabbatical can help you penetrate into that a little bit.
What do you mean.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Yeah, so we talk a lot about burnout. I view
burnout as a spectrum. So you're kind of like, you're
like burning out right, You're existing on a spectrum where
you're not doing your bath, not feeling great. That's kind
of hard to realize unless you step out from it.
And stepping out I'm assuming you've all had the experience
where you go on a vacation for a week and
right at the end you're like, oh man, I was
just sinking into it, and then you have to PLoP
back into work. So stepping out long enough to say, Wow,
(18:24):
the way that I was working and the way that
I was living was actually not serving me, and I
want to just step out of that for a little bit.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
I might want to make a big change.
Speaker 3 (18:31):
But obviously people's experience of COVID varied widely, but I
think a lot of folks saw, oh man, now that
I'm back at home with my family, I actually want
to do that more. And like the way that I
was kind of returning back to my family or or
you know, even how I was working was not really great.
So you needed like some perspective and like a long
enough break from the norm to understand that.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
And also this seems connected to this idea you've talked
about called regret insurance, right, maybe like a benefit that
comes later in life. What's that like?
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Imagine you're, you know, the age of your grandparents, and
you're telling your grandkid a story, like what do you
want to have in that story? Bronnie Ware, who is
a Pallido care nurse, talks about the five Regrets of
the dying and this notion that you have not lived
a life authentic to yourself. If you close your eyes
real quick and think, like, what would I want to
do with my life? If I could do anything? Can
(19:21):
that happen in the life that you're living now? Maybe,
but probably not, Like it takes a little bit of time,
and taking six months off in the scheme of working
for forty years is just not that much time.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
It's less than like two percent.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
I mean, if you know then what you knew now,
would you still choose the sabbatical? Would you do it differently?
Speaker 4 (19:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Actually, one of the things that spurred me to taking
my sabbatical was advice from a mentor. I went into
that mentor's office and I was complaining, you know, hey,
like this is hard, this is tough. The company's not
working as much as I would like it to be,
or whatnot. And he said, DJ, if you knew then
all the things you know about your life and your company, now,
would you join that company again tomorrow? And it was
(19:59):
very clear. I was like, absolutely not. And so I think,
like the tough part about our lives is lived kind
of with this inertia. You've made a bunch of small
decisions and all of a sudden you find yourself in
this past. So I guess encouraging you to think about
would you want to return to this exact life, and
if not, how are you going to run experiments to
figure out what other track you need to be on.
So long way to answer your question, But I look
(20:20):
back at that time and it's the most dense period
of memories in my entire life. It was eight years
ago right now I was walking in Japan, and so
that will serve me, I think, for the rest.
Speaker 4 (20:29):
Of my life.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
So it seems like sabbaticals are serving the people who
take them. But now I really want to jump into
these benefits that employers can get because I think this
is one of the reasons that sabbaticals aren't just equal
for everyone, that not every company is doing this right
is I think employers are really worried about whether this
is going to be incredibly costly for companies. We talked
a little bit about some of these benefits, but I
want to do a deeper dive, like what are companies
(20:50):
really getting out of this when they set up sabbatical policies.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
I think it's a great point in the sense that
the best case scenario is that a sabbatical that doesn't
require you to blow your life up, doesn't require you
to save up for ten years, is possible because your
company values in you enough to do it. So all
of us who work at companies where managers are also people,
so we're taking our people hat off and putting our
company hat on. So this resilience is just a huge
(21:15):
piece like having a company be able to withstand what
they call key person risk. One of the interviewees was
like the principal and founder of this boarding school in
South Africa, and you know he'd been there from day one.
It was ten years in and he stepped aside for
six months because his spouse was doing a degree in Europe.
And by stepping away, he was able to see that, like,
(21:36):
some of the things ran really well in his absence,
maybe even like a little bit better right the operation side,
and then other stuff like fundraising fell off an absolute cliff, right,
And so the organization got to see what it was
like when he stepped away, and you know, junior folks
got to step up into roles and have kind of
career stretch experiences. But also he got to figure out, like, Okay,
(21:57):
if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, like this
thing is going to fail and that's not great, and
so like really developing like the resilience to say, Okay,
if I do want to transition out, what kind of
skills do I need to kind of manage? And said
the organization. So I think tenure and loyalty to the company.
