The Sabbatical Reset
In the twelve years of my career, I’ve known fewer than ten people who have taken a sabbatical. It’s an option that my company proudly offers to figure out how to customize your career or balance your professional and personal goals, but it’s sometimes hard to see how it can fit into your own career journey. Will this affect my career trajectory? Will I be able to adjust my budget to accommodate the pay decrease? What will happen to the projects I leave behind?
While I definitely had all of these questions, I also had a lot of questions about my career and the person I was becoming. I had no idea how I had became the person who planned her whole life around being close to a computer in case someone needed me. I was finding it hard to see how my day-to-day actions aligned with the person I wanted to be one day, and I definitely did not have the energy to think about my future. Something had to give.
I had always joked about taking a sabbatical, but in October 2021 I started to put the pieces together to make it happen. Here’s the story from the beginning and how sabbatical changed my outlook moving forward.
A look back at my career
I started working for Deloitte a week after graduating from college because I had $200 left in my bank account after spending all of my co-op money on theater tickets and going out to eat. That’s the major lure of Drexel — during your time there you can have up to three six-month internships during your college experience. I took advantage of all three during my time studying architectural engineering. For the first and third, I worked in the construction industry. I spent the first one in an office assisting with (literal, physical) project plans for the development of a shopping center. Sometimes when I was using the plotter, I would accidentally give myself a papercut and have to use Wite-Out to clean up the evidence. The other construction gig was an assistant project manager helping to build a new high school that looked an awful lot like the High School Musical high school if you ask me. My memories from this job include taking photos on site, getting made fun of for the number of mice in my apartment, and polka-ing around the job trailer. 100% would do it again.
My second co-op was at Deloitte working with the Capital Project Consulting group, a name which has changed half a dozen times since 2008. In my own words, we “helped construction companies and owners stay on budget and on schedule or help them figure out where something went wrong.” I joined this Deloitte team full-time in 2011 upon graduating. Work-life balance was surprisingly good, even for being on the road four days a week. During the week I socialized with my co-workers on weeknights, and then I had time on the weekend for friends, time on the airplane for creative hobbies, and eventually started a meet-up group that turned into an annual conference. I even found a barbershop choir to join while I was traveling for my first long-term engagement. I was able to find a way to combine my passion projects, my relationships, and my work in the same 168-hour week.
Through the years, I went through periods of enjoying what I was working on and periods of definitely not enjoying it. Essentially, any project where I felt like I was providing recommendations for improvement while feeling like I was helping society at large was a good one, and any project where I was in the nitty gritty cost details searching for a very specific piece of paper to support a total project cost was a less good one. This engineer just could not wrap her head around auditing.
After one too many projects that felt more like an audit than not, the less good moments overwhelmed the good moments. Seven years into my career, then a manager, I attempted to quit to become the manager of a local gift and greeting card shop (truly the dream job – no sarcasm). I say attempted because after accepting the job, I was told that the job was not a good fit for me because I already needed too many days off. She rescinded the offer, and I went back to my daily grind. I had hit rock bottom. I couldn’t even find happiness in taking a 60% pay cut (and health insurance).
I felt stuck. A few more weeks into my wallowing, after a concerned co-worker asked me if I even wanted to be happy anymore, I received a call from another colleague asking if I would temporarily fill in for him on a project similar to one I had enjoyed. I figured things couldn’t get any worse and I might as well help someone else out instead of continuing to flounder, so I said yes. After one day on the project, I was immediately reminded that I did indeed have value as a colleague, a consultant, and a person. While it may sound dramatic, as an enneagram 3, I was really having trouble with the fact that I felt like I hadn’t provided value to anyone in a really long time. But as interacted with folks around the dinner table that first night, introducing myself to new colleagues and sharing war stories from the “good old days”, I realized I had found my place again.
