Thread

Conscious breaks from work as life redesign

The show's biggest thread. Guests describe stepping away from work on purpose to rethink how they live, what they learned, and how they came back. Petro frames the series with her own deliberate break, but the stories themselves are mostly guests'.

How it developed: It starts with why people left and what they found. It then moves to re-entry and carrying the lessons back into work (#036–#039). Later episodes widen it to shorter rests available to people who cannot take a full sabbatical.

The thread's title and description are AI-written, drawn from the episodes below. The quotations are verbatim from the episode audio, each linked to the moment it was said.

What was said

“So that one year gave me job satisfaction for the rest of my working career.”
— Fatima Collins, guest · #027 Purposeful Pauses | Fatima Collins · [11:29]
“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 · #028 The Realignment Pause | Lizette Spangenberg · [25:06]
“You can actually come back a better person because of this experience.”
— Thea Weeks, guest · #031 Intentional Interludes | Thea Weeks · [23:23]
“I've gone from being a cynic to being a very big advocate of it.”
— Zaheera Soomar, guest · #034 The Transformative Break | Zaheera Soomar · [32:09]
“this experience leaves you as a different person, probably more than it leaves you with having done different things,”
— Sas Wessels, guest · #036 Rest, Reset, and Recharge | Sas Wessels · [15:04]
“taking a sabbatical is a huge privilege, of course, but actually, we can all take periods of rest. And it doesn't have to be a sabbatical.”
— Amy Martin, guest · #042 Special Focus on Seasonality | Amy Martin · [25:02]

Episodes in this thread

All topics and episodes of On Change with Petro du Pisani