Be Not Afraid (Part I): “I Took a Sabbatical. Should I Hide That From Employers?”

Who's afraid of a ginger wolf? A ginger wolf? A ginger wolf? I am, George. Who's afraid of a ginger wolf? I am, George.

I am.

KELLY] That is Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, basically the king and queen of Hollywood back in 1966, quietly eviscerating each other at the end of one of the greatest movies ever made. That movie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which I'm actually stunned to say that I probably watched when I was 6 years old. Not recommended. It was ostensibly about a married couple, the wife with bored and feckless Martha, and George, a college history professor, and what happens during a drunken dinner party at their house. But beneath that, that, it's really a story about what we're going to talk about on the podcast today: fear.

Maybe Georgie boy didn't have the stuff. Maybe he didn't have it in him.

Stop it, Mother.

Like hell I will.

And not fear of the unknown. No, no, no. That movie was about fear of the known, and specifically fear of knowing ourselves, which can be as scary as it gets.

A great big fat flop.

Stop it, mother. But you have to go there. No exceptions. You have to know yourself or you will never grow. There's this amazing poet, Arisa White, and she says everything emerges from intimacy with one's story. And even though I love her and she's fantastic, I would edit it slightly to say everything good emerges. Everything that unleashes our ability to flourish emerges from intimacy with one's story. And that starts with knowing ourselves in the detailiest detail that we can. Hello, hello, I'm Susie Welch. This is Becoming You, the podcast that helps you answer the question, what should I do with my life? Just that little question. Becoming You is a scientifically validated methodology of self-understanding and purpose discovery that I teach at NYU and to people like you all over the world. I'm so glad you're here. Everything you need, the website, the newsletter, the workshops, blah, blah, blah, on and on, all in the show notes. You know it. So let's get going. Today is the first episode in a trilogy about how to face your fear changing from the inside out. And we will be aided and abetted in that journey by 3 listeners, one per episode, who who each wrote in asking about a fear of knowing themselves, revealing themselves in different ways. But each question is so familiar, like I feel seen, and I think you might too. I'm dying to jump into our first question in this series, which is from a listener named Katie, who's afraid of telling the truth about herself on her resume. Let's listen to her.