We talk a lot about people finding meaning at work,
but at the end of the day, I'm sorry, like
most companies cannot provide a ton of like meaning and
(22:19):
purpose and so yeah, yeah, and that's fine, that's fine,
But I think what the company can do is they
can give you time to yourself to do the thing
that's meaningful for you. And I think the impact of
that is that people have more loyalty to the company.
One of our interviews was from the US Treasury, where
they had this long service leave policy where you can
take six months off and she got to go and
(22:41):
do like mountaineering and trekking in Latin America, and it
was long enough to say, I like trekking, I like
being on vacation, but I also really like the work,
you know, international development work. She was not planning on
having a family. She's like, I appreciate the ability to
step outside of my work for a stretch and become
kind of appreciative of that work again. And I know
I can do it every seven to ten years. So
(23:01):
that kind of like loyalty. And I also think that
creates authentic company culture. Because there's a financial advisory start
firm in Seattle called Brighton Jones that has these sabbaticals
every ten years, and people come back and they're doing
like a slideshow of their sabbatical, and everyone's excited for
those folks because they know they get it as well.
And so the company values you as a whole human
(23:23):
being and also like they get to celebrate your experience
because they know they get to take it, which is
different than someone being like I had a great honeymoon.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
You're like, oh, man, I didn't you know.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
You've also argued that it can help employees like increase
their innovation over time, and it's not necessarily that their
skills building, although that happens in some cases with sabbaticals,
it's more just that like time off builds this innovation.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
Yeah, So one of the interviewees was the CTO of
a tech company Stepped Away and was engaging this kind
of identity play I talked about, so, you know, was
a developer in college but had really not played around
with like mobile app development, and so it was like
futzing around and created this app to help text to
speech folks, right, And so that turned into being a
(24:07):
company that he started started from just wanting to learn
and play. I think this like play muscle, is really underutilized,
and I think it's really important to have folks like
step away and regenerate their ability to solve problems creatively
because you don't know what's coming around the corner. As
technology kind of accelerates, so you have to be able
to see outside of the box.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
And that's helpful for companies when people come back to
I soon totally.
Speaker 4 (24:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
I mean you have to solve problems inside of companies, right,
And so it's starting.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
To seem obvious that sabbaticals are a good idea for workers,
They're a good idea for companies, probably a good idea
for like society and us as people, right right, right,
But only five percent of non academic companies are doing this,
and so DJ this is now your life's mission, your
dream to make sabbaticals more equitable. But to do that,
(24:55):
we have to overcome all the barriers that we and
our employers feel when it comes to giving us a sabbatical.
And we're going to get to those barriers when we
come back from the break. The Happiness Lab Live from
south By Southwest will be right back. Sabbaticals seemed like
(25:16):
a good idea, But let's go through some of the
worries that people have when considering a sabbatical or just
like the actual barriers that come up when you like
detonate your life for six months. In some ways, one
of these barriers is the optics.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I think people are really worried about what this is
going to look like. Is that something that you experienced When.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
I first thought about what the barriers were, you know,
around seven years ago, optics was one of the biggest ones, right,
So what are people going to think about the fact
you took time off? That has changed significantly since then.
I think one of the enabling features is that LinkedIn
introduced a career breaks role that you could put in,
which is tremendous. So like hundreds of thousands of people
now like proudly kind of talk about their career breaks.
(25:58):
The other thing is just like this story about a
successful business and a successful life is also changing. So
people are starting to hear in addition to the CEOs
running multiple companies sleeping under the dea thing, they're starting
to realize that folks like Steve Jobs right was studying
calligraphy for a year, and you have the CEO of
Impossible Foods figured out his company on sabbatical, Like, there's
(26:18):
actually like a lot of roles for you to kind
of find that creative energy when you step away. The
other thing I think about if you're interviewing for a
job and you tell them that you took a career
break and they disqualify you for the position. That's a
great sign that maybe you didn't want to work at
that company. It's like a kind of a revealed preference.
