This podcast episode is about the business of taking a vacation and the importance of vacation taking to your business, career, customers, employees, your family, and your health. We’ll be talking about the ways that taking a well-deserved break from time to time, scheduled into your calendar, can impact your bottom line, improve your creativity, help you retain more customers, and make you a better overall manager, business owner, and a better employee (if the first two career tracks don’t necessarily apply to you).

I have several friends in the field of academics. These friends are teaching at various levels and over the years a few of them have taken sabbaticals. It has always fascinated me that there are actually some career paths where backing away from the intensity of the work is tolerated and even encouraged. 

I did a little research and found that the word “sabbatical” has roots in the Greek language coming from the word sabbatikos which means “of the sabbath”. Many may recognize the word sabbath as coming from the Hebrew word shabbat or “joyful day of rest”. After looking up the word sabbatical and understanding its roots, it made me really happy for my teaching friends that they were taking joyful periods of rest away from their work. But it made me a little sad that I couldn’t do this with the career path I had chosen. Or could I? So while I couldn’t take a year or more off of work, what I started to do was create little pockets of time on my schedule to decompress.

A while back, I attended a really fantastic yoga and meditation retreat. It was held in the dead of winter at a time when all of the insanity of daily life during the warmer months was at a slower pace. Like a lot of people, I felt selfish for having taken an entire weekend all to myself, leaving behind family and friends. I also felt guilty for spending money on my own personal quest for spiritual growth and nourishment. And as a business owner, I felt as if I was slacking off knowing that I could have been working on a few big projects that weekend.

But during the retreat, the facilitator talked about one of his favorite books. He referenced a book by the author Wayne Muller. The title of the book is “Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives”. I wrote down the title of the book in my notes, but didn’t download the book to my e-reader until weeks later. One of the quotes that particularly struck me was where Muller says, “Our lack of rest and reflection is not just a personal affliction. It colors the way we build and sustain community, it dictates the way we respond to suffering, and it shapes the ways in which we seek peace and healing in the world.”  So to those of you listening to this podcast, know that this aspect of vacation, rest and renewal is not just about hitting the beach or the mountains for the week or enjoying a week at home sleeping in with nothing to do. This idea of taking a break is big, because it has the potential to affect the world.

I finished reading it the other day and now understand the importance of taking a break, a vacation, a rest, a respite, or creating time in my schedule to renew myself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so I can continue to serve the communities of which I am a part.

So as managers and business owners, it is our responsibility to encourage our employees to take time off to rest and renew. We need to create cultures in our organizations where we honor the need for the human body, spirit, and mind to rest. To deny someone the vacation time they’ve earned, to make someone feel as if his or her taking time off will hurt the organization, or to create roadblocks for vacation time to be taken, is wrong. I’ve worked for organizations where these conditions have existed.