As a manager traveling four days a week, I found it harder to maintain work-life balance with the new amount of accountability on my shoulders. I loved creating team culture, mentoring newer folks, and creating high-level insight reports, but late in 2018 I found myself winding down my seven-year-old blog — partially because the blogging world had changed and partly because I couldn’t find the time to devote to it anymore. Simultaneously, I gave up leading multiple Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives at work and even had to stop singing because of my new travel schedule. And while I still had plane time, I often spent this time sleeping now instead of crafting just trying to balance it all.
I made my pitch for senior manager on March 17, 2020. The world had just closed down, I spent far too much time arranging the physical items in my background, and I chose a mug I thought would bring me good luck. I recited my memorized 5-minute pitch nearly flawlessly, (sometimes clumsily) navigated the panels’ questions, and officially found myself with the new title of senior manager a few months later.
I sometimes say I became a senior manager by accident. Reflecting on this story, I can now confirm that it was a lot of hard work that got me there, but at the time the reason I wanted the promotion was (to quote Hamilton) to be in “the room where it happened.” I was sick of a large group of people going into a room and making a decision about my project team in which I had no say. I hadn’t quite realized all of the implications of my new title until it took effect.
Reaching the point of burn out
I soon found myself managing four teams. I was in the lost year of senior managers who only received a few hours of training because the world was locking down and trying its hardest (and fastest) to switch to a virtual environment. And I quickly realized that I had just become a senior manager without ever even working for one. I had no idea what senior managers even did. I did what I always do though and worked hard to figure it out. There were some late nights crying on the kitchen floor over pricing models, but I got there. That said, the work life balance was starting to disintegrate.
I eventually switched departments into one that was a better fit for me than construction, but this now meant I was working to help state and local governments with Federal grant funding full time. And Federal grant funding exploded during the pandemic - between the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act, over $500 billion dollars were heading into the hands of state and local governments. Our teams were working 60 hours a week trying to respond to Request for Proposal while simultaneously keeping our current clients informed and calm during a time when the world was building the plane while flying it. I was exhausted. (Honestly, we were all exhausted.)
My projects were starting to get the better of me. Did I even have it in me to make it to Principal or Managing Director if I couldn’t make it through Senior Manager? Was this how I was called to spend the next thirty years of my career?
I started working with a leadership coach to sort through these feelings. She was really into metaphors. At one point, we were talking about me navigating my workday as if I were trying to swim across a very large lake, but recently I had started drowning. She asked what I would do if somebody threw me a life raft? In true Dorie fashion, my answer was to pause for a quick break and then “just keep swimming”. It didn’t even occur to me that I could use the life raft to return to shore.
She used another metaphor where I was working at a bakery and kept trying to cure my unhappiness by making a new and exciting type of baked goods - would it be a cruffin, sourdough bread, or maybe even a sfogliatelle? She then asked me, but what if you don’t want to make baked goods, what if you look outside the window one day and see someone wearing a really fun hat and you decide you want to sell hats now? I never thought of that.
To be clear, this leadership coach was actually very pro-Deloitte. I had worked with other leadership coaches who had built up a more negative perception of Deloitte through the years, which was actually not helpful because I spent the whole time defending it. (A company can’t continue to win numerous Best Place to Work awards and be that bad of a place to work.) All she was trying to do was open my eyes to the fact that there might be something else out there that wasn’t literally exactly what I was doing right now. I started to realize I had no idea what was out there. When I thought about careers, even though I had been in the workforce for over a decade, I felt like a child when it came to choosing what might be next. In my brain you could be a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a firefighter, or a librarian, as if all of life was The Busy World of Richard Scarry.
I also had so many other interests that I had never explored. All I knew for sure was that I liked helping people. Maybe I would be better off working in the nonprofit sector or in a local government? Maybe I could make a bigger impact on society by being closer to the decision making instead of being the one to recommend the decision – I could be the one actually implementing. The thought of that was overwhelmingly freeing. I could be the do-er again.