And also I've also found that in interviews, people want
(26:40):
to talk of, oh, like you traveled for six months,
Like what did you do? What was your favorite Like
that makes you an interesting person, and it also shows
that you had the courage and self confidence, like to
take time off and do something for yourself, which I
think the majority of people are going to be like,
that's awesome, Like I want this person on the team.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
So it seems like the story is changing, but it
also seems like we need to change the story in
our own heads. Like part of the problem of optics
seems like it's what we think other people are going
to judge us about, but it also is a lot
about what we're judging ourselves about too.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
I did a study of my Harvard Business School classmates
ten years out, and ninety percent of people were concerned
about how a career break would look, and less than
five percent of people actually cared whether or not someone
took a career break. So it's this weird dynamic where
you assume that people might take you less seriously, but
it's just not the case. And the way to kind
of solve that in our research, we identify this concept
(27:31):
called exemplars, which is fancy for examples, So like, find
an example in your life, someone that looks like you,
someone that has a similar job to you, who has
taken this time off so you can actually see for yourself, like, oh,
I'll be fine on the other side.
Speaker 1 (27:44):
I love that example because it seems like part of
the problem with sabbaticals is like for many people, this
is just going to be the first time you're letting
yourself do something that's not like work for any any
stretch of time whatsoever.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
It's very uncomfortable. It's not a natural feeling.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
It kind of creates a vacuum, right because you had
all these responsibilities and even though you want to not
be checking email, when all of a sudden you're cut
off from email and your calendar, Like, the first part
of sabbaticals can be difficult, and that's one part I
think folks don't get, like, you're on sabbatical must be amazing,
and you're actually like beating yourself up about leaving not
knowing what you're going to do next, and so it
(28:20):
is like an identity transformation. And in order to transform yourself,
you've got to really do some you know, like some
thinking and some breaking apart of who you are.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Okay, So that's the optics, like internally and externally. Another
big one, just practically is responsibility. Like we have professional responsibilities,
personal responsibilities, we're parents. There's like logistical challenges. How did
you navigate this stuff? And what are some suggestions?
Speaker 3 (28:46):
So I think that almost no one can throw all
of their responsibilities off tomorrow, right, And so if you
treat it like an emergency root canal, like that's difficult.
If you say, what is everyone here in this room
doing in twenty thirty one, Like, no one has any idea, right.
So if you say, like, in twenty thirty one, I'm
taking six months off and you work towards that, man,
(29:06):
twenty thirty one's coming up.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Actually, yeah, twenty thirty one is not very far away,
but it's gonna be awesome for the folks in this room,
because everybody started nodding when you said that twenty thirty one. Right.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
So if you can set some time in the future
and say, like I'm committing to take six months off.
Then all of a sudden, you can save up for it,
you can signpost it with your employers, and it's not
a big deal. This is just part of who I am.
I take six months off six years from now. The
other thing is you hear a lot about responsibilities. I
have kids, like they have, like, how am I I'm
going to pull them out of school to put them
back in school.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
Time and time again.
Speaker 3 (29:36):
It's it's difficult, But the people who have children who
take sabbatical have the most inspiring stories, hands down, because
they'll say stuff like I just had begun to think
about my kids as a set of responsibilities and tasks
like take them here, pick them up from here. When
in actuality, what's happening is people are showing their kids
what is astronomy? Oh, you're seeing the stars from Patagonia,
(29:58):
seeing them and getting excited about that.
Speaker 4 (30:00):
Like what is zoology?
Speaker 3 (30:02):
And you're going to the Serengeti and you're seeing like
animals up close?
Speaker 4 (30:05):
What is geology?
Speaker 3 (30:06):
You're in like the Grand Canyon, And so it enables
you to see the world through their eyes and actually
give them an experience that will sit with them for
their entire life. There's a movie called Blink that we saw.
I don't know if you've seen it, but distributed by
nat Geo, and it's this family in Quebec where they
have I think three or four kids that have this
kind of ocular degeneration disease, and so they only have
(30:26):
a certain amount of time that their kids are going
to be able to see the world, and so they
decided to take a year off so the kids could
like absorb as many images about the world as possible.
