How Taking a Sabbatical Can Make You a Better Leader with Alyson Caffrey

Subscribe To The Podcast

Today on the show we have Alyson Caffrey. Alyson has been one of my favorite people to work with and collaborate with over my many years of entrepreneurship. She has just completed an incredible legacy project of a book called The Sabbatical Method.

The Sabbatical Method is a powerful formula to set yourself up to take weeks, months, or maybe longer away from your business and ensure that your business still continues to grow and thrive while you are away and the actual process of going on a sabbatical turns you into a better leader, parent, partner, and human overall. We are going to dive into how we set ourselves up to create these sabbaticals and what benefits can we expect from them.

We discuss:

[02:25] Alyson shares her defining moment when she became a mom.
[05:11] The Sabbatical Method can be a way to exercise strategic rest inside of your business.
[06:28] We are not going to change anything unless we can try to change some of the habits that exist around how businesses are run and how we as founders interact with them.
[07:42] We are taught in order to be successful we need to make ourselves irreplaceable at work but what we don’t learn is that in order to run a successful business our job is to make ourselves replaceable in the business.
[10:30] If we can be able to give ourselves small doses of strategic rest, it will unlock a lot of challenges that entrepreneurs and small business owners face.
[11:11] Recording your screen while you are handling a lot of your tasks is a simple way to hold time. You can begin to build an internal knowledge base for a team.
[15:10] Create what is first. If you don’t have a repeat process for something yet, start by creating some standards or bullet points around how we can serve in that area.
[16:23] Onboarding new clients is usually going to be the best, most impactful place to start.
[22:13] The Sabbatical Method really is designed to help incrementally pull the founder out of the business. Blocking the time in her schedule for mini sabbatical periods to focus on her new project was super helpful.
[27:16] Being intentional about scheduling breaks can help you recharge for the rest of your day.
[27:40] As we can start to become more intentional about focusing on scheduling in that time for the more important projects, you can really set an intention for your sabbatical so you can take the rest period and pour into yourself as a leader and gain a new perspective over your business and your life and the way you are showing up.
[28:45] At the end of the day if we are really looking to create lasting impact, longevity, and relationships that are going to survive we really need to focus on who we are showing up as. Starting their first is going to be able to fill you up so you can show up as a better leader in the other areas of your life.