My coach and I talked about values. We worked on finding balance between and integration of how I think, feel, and act. We identified when I felt like I was “in flow” and when I felt drained. We talked about what things I actually had control over, leadership theory, and creating boundaries. She also helped me realize that one of the signs I am personally reaching burnt out is when I start declining one-on-one meetings. They’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but the quick calls where I can answer someone’s questions about their own career are one of the most life-giving parts of my day. So when I started declining them because I couldn’t find the time, I started to understand something was wrong. Something had to give.
I had always toyed with the idea of a sabbatical. Deloitte is one of the few private sector companies that affords this time to its employees, but I wasn’t even sure what I would do on the sabbatical. I knew I wasn’t the person to climb a tall mountain and I felt no need to become a certified fraud examiner. What could I do to help broaden my view of the world? Bonus points if it aligned with my core values: community and efficiency.
How it all came together
In October 2021, I attended an in-person leadership conference hosted by a local nonprofit. I knew from my blogging days that conferences were my jam. It was also my first time really leaving the house for a major public event since March 2020. The energy in the room was electric. The people were engaging, inspiring, and interested in bringing positive change to the city in which we lived. I was recharged in a way I hadn’t been in months.
The first day, after a series of lectures, we went on field trips to learn more about economic development; one of my destinations was to the local distillery. After an excellent panel discussion on small businesses and two cocktails, we transitioned to dinner. Where I had another glass of wine. By happenstance, I sat next to the Managing Director of the hosting non-profit and after a(nother) gulp of liquid courage I asked him, “hey, can I work for you for a few months?” And a few weeks later we were on a call to try to make it happen.
Deloitte had a few Partners on the Board of this nonprofit, so it was an easy sell for my home office, but it felt like a harder pitch for my project teams. I first ran it by a Partner who I knew through my projects, but for whom I didn’t work directly. He said I should absolutely do it. This gave me the courage to map out potential dates and pitch my project leaders with eight months’ notice – plenty of time to transition my work.
To my surprise, they all said yes. When I asked one why he said yes so quickly, he said, “what’s the other option, you quit?” I laughed, but honestly hadn’t even considered that option. (Remember? I’m the girl who doesn’t get out of the lake and only makes baked goods.) One person did warn me that this might affect my career progression, but as a 33-year-old senior manager, I felt like I still had some wiggle room.
In June 2022, after a week of work between my honeymoon and my sabbatical I finished transitioning my projects to other senior managers. For the biggest projects we started transitioning in March, but for others I was writing long emails with billing instructions up the last minute. But after that I had five and a half months away from the life I had known for (at this point) eleven years.
I ended up spending my sabbatical
helping to plan the same leadership conference I had attended in 2021. The conference brought 150 leaders from my city to a different city to learn how we could make our own city better. I was in my element. And I was the do-er. I was building the spreadsheets, doing the research, and executing certain tasks to bring the event to life. In the first month, I had the opportunity to attend a conference in a completely different industry from my own, a women’s health panel, and a board meeting connecting with executives from around the city. These were opportunities I had never had.
Prior to this, I had spent my whole career building deep working relationships with colleagues and clients all over the country, but somehow had no work connections in my own city. Now was my chance to meet them. I scheduled informational interviews with over a dozen people who I met through my new role and asked them about their jobs, their volunteer efforts, and what made them tick. I asked what decisions in life had gotten them to where they were now and what decisions they would make if they could do it all over again.
During the workday I was a part of conversations that were completely new to me. While I had worked with states and local governments for years, my knowledge was limited to regulatory compliance. I had never explored the nuances of inflation, shrinking cities, the housing market, or workforce development. There was so much more to learn.
My boss encouraged me to write about my community development journey on LinkedIn. (Here you can find articles 1, 2, and 3.) I had missed writing so much in the last five years, but I had been low on time and didn’t have the energy to navigate the corporate red tape of writing about my career experiences for an external audience. It felt amazing to be building an online brand that tied to both my values and how I was spending my day.
And this was only 20 hours of my week. In the other 20 hours I took art classes, read books, wrote a book, took myself on artist dates, volunteered with other organizations, tried on the role of an assistant wedding planner, started bullet journaling, attended a sound bath, and more. I had somehow managed to check off all of the things on my to do list that one usually thinks, I’ll never actually get to those. Checking those boxes felt so gratifying.