So I think about that like taking it from a
responsibility that you have to take care of to a
responsibility to allow your kids, or you and your spouse
or yourself to get to experience the world in a
(30:47):
different way than our just routine life.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
I also think that it's probably really great for parents
to show kids and to model like be that exemplar
for taking some time off and also just like not
be so burned out around their kids. Like I do
worry with some of like my adult friends with kids,
that those are kids that have only ever seen their
parents super stressed out, and I feel like it must
just be rejuvenating for kids to see parents it's taking
time off too.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Absolutely, you have to model this behavior right And I
actually have two good friends who are on sabbatical and
Kenya right now, and just seeing them kind of go
from having groceries delivered, meals delivered, like no time to
do anything, into like teaching their kids how to ride bikes.
You know, it's just it's really inspiring and life is
too short. Right Again, a silver lining of the pandemic
(31:30):
for many people is that you realize that life is
fragile and it's short, and you just can't bet on
twenty thirty one even who knows, so maybe she said
it to twenty twenty nine.
Speaker 1 (31:40):
When you take your sabbatical, Yeah, we gotta get it
in as soon as possible. Okay, So we've talked about optics,
We've talked about responsibility. I think the elephant in the
room when it comes to sabbaticals is cost right, just financially,
I think if you survey most people, my guess is
most people are going to say that sounds awesome, but
it's just completely out of reach. How do we solve
for this?
Speaker 3 (32:01):
So, I mean, the first and obvious answer is that
if this is supported by companies countries like our culture,
then it's not a problem at all, and if you
can plan it in advance, right. So a couple people
from the study were teachers. They had taken a sabbatical
right before they got married and backpacked around around the world,
and so it's like, we want to do this when
(32:21):
our kids are a certain age. So they saved up
for ten years because it was important to them, and
they did it and it turned out, actually they drove
a land rover across to the tip of South America
from Arizona, and it turned out that there was so
much maintenance with the land rover that the guy got
really good at it. And he came back and he
was like, I actually want to start a land rover business.
So now he like refurbishes land rovers and takes people
(32:44):
on tours. But yeah, so if you're thinking about it
as something that has to happen tomorrow, very few people
can afford it. If you're planning it out and saying
this is important to me, I'm going to save five
percent a year, then it's not that big of a deal.
The other thing I would say is that I've heard
this over and over again, where when you're at a company,
your raises are kind.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
Of on a schedule.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
It's like you get a five percent raise or here's
what you're eligible for. When you switch jobs, you actually
get paid a lot more because you're being valued at
the market rate for your skills. And so lots of
folks are saying, I quit my job, they wouldn't give
me a sabbatical. I joined another company and I got
a raise, so that essentially made the sabbatical free. So
your mileage may vary, but that's a dynamic that we
(33:25):
kind of get trapped in as we've been at a
company for a long time.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
You've also noted that it's also just worth asking because
lots of companies have policies that are like this that
might be hidden or not talked about too.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Yeah, there's these secret policies. I think that if you
want to do it and you're kind of set on it,
and you're like, listen, I'm either leaving or they're giving
me a sabbatical. Like at that point, you're going to leave,
and so you can talk frankly with your manager about this.
And I've seen this many times where someone says, all right,
let's work this thing out. Can we wait a year
so we can prep the team Okay, cool, how about
like we're not going to give you full pay, but
(33:57):
how about partial pay or how about just retaining benefits?
And what we find is that most people if you
just retain benefits, because that's the scary thing, they can
save up for it. And so again like how far
in advance are you planning on doing it? But I
would talk to people who aren't your manager first and
try to find an exemplar, and then you can kind
of broach that subject. And one of the reasons why
(34:17):
we have like a like a kind of a support
group on Facebook and LinkedIn where you can ask other
people what their best practices were in doing it. You
can find people who maybe worked in your industry or
in your company who have taken it.
Speaker 4 (34:28):
So that's helpful.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Okay, So this is how kind of personally we can
sort of fight some of the barriers. Let's talk about
maybe some of the structural barriers. Hopefully there are folks
in the room who are themselves employers, maybe big CEOs
of companies who are hearing about these benefits and want
to start offering sabbatical policies and want to develop a
company policy that can help folks do this. What do
employers actually need to make sabbaticals a thing.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
So in order to make it equitable for folks, it's
got to have to be paid, right, So allow people
to be able to take it and not take a
huge financial hit. I think in order to make it successful, Like,
the worst thing that can happen is you roll out
a sabbatical policy and it's too short or you don't
allow your employees to disconnect, and then you've had people
who are gone from the workplace and then also haven't
(35:10):
gotten the benefits. And so give folks enough time ideally months.