Hi, Susie. I'm a big fan of your podcast and have recommended it to several friends who love it too. My question today is about whether or not I should list sabbatical on my resume and on my LinkedIn profile. I've been quite the professional achiever since I graduated from college in 1996. A few months ago, I left my most recent job where I had been a vice president and worked for over 10 years. I wanted and really felt like I needed to have the time and mind space to reassess, explore what I hope to do next professionally, and recharge. A sabbatical, if you will. It's been a very productive time of many informational interviews, classes in AI, and moving across the country. But I've had no professional affiliation. Should I list sabbatical on my resume and LinkedIn and explain this professional gap? I so appreciate your advice. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Katie. I love this question. It is so real, and it's so relevant. Because since the pandemic, believe me when I tell you Katie is not the only person who has decided to take stock and ask, What do I really want to do with my life? I mean, really. I mean, the pandemic did that to many of us. They didn't call it the Great Reset for nothing. And the truth is, we sometimes cannot do that kind of self-analysis while we're in motion at work, running around every minute. We need to, you know, stop, drop, and roll around in self-discovery. Well, how do I know this? Why am I saying it with such conviction? Because I spend all day, every day with people who are in the rolling process. Becoming You, the methodology, is that rolling process. It helps you excavate and rank your actual values, get honest about your aptitudes, and open your aperture on what opportunities are really out there for you. You know, our contention is that your purpose lies at the intersection of those 3 data sets: what you want to do, what you can do, and what you should do. And that is not something that you do on a random Sunday morning after you've done the crossword or sitting on the beach chatting chatting with your bestie on a Saturday afternoon. I mean, taking stock of yourself. I'm not kidding around. That's a thing. And that's why I want to actually start by congratulating Katie at age 50 or so for having the presence of mind to know that she needed to take stock. So Katie's question is about how transparent she should be with prospective employers about her sabbatical. Before I answer it, though, I want to talk about the courage it takes to take the time and the energy to look at yourself. Now, obviously not all of us can manage a sabbatical of any length for financial reasons. And I get that, and I'm sure Katie gets that as well. But in my experience, many people do not stop and take stock because they cannot manage it for emotional reasons, because they are too scared to look in the mirror and ask, am I who I wanna be? Have I been doing what I wanna do? Am I going in the right direction or do I, uh-oh, need a big course correction? They're too scared because they fear the answers. Now, hello, this is not just my hot take sitting here talking about fear because there's a huge body of research showing that people actively avoid self-relevant information when it feels threatening. Psychologists have a name for this. They call it information avoidance. Study after study, there are so many finds that when learning something might dent our self-image or raise our anxiety or force a hard decision, we often choose not to know, just simply not to know. For example, there's two very famous economists, Daniel Mobius and Tanya Rosenblatt, well known. And they did a study that found that people were eager to receive feedback when they thought it might be positive, but they got noticeably less interested when there was a real chance that the news would be negative. And there are many other studies finding the exact same thing with the same bottom line, which is that our curiosity has conditions. If we think we aren't going to like the answers, we don't ask the questions. Self-knowledge is clarifying and clarity, especially if it's going to prompt a change. I'm not gonna lie, it can be uncomfortable. But you know what's scarier in my opinion? Not doing it. Not stopping and asking questions. Because here's one thing you can be absolutely certain of. Eventually you will have to ask. Am I who I want to be, where I want to be, and with whom I want to be? Life is going to force you to, and very often it's going to force you to do that in a terrible crisis moment. That's what happens. That's the truth. You will get a diagnosis that changes everything, or you'll get a divorce, or you'll get fired, or your company will go under, or you'll have a kid who goes off the rails, or a parent will die. I'm sorry, something big will happen and suddenly you will have no choice. You're gonna be forced to ask, who am I? What am I doing with my one wild and precious life? I've just got one. Who should I be? So kudos, first of all, to Katie for asking herself these big questions before the crisis came. Okay? She did that. And I wanna pause here though, and I wanna ask you, do you have the courage to stop and look at yourself? Now, if you haven't done that, please know you are being perfectly human. And inasmuch you're being imperfect, okay? It's very hard to do this. I mean, all the studies would say you're not gonna do it unless you have to, but this is your invitation to do it before you have to. So let's get back to Katie's essential question. She wants to know if she should admit that she's done this reflecting to potential employers and that she took the time to stop and ask those hard questions. Should she admit it? Should she say, hey, that downtime you see, those 6 months of nothingness on my resume, that's when I was reflecting? Would that be worth the risk of employers maybe judging her or thinking less of her? My answer is yes, yes, yes, 1,000 times yes. And I have 3 reasons why. First of all, first one's very, very simple. I'm an employer and post-pandemic, I have heard and read about sabbaticals so many times, it does not faze me. All right, Katie, I love you. You're not going to shock anyone with the admission of a sabbatical. Okay? You know, it happens all the time. So I mean, sometimes I get a 27-year-old who gives me a resume and they've had a sabbatical. You're 50. You've earned it. No one's going to question it or think less of you for it. So go ahead. And for that reason alone, you can include it on your resume or at least mention it in the interview. No one is going to blink twice. Okay. Second, and I like this reason so much better, the admission of a sabbatical allows you to position your candidacy for the job so much more persuasively. I mean, think about it. You can say, hey, Mr. or Mrs. Employer, I had a wonderfully successful career and then I deliberately took the time to reflect