#028 The Realignment Pause | Lizette Spangenberg

Lizette Spangenberg, guest · [01:43]So I've taken two sabbaticals, and both of those were for very different reasons. Vastly differently structured and had very different outcomes, if I can call it that. So the first one I took in 2017 for a month, and I had a very specific goal. I wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. So I was at a point in my life where I'd been working for a few years, I'd always loved traveling, and I started finding that a lot of people would always say, oh, one day I want to see the Northern Lights, and one day I want to do this. And I realized that I also have those, and I also have these ideas of things I'd love to do, and it just suddenly kind of dawned on me that you kind of have to do something to make those dreams a reality. So beginning of 2016, I decided I want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I started exercising, I started saving, started researching, and yeah, then eventually made that a reality. So I took a month off work and summited Kilimanjaro with my brother, and then took the rest of the month to travel through Kenya and Tanzania, and it was absolutely incredible.

Lizette Spangenberg, guest · [04:40]So my second sabbatical was last year for three and a half months, and that also coincided with leaving an employer and then looking for something new, but that was very, very different. So the first one had a very specific goal. So I was going to climb Kilimanjaro, had the trek set, organized with a guide, tour, all of that. The second one, I did my PhD from 2019 until end of 2022, and then I had my viva in January 2023. So a viva, it used to be called a defense. It's essentially where you meet with your examiners, they have some questions, and they just want to talk about your ideas. But it's still extremely nerve-wracking because I had, international examiners who are experts in the field that I was working in, which is healthcare design, and it was simultaneously very exciting and very terrifying meeting these people. For the six months leading up to that point, which was the end of my PhD, I'd been starting to realize that I wasn't quite sure if I was in the right role. I was in a management position. I was managing fifty-four people, which no one should ever have to do, way more than anyone should ever have to do, and I was not doing any actual design work anymore. So I was purely in management. I was in charge of retrenching people, I was in charge of, discussing salaries and having performance reviews and talking to people, and reviews weren't good, and when we couldn't give them a fifteen percent raise and all sorts of things like that, and it really started to weigh on me, because my passion is in design, and with doing my PhD in healthcare design, I realized that that is actually where my passion lies, is Helping people.

Lizette Spangenberg, guest · [06:59]Yeah, definitely, because it was that whole idea of, because I found myself in management, I realized I'm spending my days telling people they can't have raises, we can't afford to keep them on, and it's a very important role in a company, but it was not something that I was passionate about. I wanted to be the person to actually help people, to either mentor designers, helping them grow as people, as designers, or to help people through my design work, which I know can be quite impactful. So Majority of my family are in medicine. My dad's a doctor, my brother's a doctor, both my grandfathers were doctors. So I've always had a lot of empathy for people within medicine. So that's how I ended up doing my PhD into that field. And then just slowly coming to that realization, like you said, that this area that I'm finding myself in, it's not quite where I want to go with my life. So taking that time to then realize, but is this what I should be doing? And really starting to doubt where I was. So having a bit of a crisis in that sense. So feeling very lost, very untethered. It's apparently something very common after finishing a PhD as well, because that was the other thing. I realized that you start a career and you have this idea, okay, I need to make it. So I started as a junior designer, became intermediate, senior design lead. I then became a practice lead, and then I became the head of design. And in the same vein, I did my undergrad, I did my master's while I was working, and then I did my PhD while I was working. So I got to this point, I'm like, okay, I'm the head of design, I now have a PhD, now what?

Petro du Pisani, host · [08:51]And you've done everything that everybody's expecting from you. It's almost

Lizette Spangenberg, guest · [08:54]like you're doing exactly what is expected. Yeah, and what I expected of myself. So I was like, I, I didn't think further than this. I, I didn't expect to ever get to this point, but, but now what? So, and it's this strange mindset that you always have to, you, you have to make it. And up until that point, I'd only been focused on, on doing the things. So I did the things, and I'm like, I didn't plan for anything after this. So it forced me to reevaluate, but what did I actually want to do with my life?

Lizette Spangenberg, guest · [17:53]Like I said, I started seeing a psychologist during that time, so I think that was really important for me to understand myself a lot better and to understand the way that I process things, to finally understand that my brain genuinely does work different from other people's, because of some of my diagnoses, and I would encourage anyone to go and speak to a psychologist. It can only help you, learn techniques in terms of how to handle stress, how to handle burnout, how to handle that work-life balance. Nice buzzword that everyone's always talking about since COVID, but it's true. I mean, I was doing my PhD after hours while working full-time, so I was working two jobs, essentially, and both were equally important to me. So I didn't have a balance. I was spending my weekends working on my thesis, and I wasn't seeing my friends, and I wasn't seeing my family. I only saw my fiance because he, we lived Together. So seeing him not necessarily spending quality time together, and I think the sabbatical forced me to just stop, take a step back, take a breath, and reevaluate what is actually important to my life. So as I said, a big part of my career up to then had been focused on, you know, I, I Want to be the best in my field. I, I still want to be, obviously, but just realizing that that doesn't have to come at the expense of everything else. You can still be amazing in what you do and not give up a little part of your soul in order to reach it. So learning a bit more about how to balance things and realizing that, you know, traveling, spending time with my friends and family and my fiance, those are things that are really important to me. And while I love my job and I, I really am very passionate about what I do, helping people, you know, get better access to healthcare or whether it's helping doctors who improve their working environments. I can't make that the be all and end all because I lose a little part of myself in the process. It's hard. I, I don't think that I necessarily would have learned that lesson unless I had gone to that extreme where I did burn out very badly and felt like I was starting to lose a little bit of myself in the process.