You know, what we found in the research is that
it takes about six to eight weeks for you to
really like become yourself again. Think about that, you take
a two week vacation up to two months to really
feel like, oh, I'm me, I'm not just this collection
of jobs and responsibilities. So give them enough time and
(35:31):
ensure disconnection. So best practice disable the email auto respond
You'd be surprised if you have an auto response that says,
I'm coming back to the office in September. I'm deleting
this entire inbox like emailing you in September. Folks will
just email you in September. It's not the end of
the world. So disconnection, I think duration and support.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
So you've also talked about some ways that companies can
make this the norm or make this scene is like
not a bad thing to do. What are some ways
that companies can do that?
Speaker 3 (35:57):
Yeah, So the norm that exists is this so called
work devotion norm where people are kind of like feel
like they have to be devoted to work. They can't
be seen as taking time off. This is why things
like unlimited vacation, which is a total boondoggle, like doesn't
work because you don't see people taking time off and
so then you don't feel like you can take it.
So I think the first thing that leaders can do
(36:18):
is take the breaks themselves to kind of model this.
So Sweden also has man Sweden's getting a lot of
love this episode. Sweden also has like kind of world
leading paternity leave, and what they found is that like,
even though you get paid paternity leave, fathers wouldn't take
it unless their bosses took it. You've got to model
that behavior, you've got to celebrate it inside the company
in order for folks to take it.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
What are some examples of positive impacts on organizations for
their leaders, like is it just the people that talk
the benefit from this or do you also see like
frontline workers taking these things and benefiting.
Speaker 3 (36:48):
Yeah, so it's a lot more rare to have folks
across the spectrum of the organization just because of the
financial responsibilities and things like that. So I talked to
this startup called Skylight. At the beginning stages of a startup,
if you've ever worked for one or started one, no
one's taking a sabbatical at the beginning. But if you
can get through the first like four or five years,
then you can make some space. And so the CEO, Michael,
(37:09):
their first employee, was just really burnt out, and so
allowed her to take two months off, come back and
then during that time it's a little bit cheating on
the sabbatical, but she had investigated a bunch of AI
tools and like got trained up, and so she was
able to bring that back, which was integrated into the
product and actually made it quite successful and kind of
changed the trajectory of it. The other example that I
(37:32):
like to tell is there's a CEO, Cheryl Johnson, of
this organization in Detroit. So, like the Coalition to End homelessness,
and there's funders that fund nonprofits in places like Detroit,
La San Francisco, Boston. They convinced the boards of nonprofits
to allow their leaders and their employees to take time
off and they fund it, right, And so the point
(37:53):
of that again to prevent this key person risk at
a nonprofit where the leaders super important, charismatic. And so
they're like convincing these boards to let these nonprofit employees
leave because like burnout started in the care sector, right,
I'm onlike nurses, healthcare workers, nonprofit leaders. If you really
care about your job, you don't want to leave it
because you feel like you're letting people down. And so
(38:15):
I think in the nonprofit industry, actually you see that
a lot as well.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
You've also seen some of these creative solutions that some
like jobs have come up with. You talked about this
idea of a prebatical, which I think is actually a
kind of clever one. What's that?
Speaker 3 (38:26):
Yeah, So this came from the great resignation. Everyone is like,
I quit my job, It's amazing, and then a lot
of people got really nice offers that other companies and
other jobs, and so like, actually, I'm just going to
start this other job, And I think it's kind of foolish.
I think that you're burnout from a job is going
to like end just because you joined another job.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Yes, you take your box and by the time you
get to the car, the burnout's over it.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
Right, Yeah, you're running on adrenaline, right, so you're bringing
like the adrenaline over. But I think companies actually benefit
from ensuring that people take time off.
Speaker 4 (38:56):
And the easiest.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
Sabbatical to take is if, like, you have a job
so I teach at a business school, Like you get
a job at a consulting firm, and you can push
your offer so you know that you have a job
coming out of it and you don't have to worry
about money. And so I think like allowing folks to
make sure they come into your organization not burned out,
excited to hit the ground running is a great one,
all right.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
So let's say somebody's listening right now and they're convinced
it's time, they're ready to overcome all these barriers. The
extended break is what they want to do. What are
some practices for the sabbatical curious who are ready to
hit go on actually taking a break.
