A Committed Sabbatical Taker Discusses Self-Awareness and Authenticity

Taking a sabbatical is an ideal activity for a Life Entrepreneur.  It gives you a chance to explore new parts of yourself, learn something different, engage in activities that will allow you to return to work renewed and re-energized.  In looking back at my life, I can see that I have been a committed “short sabbatical” taker for most of my adult years.  Without all those breaks from routine, delving into unfamiliar experiences and adventures, I don’t believe I would have arrived at this point with this much self-awareness.

I was visiting a friend in Florida feeling so grateful that I have people all around the world that I love and appreciate who are genuinely glad to see me and share some of their lives with me.  I hadn’t actually seen this friend face to face for four and a half years, but we picked up right where we left off and have spent the last day and a half filling each other in on major events, recounting challenges we’ve faced, how we’ve grown through them, what we’ve learned, where we see ourselves going from here.

In some ways our lives have paralleled, in other ways we are very different.  We do have one common thread–in our early sixties, we are both re-evaluating who we are as women, how we show up in the world, and what we want to do with our time and energy from this point forward.  This is right in line with what I realized when I was in Greece last month.  We are becoming Life Entrepreneurs, which I’m now seeing as the next step from being a business entrepreneur, as I have been for the last 30 years or so.

Life Entrepreneurship doesn’t only apply to women or business entrepreneurs.  I think this is a new wave of thinking that is germane to mid-life and beyond for both men and women, from all walks of life, from a variety of past experiences.  People want their lives to mean something–and if you watch Mad Men on TV, you will realize that having a meaningful life was only a remote possibility in the early 60s.  We’ve come a long way from the stereotypical roles of men and women in the workplace–and thinking that men knew best, that the government was to be obeyed, that working for pay was more important than working for something you believed in.

So I’m really just putting a label on something that I’ve been doing for a while:  being a Life Entrepreneur.  I look around and see I’m in good company.  There are millions around me doing this in one form or another.  I plan to spend some time over the next few months exploring, learning more about what it takes to succeed at this, and sharing my insights.

I’m also going to encourage people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs, and tap into the creative energy that can allow them to blossom into more authentic lives.  After all, a lot of us will still be here well into our nineties.  That means we have twenty, thirty, maybe forty years to be productive, engaging contributors to the world we live in.  Let’s make it meaningful!

Margery Miller, owner of PeopleBiz Inc. is a coach and business consultant and is currently writing a series of blogs encouraging people to see themselves as Life Entrepreneurs. For more information see margerymiller.com, or write to her at margery@peoplebiz.com.