Lizette Spangenberg, guest · [22:10]Definitely. I think with the first one, There was a part of me that never actually thought I would, you know, conquer the mountain, because it always seems like this thing, you know, like I've climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, and to, to be able to say that I've done that, I'm still surprised by it. I spoke to someone last week who actually struggled to believe me, because it, it sounds so incredible. It sounds like that pipe dream that you have, and it, it's actually really not, okay, I'm not going to say it's not that hard. It is really hard, but, it is doable. You don't have to be the fittest person on earth, because it's not climbing with scaffolding and all sorts of weird and strange things. It's a walk. you just have to go slowly and pace yourself, and it made me realize that I'm a lot more resilient and stubborn than I might have thought previously, because it's just a matter of keeping going. And then with the second one, I think More and more just becoming comfortable with, I don't know if discomfort is really the word, but what we were talking about earlier, this idea that you throw yourself into something and you, you have to step out of that comfort zone. So you have to embrace the fact that you don't know. That's also a theme that kept coming up in my PhD and as a designer. I mean, when you start a new project, you don't know. The client comes to you with a request and they might say, okay, make the button on this page orange. And we're like, okay, why? No, because no one's clicking on it. Okay, but why is no one clicking on the button? And a series of these questions, you eventually find out, okay, a client wants people to click on the button because then they fill in a form and then their call center calls you back. But the main reason why people aren't clicking on the button is they don't want people to phone them back. They want to be able to send an email and have someone email them back. So getting to the core of what it actually is. So when you start a project or something like that, you don't know the answer. You just know there's a problem and it's a vague one and we have to embrace the ambiguity and figure it out. So I think a big part of my second sabbatical was that, like embracing the ambiguity and Taking the time to then, yeah, research new companies and going on interviews with different places and figuring out what, where would be the right fit for me. And I was lucky that I, I found a company who fit exactly what I wanted to do, and they were exactly at that point where they needed a designer. So I've been with them for a year now, and I'm very excited about the work that we're doing. And I feel like I've landed exactly where I wanted to go. So without taking that sabbatical, I don't think I would have been able to take the time to reflect and grow and learn enough about myself to understand where I needed to go next in my career.

Lizette Spangenberg, guest · [27:05]Oh, I'd love to. so when I was researching sabbaticals initially, there's a, quite a well-known designer, Stefan Zuckmeister. He does all these incredible campaigns for like Nike and Adidas and et cetera, et cetera. And he has this philosophy that every seven years, he closes his design studio for a year and then takes a sabbatical. And he's done this twice now. And I was reading up about, you know, his background and what he did in that time. For one of them, he lived in Bali for a year and like made furniture. Fascinating story. But, the idea of it was just so interesting to me that we shouldn't wait until you're retired, because his idea was he was stealing years from his retirement and then dispersing them every seven years. I just love this mindset that we shouldn't wait to live our lives until you actually have the time when you're retired. Because at that point, you'll probably be too old to be able to do a lot of the things you might want to, like hiking to Everest Base Camp, which is something that I still want to do. So I would love to take another sabbatical, not anytime soon, maybe in a few years' time. I'm not sure if there's necessarily something that I'd do differently. I, I, well, maybe having a bit more of a goal. Hopefully, with the conscious breaks that I am putting into my work at the moment, I don't feel nearly as burnt out now as I have at previous points in my career. Well, I don't feel burnt out at all, actually. Hopefully, if I do take another sabbatical, I won't be burnt out and I won't need a month of reality TV to recover before I can actually start, you know, vaguely functioning as a human again. Yeah, I, I, I think there's so much value that you can get from it, even just taking that time to spend on things that you're passionate about, whether it's traveling, whether it's hiking, whether it's playing with your pets in your yard, and just being fully present in the moment. Because I think for me, I have a lot of anxiety, so I tend to stress about things that are still going to happen. I tend to obsess about things that have already happened that I can't change, which there's no point in worrying about, but they do You still give me anxiety. So being a lot more focused in the now, really helps me with that. And I think that's definitely another thing that, yeah, I, I brought from my sabbatical mindset is trying to be present in where I am now. And that's definitely something I'd want to carry through to a next sabbatical as well, is just being present with what you're doing at that moment and really fully enjoying it.