Three months into sabbatical, I started to feel like a person again. I hadn’t realized how far away I had gotten from who I am at my core. I felt lighter. I was laughing more. I assumed that things would work out for the best and put my faith in people again. I was making decisions from a place of abundance filtered through the lens of community and efficiency. I felt like Chrystina again and I didn’t even know she was gone.
I read a book called You Turn: Get Unstuck, Discover Your Direction, and Design Your Dream Career by Ashley Stahl. It was the word “unstuck” that resonated with me the most. One activity prompted me to ask friends and co-workers when they had seen me at my best and how a room changes when I walk into it. The responses I received surprised me. I was seen as a teacher and a safe space. Two things that I loved being, but I was worried had gone unnoticed. It seems these traits were things others loved about me, too. If I was going to continue with my career, I was going to need to find a way to build these back into the framework again.
The remaining two-and-a-half months flew by. I helped execute the leadership conference, planned and went on my husband’s first trip to Disney World, and celebrated the first relatively normal post-pandemic Thanksgiving. I arrived back at work at the end of November feeling like a new person.
I slipped back into the day-to-day almost unnoticed. The transition back to work went surprisingly smoothly and the leaders gave me time to find projects that were a good fit for both me and the team. I had even started to miss leading project teams. While I loved having my own spreadsheet to manage, I knew there were folks out there who could do it better than I could, and my skills could be better used elsewhere. I joined three new project teams with new people, which both allowed me to switch into taking on more of a strategy role and to learn from new perspectives and experiences.
Sabbatical did a few things for me.
First, it gave me a clean start. Before I left on sabbatical, I had been on the same project for four years. Although I was ready to work on something new, I had no idea because I was so in it. I’m also a completionist and hate letting people down. While I knew the day-to-day of that project felt really hard, I had assumed that I was the problem, which is probably what started to lead to burnout. Taking the time away helped me realize that I, in fact, was not the problem. The project went on without me with its same challenges. While I definitely had areas in which I could improve, the nuances and contractual clauses of the contract created a challenging environment in general and I just couldn’t see that.
Second, I was reminded of the things I love to do. At my core, I am a party hostess who loves a creative endeavor. While these skills definitely translate to being a good consultant (read: customer service and project manager), I hadn’t infused these traits into my days in a long time. One morning on sabbatical, I woke up and created a piece of art highlighting the top 25 CDs that influenced my life, which now hangs above my desk. I sent Halloween cards to my cousins’ children inspired by my watercolors class, which inspired one of them to send one back to me, mimicking mine. I brought together groups of women in casual networking settings which resulted in new friend groups. Each of these activities reminded me that allowing myself an opportunity to be creative always leaves a positive, lasting impact.
Third, this gave me an opportunity to give less power to the “grass is always greener” narrative that had built up in my head. When you start your full-time job one week after graduating from college, you have no idea what else is out there. All I knew was I liked helping people, and before sabbatical, it felt like I could make much more of a difference working in the public or non-profit sector. Sabbatical gave me an opportunity to talk to folks in these industries in an incredibly open way. I wasn’t looking for a job, I was just looking for perspective. My false narrative had told me that a decade earlier I made the wrong first career move. What I learned was that there were ebbs and flows, as well as pros and cons, to every industry.
After the leadership conference, I sat in the lobby with my sabbatical co-workers and we had a candid conversation about management consulting salaries. I watched their faces go from excited to very concerned as I first started by sharing salary ranges, and then explained how integrated your work becomes in your life. In a company full of overachievers, it’s hard to put up boundaries. You lose some of your autonomy and a not insignificant amount of active brain space to an internal voice constantly trying to navigate problems both as and before they occur. My co-workers seemed to leave this conversation equal parts impressed by the salary and unsure whether losing that level of freedom was worth it.
