A tech leader goes exploring – both inside and out
“My sabbatical gave me the space to explore my passions and really identify my life purpose. It has changed the whole trajectory of my life.”
A job has meant many things over the course of Zee’s life. Growing up, her mother’s mosaic of employment meant the family’s survival. From an early age, Zee pursued jobs that were high paying rather than passion-filled because she knew she was the emergency cushion for her family.
But work was never her identity—until it was. After college in New York, Zee felt for the first time that work was how people defined her—“what do you do?” was the next question after “what’s your name?” Over the next decade, this feeling only increased as Zee worked in banking, went to business school, and moved to San Francisco to work in tech. Though she was moving up the ladder towards her goal of becoming a V.P., she didn’t feel particularly successful compared to her classmates, and was increasingly overloaded with stress. Zee consistently worked on weekends and struggled to balance work and personal life.
At the same time, a couple of her friends embarked on sabbaticals. For the first time, Zee had an example that taking time off at this point in life was possible—and wouldn’t ruin her career. A coach helped Zee envision what a more authentic next step in her life would look like. Zee decided to take the plunge; she’d always wanted to do yoga teacher training, a meditation retreat, and to invest more time with her family.
“Before my sabbatical, stress was all-encompassing and started to have a negative impact on my physical—as well as mental—health.”
Time Off
Zee’s sabbatical started with an exploratory road trip from San Francisco through the southwest to Colorado. An avid rock climber, she’d always wanted to see what it would feel like to live closer to the mountains. Traveling alone for an extended time for the first time in her life, Zee felt moments of extreme joy—sunrises in Utah—and deep sadness—a friend’s death—along with spiritual experiences on meditation retreat, and glimpses of what a very different future career and life could look like.
Her next stop was healing (and learning to be a healer) in India and Peru. True to her nature, Zee found herself putting on her business hat to bring the holistic health insights she’d learned in India back to the States. Next, Zee planned trips with each of her parents and attended her business school reunion. While she feared feeling judged by her classmates back on campus, Zee instead felt admired by her peers, even those who she’d assumed were happier and more successful than she. Soon after, Zee decided to return to work and to fulfill her dream of moving to Colorado.
Back Home
Zee credits her sabbatical for catalyzing major changes in her identity and her life. Among the most important lessons she learned were the ability to live on much less, the benefits of focusing on one’s personal development, and how to have a healthier relationship between herself and her job. She learned that it’s never too late to reinvent yourself—she relishes the fact that there are people in the world that think of her only as a healer.
“The things I learned and how I’ve changed wouldn’t have happened without the sabbatical. I was in the rat race so much that I didn’t even know there were other options—it took a major life disruption to get me to quit.”
Several years after her sabbatical, Zee is still reaping the benefits of her time off. She has recently launched a company fully aligned with her calling: her business Reclaiming Flow teaches mindfulness to people of color to heal from the challenges they face in the workplace. Without the extended time away from work, Zee wouldn’t have been able to learn the skills needed to bring such timely and important tools to the black and brown community in the United States. (More about Zee’s work below.)
“It was nice to have a balance between structured activities like yoga teacher training and having no plans whatsoever. If you overly pack your sabbatical with stuff, you miss this beautiful and unique experience of freedom.”
More about Zee’s work:
As a Black woman in corporate America I’ve found very few resources to help me manage the challenges we face at work, from microaggressions, to disparate treatment around promotions and compensation, to imposter syndrome. For this reason, I started Reclaiming Flow, offering mindfulness training workshops tailored specifically to address the unique challenges of Black women and people of color in the workplace. With these workshops, companies can drive employee retention and well-being for these communities.
In a recent Blavity article, Microaggressions: Why Mindfulness Training Beats A Harvard MBA, I share some of my experiences and a few of the tools that have helped me along the way.
Interested in more solo sabbatical stories? Check out Alice’s story here.
