My First Sabbtical

It was an ordinary Monday morning as I absentmindedly rushed to get ready for work. An unsavory thought was rising within me, ‘I don’t want to go to work!’, ‘I want to crawl under a blanket and go back to sleep!’. I tried to shake away the feeling but it refused to die down. It had been building up for a few months and now had become a force I could no longer ignore. 

It was in 2009, 9+ years since Dream a Dream was co-founded and 7+ years since I moved in full-time. I took pride in believing that I will never burnout since I am living my dream and yet it happened. It scared me. 

I quickly packed a few clothes, gave an excuse at home about attending a conference, called in at work and said I won’t be available for a few days and landed up at the Bangalore Bus Station without a clue. Got into the first bus leaving the terminal without knowing where it was headed. Eight hours later, I landed in Coorg and decided to check into a home-stay. I switched off my phone and spent a week there. I slept (a lot), went on long aimless walks and didn’t think about work. 

While my body was resting, my unconscious was at work seeking answers to the question, ‘Why did I not want to go to work?’; ‘What is going on?’; ‘Its work that I chose, that I am deeply passionate about, that’s creating change and yet something is fundamentally wrong’. 

In the pursuit of creating transformative change in the lives of young people, I had run myself aground physically, mentally and emotionally and Dream a Dream was no longer an organisation that inspired me. Something had broken. 

I came back a week later with a commitment to understand what had gone wrong. I spent the next year unravelling that the organisation I had built had become toxic, unsustainable and disempowering and I was at the centre of this toxic culture. 

A few things became clear to me through this process of self-reflection - 

1. The identity of the organisation and my identity had become deeply enmeshed. Vishal = Dream a Dream and Dream a Dream = Vishal.
2. The high standards I held myself to, I expected the team to also hold themselves to the same high standards without investing in building their capacity.
3. While I was driven by doing everything right by the young people we are serving, I had completely ignored the needs of my team and my own needs. Sacrifice had become an unwritten value.
4. It was my vision (unreasonable at most times) that was driving the work and I felt I was dragging the team towards this vision without pausing to listen and understand them.
5. I was constantly disappointed with my team. I didn't trust my team resulting in micro-managing everything across the organisation.
6. My leadership style was confusing and inconsistent. I had a certain idea of the kind of leader I was, which was very different from how I showed up as a leader everyday. 
7. While our work was about unlocking agency in young people to take on life’s challenges with confidence and strength, it was inauthentic because the team had no agency and felt disempowered. How can our work be impactful if it was inauthentic in its approach?

A week-long self-enforced break and the subsequent year-long investment in honest self-relfection led to a fundamental shift in my approach to work and leadership. This was the power of a sabbatical, a term I didn't know then. 

The break, although short, gave me the pause that I desperately needed to relook at the organisation and my role in it. It gave me time away from the day-to-day rigmarole and space to look at the organisation from outside-in and myself from an inside-out lens. It gave me the questions that were brewing and those that were too scary to acknowledge while running the organisation. 

My first sabbatical, although unplanned, helped me go on a whole new journey of re-imagining - 

1. My role as a leader
2. The values of the organisation aligning them deeply to the values of the work we are doing in the world
3. The culture of the organisation so that we can all learn to walk together

Although not all sabbaticals need to arise from such a drastic trigger, they are invaluable in our journeys as leaders. We don't have to allow things to get completely out of hand before we can lean-in to turn them around. Planned sabbaticals can help to give us the rest we need and the time and space for authentic reflections. 

Vishal Talreja