One morning I had a conversation with someone who sat on over half-a-dozen Boards. We talked through his favorite and least favorite experiences, as well as what made a good Board seat. I started to wonder if it was possible to make more of an impact by staying in management consulting and contributing to non-profit organizations from a financial and volunteer perspective instead of switching industries. The more conversations I’ve had about this, the more I realize it takes both halves of the coin in order to make an impact. There were no “right answers” a decade ago, there were just the decisions I had made and the outcomes that resulted.
I also talked to a friend who had left government to go to a role in consulting. She spoke about the new resources she found at her disposal and the mentors now available to guide her. I started to realize all of the benefits I had just from being in my current senior manager position. Through the years, I had heard similar stories to these from folks who had joined Deloitte after spending time in the non-profit sector, but now with my “grass is always greener” wall dissolving, it was easier to understand. And no matter what industry I was in, I wanted to make sure I was taking better advantage of the resources available to me.
Fourth, it taught me that I could indeed manage a budget. With a little forethought and mindful spending, I was able to live within the means of a reduced salary. It was good to run this experiment within a confined, safe space and now if one day I do decide to make a change, I am more confident in my ability to make it happen logistically. I’ve found that feeling like you have the freedom you could make a change if you wanted to allows you to truly commit to being there - and being your authentic self.
What the Future Holds
Figuring out how to take my sabbatical lessons and incorporate them into my day-to-day life beyond writing this story has been tricky though. I’m working to be more mindful of how I am feeling, trying to set more boundaries to have time to be creative, and learning when to ask for help. I blocked my calendar with one weekly date night and one weekly free night to try to help with the work-life balance. And I started a Wednesday morning coffee meet-up group to make sure there’s at least one reason to get out of bed early each week.
Allowing myself time to come out of burnout gave me a new-found energy to work within the system. I’ve opted back into some of the initiatives I had stepped away from because I “didn’t have time” because they both fill my cup and align with my core values - leading our team’s Women & Allies initiative, as well as a monthly community building call. I now see that my ability to bring people together and to create safe spaces are valued by my co-workers, not tolerated. I even talked to the right people to figure out whether I was allowed to write an essay like this. (Thanks, Joe!) Next up is starting one-on-one conversations with leaders across the company about where my place could be moving forward. (And then of course deciding whether that aligns with my core values.)
It hasn’t all been “coming up roses” though. Just a few months back into work and my plate of internal extracurricular activities started overflowing again. I’m starting to realize this may be a problem for me wherever I work though. I’ve had to have at least one “come to Jesus” talk with myself, but at least I had the energy to identify the problem this time around. And on top of that, now I truly do understand the benefit of not having too much on your plate, everyone - clients and team members alike - get a better version of you, which will (hopefully) help me to be more ruthless in setting up future boundaries.
There are times on hard days that my new-found energy actually just gave me more fuel to be sassy, but overall I have been surprised how long the benefits of sabbatical have lasted. My best guess was that they would last for three months, but a year later I still have an extra spring in my step. I still feel more like myself than before and was able to use the time away to strategically position myself for the career I want to have going forward.
It turned out that the questions I was asking in the beginning weren’t the right questions. Did I make the wrong choice a decade ago? Can I do this for the next thirty years of my life? Am I the problem? These questions came from a place of scarcity, where I was just trying to survive each day and couldn’t see any further ahead in life than a few hours. Taking a step back, opening up my bubble to other industry perspectives, adding back in time for creativity, and engaging in vulnerable conversations opened my world to show me that there are better questions to be asking. How does this job make you feel? Do you have people around you that value your strengths and support you? What steps can I take right now to make my day-to-day more manageable? Is this job affording me the lifestyle I want to live? Am I becoming the best version of myself? These are the types of questions that can help build a foundation for the future.
I’m truly grateful I had the opportunity to take some time away to learn about both me and the world. The knowledge I gained in those six months will carry forward with me as I figure out how to be the best version of myself. I look forward to using this insight with future colleagues to help them change their own lives. When one of us grows, we can all continue to grow - creating better lives, and life-changing work for all.