Speaker 3 (39:32):
So I think the first thing is you got to
ask around, so try to find an exemplar. I think
setting the container for a sabbatical is super important.
Speaker 4 (39:38):
So I don't really.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
Want to give people guidance on their particular sabbatical, but
you got to like set enough time. You have to
ensure that you are disconnected enough. And partially that means
traveling if you can, so getting out of your geographic space,
and partially that just means getting out of your routines
because that's a vacuum at the beginning of your sabbatical,
when you subtract all of your responsibilities. It can help
(40:01):
to have some structured things, especially at the beginning of
your sabbatical, like you want to do something gets you
out of your head and into your body. Yoga, teach
your train, pottery like stuff where you're using your hands.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Hiking, building cabinets.
Speaker 4 (40:13):
We heard ye, yeah, exactly. Do not suggest going to ikea.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
It's not stressful getting out of your head and into
your body. And thinking about the phases of a sabbatical
as healing at the beginning and then experimentation in the middle,
and then integration at the end. So really like finding
these what they call like counterfactual experiments, like what would
my life be like if I did this versus what
I'm doing now. One of my favorite stories was a
(40:37):
consultant who would take a sabbatical every four years, and
he was like, when I retire, I want to run
an eco lodge. And so you spend a sabbatical volunteering,
like working in the kitchen and working in the back
office of eco lodges. And was like, this is actually
not for me, right, and so like running these experiments
so that you don't have regrets later in life.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
You've also talked about the importance of using your sabbatical
to focus on relationships. I know why this is so
important from the happy to science. The science just shows
that social connection is so critical for happiness, But why
can this be so important and transformative?
Speaker 3 (41:09):
Sabbatical specifically, A, I think you can go too far inwards,
and so I think about sabbaticals as having three archetypes.
There's like the achievers that really want to get something
done kind of type A. Folks be the explorers, so
people that just want to like see the world and
explore outwards.
Speaker 4 (41:25):
And also like more seekers.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
That want to find out, like I wanted to do
that spiritual journey so like, and then there's like folks
that need kind of healing and so, you know, one
of the tough things is that you spend so much
time thinking about yourself and what you want, because like
you're parched, you want to like go out and do
all the things that you end up just focusing solely
on yourself for happiness, Like, focusing on relationships is important.
(41:47):
It gets you out of your head and into more
like what do we actually care about?
Speaker 4 (41:50):
Like what are we doing here?
Speaker 3 (41:51):
And then second, I think as you as you get older, right, like,
everyone has their own schedules and you're trying to like
align stuff, and so this allows you to take the
scheduling hassles of one side of that equation and take
it away so you can actually plug into someone else's
life in their convenience. So it can kind of like
and catalyze and refresh these relationships that might have run
(42:12):
a little dry.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
That's so interesting is some of the happiness lab fans know.
I quite famously took this my own zabbatical when I
was feeling really burned out, and I think one of
the unexpected benefits was this sort of relationship building mostly
because of that schedule issue that you just mentioned, right,
I wanted to see your friend or catch up, and
they were like when can you meet? I was like
one any time, Like I got nothing going on, right,
(42:33):
you know? And that was just transformative, right because it
meant that those meetings and those relationships actually got built
and that those connections actually happened.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Yeah, there's all these things that we say are importance,
we know are importance, but we don't make time for
I talked briefly about this urgent versus important kind of dynamic.
So it to urge you to think about, like, what
are important relationships that you haven't given a lot of
love to, Like what are important things that you want
to do in your life? And take stock like how
old am I? Like, how many years have I been working?
(43:02):
How many times have I taken the chance to do
some of those things? And I'm guessing the answers like
pretty pretty rarely, and so like, okay, like you have
to make the time to do it. So relationships are
one of those.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
And so any advice for how to pick what to do,
because I think especially if you're entering the sabbatical for
that period of healing, if you're feeling really burned out
and you're thinking like, now's my time to find my passion.
That can kind of feel a little bit exhausting. But
you've talked about we shouldn't be going for passion, we
should focus on tiny curiosities. How does that work?
