The Pause That Made Space
What a two-month sabbatical taught me about perspective, creativity, and beginning again.
After more than thirteen years in the corporate world, I made a decision that felt both exciting and unfamiliar.
I stepped away.
But rather than immediately filling the space with a new title, new responsibilities, and a new set of expectations, I chose to do something different.
I gave myself two months to pause.
Not to plan every detail of what came next. Not to turn my time away into another productivity exercise.
I wanted to give myself the space to experience what was next with more clarity and intention.
The space between two chapters
For much of my professional life, I had been accustomed to movement.
Strategies to develop. Problems to solve. Teams to collaborate with. Goals to achieve. Always thinking about what came next.
I am grateful for those experiences. They helped shape how I think, how I lead, and how I approach challenges.
But when I decided to leave that chapter behind, I realized something.
I didn't necessarily want to carry the pace of my previous life into my next one.
I wanted to make room to discover what that next chapter could become.
What the pause gave me
Those two months gave me something I hadn't fully appreciated until I experienced it: perspective.
Space to reset my mind, body, and spirit.
Space to reconnect with my creativity.
Space to consider ideas without immediately turning them into deliverables.
It wasn't a dramatic revelation. I didn't return with every answer or a perfectly mapped future.
But I did return with a different sense of possibility.
I began to think less about what I should do next and more about what I genuinely wanted to create.
And perhaps, more importantly, how I wanted to experience my life while creating it.
Building a business. Living a life.
Today, as I step into my role as a co-founder of The Ryder Method, that experience continues to shape my perspective.
I believe deeply in strategy, structure, systems, and execution. They are essential to building a successful business.
But I also believe that success deserves a more personal question:
What kind of life is this business helping us create?
It's a question I think many founders, executives, and ambitious professionals rarely give themselves enough room to explore.
We can become so focused on building something meaningful that we forget to examine the experience of building it.
The pace. The pressure. The decisions. The space we make for ourselves and the people who matter to us.
That is one of the ideas I carry into this new chapter with Ryder.
The science of building a better business and the art of living fully should not be competing ambitions.
They should support one another.
The invitation to pause
I recognize that taking two months away is not possible or desirable for everyone.
And that isn't the lesson I want to share.
A meaningful pause doesn't have to be a sabbatical. Sometimes it begins with an afternoon without an agenda, a quiet morning, or a decision to stop filling every available moment.
Perhaps the more important question is whether we're creating any room to reflect on the direction of our lives.
Where am I going?
What am I creating?
And is the way I'm working aligned with the life I want to experience?
I am still discovering what this next chapter will become. And I find something beautiful in not having every answer.
What I know is that the two months between my corporate career and my journey as a founder were not simply time away from work.
They were time to reconnect with what I wanted my work to mean.
Sometimes, the space we give ourselves becomes the most important part of what comes next.
Continue exploring.
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