How and why I took a short sabbatical

Basically, the last push was that we decided to part ways with my last company. It had been on the cards, and now I can only say what Harry Maguire said in an interview about Ole Gunnar Solskjaer:

I’ll probably speak more about Ole when I’m retired.

Well, exactly. I’ll come back to this in a couple of years. But let me just say now that the main reason behind my lack of motivation is perfectly summarized in this sentence:

They held onto “what worked” instead of re-allocating resources to what would work next.

So, full stop for now.

The first reaction

First it was a strange feeling, but I soon realised this was the opportunity I had been waiting for. I had the summer to figure out everything around myself including career paths, midlife crisis, personal questions – all these while I can spend valuable time with my family, the kids, as the summer holiday unfolded.

Hallelujah!

And I had to plan the whole thing, the next two months with the kids, the next two months with my professional plans and the next half of the year with everything financially and work-wise.

I knew that the first to do was to lay the foundations of my career path. I had been working around digital education, but at Raabe Klett I was moved slightly to the technical side, and with the print products added into the equation, I lost my focus. Too many different things, too many little areas to take care, to handle. What is the best description of my position? Product owner? Product manager? Project manager? Learning & development lead? Head of the digital area? How can I position myself?

I finally contacted a career expert to help me understand what my strengths are, what my focal point should be, what path I want to choose and where I want to work. It was a revelation to use an expert’s help. I realised that if this part of my life is sorted, I can move on to the other sides.

But that is a different post, back to the sabbatical.

I need a break

So, I took a sabbatical.

For two or three weeks I didn’t do anything apart from being with the kids, travelling with them, enjoying everything. Well, you can imagine there were bumps on the road (visiting my mother-in-law is always a special challenge and this time it was like the Olympic Games of all the recent visits…).

But after all these weeks, I was ready to build something and I sorted my priorities for the summer.

Running

For some reasons I lost weight before July, so (surprisingly) I was in a good shape when the sabbatical began. Being in a good shape at the right time had only happened like three times in my life, so that gave me another push. Having an operated knee and another simply bad one doesn’t really help running. But this time even that clicked – obviously, the lower weight helped.

Anyway, I was back on the running track putting kilometers in the bag, burning calories. I loved it. Read more about my plans with running here (August targets), and here (annual targets for 2025).

The home chef

Summer holiday, kids in the house. The routine in terms of food with three children is like a constant harassment. They wake up in a different time, so they eat separately. By the time the last one finishes, the first one needs something. And this is usually around 11 in the morning which means that lunch should be under construction.

So, morning done, such is ready, here comes the afternoon!

“Daddy, what are we going to do?”

Can we go out?
Sure, but it is 40 degrees Celsius outside.
Who cares?

All right, we figure something out, spend the afternoon somewhere and come back home to the question: What are we going to eat for dinner?

Anyway, the main thing is, I like cooking. And this summer I cooked lots of different meals. And most of them was a success. They liked it. Everything tasted good or even better.

Family time

I knew it could be the best summer of our life. And I think it is close.

Previous summers were organised around the availability of us and the grandmothers. I was on holiday for two consecutive weeks and usually after that my wife for another two. Apart from those days, grandmothers came and went on a daily basis to take care of the kids. So, they spent the whole summer in the flat, mostly.

With me being at home, it was completely different. We did a lot of things, traveled to the grandmothers and spent time there, enjoying it, mostly. Except my mother-in-law’s event as that was a catastrophe.

And we even decided to visit Genoa, Italy, to swim in the sea.

It was an action-packed and busy summer for all of us. The only one slightly missing from this was the wife, but that is another story for another time.

Learning & development

I thought it would be easy, I am at home, I have to be able to find some time to learn. Yeah, as you can imagine. If you read the above sections, you can understand why. So, at the beginning it just couldn’t happen, but then I squeezed it in.

I am a premium LinkedIn subscriber so I can use LinkedIn Learning which is a convenient way of self-development. First, I had to find my own career path, but by that I was able to identify the skills and the tools I needed to step forward. So, I found a so-called “learning path” at LinkedIn which I still follow with several courses in it.

Will talk about that later.

And that was it, end of summer, back to school. September arrived as quickly as Harry Maguire at Grimsby in the last minute to postpone the inevitable.

And a different type of experience for me began.