Hello and welcome back to Be What Works.
In today's series we are going to look at the second part about taking a career break which is about “exploring your hobbies and passions”. If you want to catch up on part one, which is around the importance of self-care and reflection, I will post the link in the description below.
When you are on a career break, it's a golden opportunity for you to get your passionate and creative juices flowing and explore the things that you really are happiest the most when you're doing. Often in the busyness of our careers, we end up putting our passions and hobbies on the back burner. You think that pursuing them is time wasted, and you trade them up to take on more work as you build your career. However, what you don't realize is that you can get so much more productive if you take a break and re-energize yourself by pursuing your passions and your hobbies. This allows you to actually be in a state of flow.
You know the time when you are happiest the most, the time when you are in your “zone”. The time when you are truly yourself and you have let go of any kind of inhibitions and are truly just you being you. It is likely that during your busy work schedule, you may have lost touch of what those passions and those hobbies are. During a career break, how do you rebuild back and make time for your passions and hobbies? When I reflect on my journey, I have identified two areas. The first is through Reconnecting with Childhood Delights. And the second is through Embracing New Adventures you may have picked up as an adult.
Rekindling the Love for Reading
For the first one in my case, I've had to dig really far back into my childhood to pick up on one of my hobbies which was reading and re-ignite that flame. My first hobby and passion was reading. Even when I was a young kid, I was an avid reader. I was passionate about books and exploring texts that would allow me to travel outside to the world that I could not reach by car, or by plane or by whatever else. I got lost in books. I got carried away with the stories. There are many nights, I remember as a child when my father would wake up to use the washroom and find that the bedroom light was still on even after midnight, long after the other kids had slept, and it would be me reading underneath the covers trying to get through a book that I had borrowed from one of my friends at school.
I also recall that when I was around 11 years old, I actually wrote my first novel, and this was inspired by the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series. It had an investigative flavor to it where the protagonist was a female detective and uncovering a crime. I wrote this in long form on the ruled paper which my mother graciously typed up.
I was passionate about reading. I was passionate about writing. I guess I took it up by pursuing my education, by going ahead to do a masters and a doctorate degree. But what I'm talking about is creative writing, letting my imagination flow, getting lost in books. Reading for me was not only an escape, but it opened up my world.
Over the years I have tried to pick it up again, and at any one point I always have about three or four books that I am reading at a time. However, I hardly got past the second chapter. I'll make up a commitment and say every morning I'm going to spend 30 minutes reading before I get out of bed. But there will come a morning when I have to get up to the office for an early meeting and I compromise on that day. During my career break, I can confess that I have just finished reading a book that I have really loved from the first page. It's called “10X Is Easier Than 2X” by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, and I would really highly recommend it. And for me, being able to get that far has been fantastic.
Incorporating Technology into Habits
One of the things that has helped me to continue reading and making sure that I don't lose track of where I'm at is uploading it on my Kindle app. And I have my Kindle app on my phone, my iPad and on my laptop, so that irrespective of whatever gadget I have, I open up the Kindle app and it'll sync to the exact place that I last read on any device. That one has been great and it feels really good to be able to finally get through almost to the end of a book. And so the lesson there is also that, hey, if you have anything that helps you keep up on your hobbies and your passions, in my case, having access to a digital device that has quick reach of the book, then please embrace that because the pursuit of hobbies and passions needs not be difficult.
Presently, my learning and escape has also been through online learning on various platforms. Closely related to this reading passion is the creative writing component. Whereas when I was 11 years old, I wrote in long form on and on paper that my mother later typed up, now I am typing scripts and building content digitally. Learning how to create that content has become a new hobby. This includes how to use digital tools, how best to communicate, how to clean up my text, and how to engage with the audience on different platforms be it through a YouTube video, a TikTok clip, an Instagram reel, or a thread on X.
Further, learning how to use video editing tools has been great because I've picked this up as a passion that allows me to again explore my creative side.
Re-Discovering a New Passion: Hiking
The second type of hobby and passion that I picked up in recent years is hiking. I picked up hiking during COVID and the reason was because I, like many others, was looking for activities that kept me outdoors but allowed me to also practice social distancing. It was great to find a groups like Outdoorer Kenya that plans for strangers to come together and have an awesome hiking experience. After a few hikes. I realized that I could take this a notch higher and signed up for a challenge. So I took up their program called “Beginners to Mount Kenya in 90 days”, which is exactly that. That you can be a novice hiker but within 90 days and with number of practice hikes you can summit Mount Kenya. I sold the idea to my younger brother and he signed up as well.
We did quite a number of practice hikes and I remember one of my favorite practice hikes was going up Mt. Satima in the Aberdare Ranges also known as Dragon’s teeth. My goodness, I had never been to a place as beautiful as that in my life. Rugged landscapes and beautiful plains with huge boulders and rocks jutting out of the ground. There was a bog we had to cross through and even with gaiters on, my hiking boots took in quite a bit of mud. But the hike to 4,001 meters was great for both endurance and altitude training.
We managed to summit Mount Kenya on March 26th, 2022 – I have a certificate to show for it. After the hike, we spent the night at Camp Minto, which was the base camp and woke up to beautiful snow that had fallen overnight.
It was the first time for me to see snow in Kenya. And let me tell you, during that whole experience, the biggest feat was conquering the mind and keeping one step in front of the other. I cannot describe the feeling of standing at the top of Point Lenana at 4,985 meters above sea level.
Balancing Work and Passion
I did this Mt. Kenya pursuit while still working full time. With advance planning, I managed to take the time off from work and do the practice hikes on Saturdays plus the 3 working days that I took to actually do the Mt. Kenya hike. What worked was to share the dates that I would be unavailable for work two months in advance so I could get the time off. The feeling of being outdoors, making new friends, bonding with my brother, made it worth it to get through another grueling workweek in the office. Sadly, as soon as the conquest was over, I hung up my boots and gave up the passion for hiking.
Being on this career break, I have taken up daily walking to make sure I can get my body back in shape as I want to hit some American and Canadian trails. I'm even considering heading to Machu Pichu in Peru. And just as I did with practice hikes before, I have been consistently showing up in my 6km daily walks and tracking my progress. For, any passion that requires a level of mastery, you must be willing to put in the hours to be good at it.
While on a career break, you have no excuses not to take time and pursue your hobbies and passions. It is a time to return to the things that make you happiest and things that edify you internally. You will find that they give you strength and provide a sense of clarity and internal harmony.
Thank you for staying tuned in and until next time when we look into Part Three on finances, Be What Works.
Bye Bye, this is Dr. Beth.
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