Speaker 4 (43:30):
Yeah, so full disclosure.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
I took this from Elizabeth Gilbert, Like she talked about
like chasing your passions is stressful. What if you don't
know what your passion is? What if your passion doesn't
fulfill you and instead just thinking about what you're curious about.
And so if you're like I've always wanted to be
a master potter and then you like spend your entire
time trying to find someone to like apprentice with, that
can be devastating when it turns out you're not good
at pottery. As opposed to saying like I've you know,
(43:54):
what is it like to travel on this part? Or
for me, like what would it be like to hang
cabinets even though I have no idea what I'm doing?
Speaker 4 (44:00):
And it was okay.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
It seems like it's kind of getting back to that
play mindset, like you don't have to do your sabbatical
perfectly to kind of get some huge benefit out of it.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
Yeah, And I think, actually this is going to sound tripe,
but the mistakes are part of the thing, right. So
there was a person from our study who was like,
I really want to learn backcountry skiing, and so they
moved to British Columbia for a couple months, I got
these lessons, got certified, and then they eventually found themselves
tracking like how many vertical feet have I skied each day?
And they had like a spreadsheet and then they realized like, oh,
(44:33):
like I'm the problem here, Like like the way I
attack things is the problem, not like the job. And
so even if you sub out of that job, do
you want to work on yourself or do you want
to just take who you are and say like, Okay,
I want to actually attack some other problem I'm passionate
about with the same energy and vigor.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
And so as folks are thinking about sabbatical right now
in the middle of twenty twenty five, when we're having
this conversation, I think there's also an interesting question about
not just how do we take sabbatical, but should we
be taking sabbatical when the world feels like it's like
literally on fire? You know what's the advice for that.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
I think this goes back to the burnout and caretaker piece, right,
So like put your oxygen mask on before your kids,
Like you need perspective as to like what's actually going on,
what's important for you, and to get the resources to
kind of like take a different tack, right, And so
I think it's an opportunity to step back, And I
think it's a great opportunity in a time of like
(45:28):
where you're feeling not so great to say, like, who
do I want to be in this next phase of
my life and what skills or like direction do I
need to take in or ready to get there?
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Okay, so I'm watching the clock tick down in like
extreme way, which means we've got to get to our
parting thoughts. So parting thoughts on why we need this
life in career investment and why we should take sabbaticals
more seriously.
Speaker 4 (45:49):
I mean back to the regret insurance.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I would just really think about what are some things
that you would like to have as a part of
your life story and actually document those, like write them
down in a journal, and then think about, like when
are you going to actually be able to do them?
I think often we live in this inertia.
Speaker 4 (46:05):
Oh well, this is the life.
Speaker 3 (46:06):
I'm looking two weeks ahead, right, but really trying to
take a step back and say, like, what are things
that are important to me that I won't be able
to do. A stat that I looked up that was
kind of surprising was, if you're like a forty year
old male, which is what I am, I use mail
because our stats are worse, your chances of making it
to retirement age are five and six. So your chances
of not making it are one and six. If you're
(46:27):
a fifty year old couple, you have less than fifty
percent chance of both partners reaching retirement age and being
able mentally and physically to travel.
Speaker 4 (46:38):
Yeah, I'm great at dinner parties.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:41):
And so like this we're going to wait till retirement thing,
this bucket list thing is not guaranteed. And I hope that,
like the pandemic gave us this like touch of like
life is precious, but like waiting until you can retire
is just not guaranteed. Both what are the things you
wish you could do? And then also, oh my gosh,
like I might not be able to do them. Hopefully
we'll like spray all into action. Twenty thirty one.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Twenty thirty one, who's putting in their Google calendar today?
Speaker 4 (47:05):
Right?
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Thank you, thank you for joining us for Happiness Lab live
at south By Southwest.
Speaker 1 (47:12):
Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed my chat
with Sabbatical expert DJ Dedonna. But that's not the end
of the live show fun because I had a chance
to record several other podcasts at south By Southwest, and
next I'll be sharing a show I did with a
new voice in podcasting, but a voice you might already
know pretty well well. Hey Professor, Hey Michelle. That's all
(47:37):
next time on the Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie
Santos
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