and reassess. And that led me to realize I want to do the work exactly like this job. I know myself now. I know my values and I know my aptitudes and I know my interests. And this job is the perfect fit. Here, let me explain more deeply. I mean, as an employer, I am loving someone coming through the door who can actually explain to me how their values and aptitudes and interests are aligned with my needs. So do it for that reason. It's a selling tool for you. So go, go, go, girl. So finally, here is my favorite reason. Admitting your sabbatical on your resume, admitting it, if you will, confessing it, it's the beginning of you living authentically out loud at last. We wait and we wait and we wait to do that in life. Why? Why? Because it is so hard to live inauthentically. It's like holding your breath. I mean, this is why— I'm sorry, I have a tangent. This is why I hated reading Jane Austen in high school. Remember Jane Austen? Were you forced to read her like me? Everyone loved those novels. I just hated them. I was like, this book would be over in 5 pages if people just told the truth about themselves, said who they were, said who they love, said what they wanted to do. It might be scary up front to do those things, apparently very scary in Jane Austen's time, and there might be consequences. But in the long run, you know, living authentically is actually very effective and efficient. Lying is such a waste of time. Time. So Katie, you do not need to hide your truth from anyone. Maybe you felt you've had to do that in the past a lot with your— to build your career, but why continue it? Why not go forward with all your skills and your values known and accounted for and say, this is me. I am comfortable with me. Here I am, sabbatical and all. Why would you want to work with anyone who wants the inauthentic version of you? Now, full disclosure, I have done this myself. I have done the opposite of what I'm telling you to do. I worked with people who were getting an inauthentic version of me. I did it right after the pandemic. Let me explain. I wasn't sure in 2021 that teaching at NYU was going to work out. So as a way of keeping my options open, right before I started at NYU, I also took a position, a big position, as a senior advisor with a fancy, well-known consulting firm. And this was totally Legit, by the way, because when I started at NYU, I was an adjunct professor. I'm a full professor now, but it was perfectly fine what I was doing. The thing that was not okay is that I knew I did not have the values or aptitudes to be a great consultant. I knew I'd been a consultant. Consulting is about selling, selling, selling. I never wanted to be in sales. I'm not good at sales, but I would show up to the job in consulting and I pretend I would sell and I hated it. And surprise, it didn't work out. I didn't like going into my consulting gigs and being my phony self. And, you know, we bumped along and smiled at each other nicely, but they didn't like it very well either because I was like a B at best. I'd give me a B-minus because why? You're never an A-plus being a fake. And so I should have told them who I was going in. I should have told them, guess what? I know consulting is about selling and I don't know, they would have never hired me and it would have been better for both of us. All right? So I learned my lesson and that's why, Katie, I'm sharing it with you. One final thing I wanna say, and it's important. You may be wondering, what if that sabbatical on your resume was not for reflection, but it was for recovery? Okay? From anything, a divorce, anxiety, a toxic work experience, death in the family. Well, let me tell you a story about that. I once had a candidate for a job who had a 2-year resume hole. You couldn't miss it, 2 full years. And we were in the interview and I said, "What happened in these 2 years?" And she told me, she looked me right in the eye and she told me she was playing golf in England. Okay, we were in the United States. Okay, golf in England. It had become a passion for her, she said. Now here's the thing, I didn't play golf in those days, so I then didn't follow up with the obvious question like, "Oh, golf became a passion? What's your handicap?" I didn't say anything. I said, "Oh, golf in England." I thought, how odd. Incredible career and then she stops to play golf for 2 years, let it go. And I hired her because she was so incredibly talented. I kind of knew I was going to hire her going in the door because she was so good. So later, like 2 years later, I found out in those 2 years that she had actually been institutionalized for severe mental illness. You know how I found out? Another employee told me. Everyone knew but me. Everyone knew but me. And here's what I want you to hear. I would have hired her anyway if she had told me, "Those 2 years, I had some mental illness issues. I've worked them out. I'm better and it's under control." If she told me, I still would've hired her because she was so talented. But after I found out that she had lied to me, what bothered me was not her history. It was the lie. After that, it just made it very hard for me to ever trust her again and harder for me to manage her with the sensitivity that she actually deserved. If she had told me the truth, You know, you don't know anybody you're diagnosed as, but if she told me something like, "I took the time to address a serious health matter and I came through it and I'm here now," I would've respected that deeply. I would've respected her authenticity. And I think even then in my pre-Becoming You days, I would've appreciated that she was authentic and how rare that was. I know I would've. Authenticity is so, so, so appealing in people and it's so, so appealing in an interview. It is. It's rare. Never doubt that. And if authenticity isn't appealing to an employer, it's better for you to know that upfront. Better for you to know that they don't vibe with the real you. Because to be the fake you for any period of time, it's exhausting and it's enervating. I mean, you don't have to be your whole self at work. I'm not telling you to bring yourself utterly unfettered. I'm not in that camp. But you do not want to be a shadow of yourself either. So Katie, you have done an incredibly mature thing. You have been superhuman practically, if you look at the research and you have stopped and you've looked in the mirror and you've asked the hard questions, you know, deliberate, intentional. I mean, I love it. And I urge you to put the fear of admitting that aside and go tell it on the mountain. And my hope and really my belief is that you'll be experienced as what you truly are, which is unafraid. I'd hire you for that, and I bet other people would too. So my friends, this has been the first in our 3-part Be Not Afraid series on Becoming You. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Susie Welch. I'll see you next week.