Me. I painted the basket and took the photo.

During July I took a 3-week sabbatical.

Not to write a book or craft a training programme, but to undertake a deep and unrelenting dive into business development.

To work, as the cliche goes, on my business, not in my business…

I expected 3 weeks of intellectual bliss.

But it was incredibly, unforseeably tough.

Here are some potential lessons for you.

• When planning my sabbatical, I identified 11 distinct priorities. 5 big ones. 6 small ones. I felt this was a solid mix of achievable things. It wasn’t ;) It was way too many to-dos.
• I gave myself the gift of 3 full weeks. 15 work days. I don’t usually work on Fridays (I put in 10–12 hours on the other 4 days), but I sacrificed my precious Fridays off. Big mistake.
• I didn’t anticipate 1 x office move and 1 x day of gastro. My allowance shrank to 13 days. I should have built in some buffer time — because I always, always get sick when I pause.
• Half-way through I got stuck and needed my business coach to haul me out of the mire with a stern and well-timed talking-to on the difference between ops and strat. Stupidly, I hadn’t planned to reach out to him at all during this time. Here’s a tip: Never try to do these things entirely solo. You must be able to turn to smart third parties for sanity-checking.

By the end, I had achieved the following:

1. I nailed 5 of the priorities, of which 2 were really, really big ones.
2. I tanked 1 entirely. It’s off the list. Not a lurking thing for me.
3. 2 of the small priorities will be ongoing. They have “frayed edges”.

Here’s the major outcome (and a confession):

My 3 remaining big priorities got started but not finished. I’m about 65% of the way through them now and we’re three weeks post-sabbatical. As you can imagine I’ve been beating myself up about this. Until now. This newsletter is therapy and I’m getting over myself.

Thanks for being here.

Have a beautiful week.

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