705: Mid-Career Family Sabbatical: How to Design an Intentional Career Break (Without Coming Back to the Same Burnout)

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: Let's talk about two versions of your career. There's one that you designed intentionally, and then there's a version that just happened, you just fell into. Most people, they're living the second version. They took a job that was available. They maybe stayed because it was comfortable. Maybe they got promoted because of somebody else wanted them in a new role. They saw an opportunity, and it was there. They accepted it.

[00:00:28] And somewhere along the way, they stopped asking whether this was actually the life that they want or that they wanted to be able to build. This episode is about what can happen and what could be possible when you start asking those questions about, 'What are the ways that you want to build your life and your work?'

[00:00:46] Laura McClernon is a team member here at Happen To Your Career, on our client results team. She's done a lot of career coaching. And in a matter of weeks, she's packing up her family, leaving Hawaii, and spending the next 12 months on the road in an RV with her husband and three kids under the age of seven.

[00:01:03] Now, before you say, "Wow, I could never do that," I want you to hold that thought because what Laura's doing here is far less about the RV and much more about skills, specifically the skills of designing your life before life designs it for you. Our executive producer, Micayla, sat down with Laura just weeks before her departure date to find out how she got here.

[00:01:25] What was the design process? What did it actually look like? And what would she tell anybody who thinks a sabbatical is a luxury that they can't afford?

[00:01:34] I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career, where we share real conversations with real people and walk you through how to build the life you want and design your career so that you get to thrive more often.

[00:01:46] I want you to know you're actually gonna hear from me. I'm gonna interject during different pieces of this conversation, and even though Laura has a really great adventure story here and she role models what we live and breathe here at Happen To Your Career, I want you to understand some of the psychological research behind why what she's doing works, and why she's approached it in the way that she has, and how this puts her in a very small group of people who will actually come out on the other side transformed instead of just rested when they take time away.

[00:02:17] Micayla Robertson: You are doing something very exciting on May 28th. Can you talk to us about what you have planned, how long it took to get there, and what you're most likely looking forward to in this journey?

[00:02:30] Laura McClernon: Yeah, great question. So starting on May 28th, my family is going to be moving into an RV, and we've been planning this for about 10 years, more or less, preparing for it in some way.

[00:02:44] And we are going on a sabbatical adventure. My husband and I are both leaving our jobs, and we decided to take this time to, as a family, explore the United States. Live simply and then also get to see a lot that we haven't seen as far as, you know, the West, the national parks, and reconnect with a lot of people that we haven't seen in a long time.

[00:03:07] Micayla Robertson: What I love the most is that it's your family sabbatical. It's not just your sabbatical. You all decided that it wasn't just, you know, you taking a time off work, it was your husband taking the time off work, and you're pulling the kids along, and you're hopping in an RV. What made you guys come to the decision of, "Let's all take this journey together"?

[00:03:26] Laura McClernon: Great question. So I think that once kids entered the picture, right, they become part of the equation. So, I knew that I couldn't just take a sabbatical by myself. I'd miss my family. So we started to think about logistically what would make the most sense. We've got three young kids under the age... seven and under. So seven, five, and one. And they'll be coming along with us. And so we thought, "Okay, what's gonna work well for the family as far as having a consistent place to sleep every night, a place where we could homeschool the kids, and then also allow us to still travel and have adventure?" And the answer to that was an RV.

[00:04:00] There was a point where we thought about, like, going to Asia or going to Europe or something like that, and we just realized that, you know, with our kids' ages and the fact that there's so much in the United States we haven't seen and done, that the United States made the most sense.

[00:04:13] Scott Anthony Barlow: Before we move on, I wanna name something that's already happening in what Laura just described.

[00:04:17] In psychology, there's this framework called self-determination theory, and it's one of the most robust models of human motivation. It argues that we all have three core psychological needs– autonomy, the felt sense that you're genuinely choosing your life; competence, which is the experience of mastering things that matter to you; and relatedness, deep and real connection to people that you love.

[00:04:40] What's striking about Laura's framing is that she didn't optimize for one of those. She actually designed for all three simultaneously. The autonomy of leaving two jobs, the competence of running a household, homeschooling, navigating a new life, and the relatedness of 12 months of intentional family time.

[00:04:59] Most people will treat these as trade-offs. Laura treated them as a package. I want you to keep that in mind because it's actually gonna show up again later in the conversation.

[00:05:07] Micayla Robertson: Let's imagine something. Six months from today, let's say on a random Wednesday, somewhere in the middle of wherever your journey takes you, what does a typical day in the life look like for you and your family then?

[00:05:21] Laura McClernon: Great question. So I see us being able to get out in the morning, you know, like, have a slower morning, get the kids ready, and then go somewhere. Like, maybe it's a hike. Maybe it's exploring, like, a backwoods area near a campground, whatever that looks like.

[00:05:38] Spending that time outside and then coming back to our RV, doing some homeschool, and you know, we have a curriculum, but then also being able to veer from that curriculum and have them research their own interest and learn their own interest. And then do something really fun at night, whether that's going to see another part of nature, or maybe if we're in a city, a museum.

[00:05:58] And then spend some time together as a family, you know, in the evening time before going to bed early, 'cause I imagine they'll be long, tiring days. So that's kinda what I see for a random Wednesday six months down the line.

[00:06:10] Micayla Robertson: I'm curious, Laura, what's one thing that scares you a little bit about this? Like even now, you know, you have your RV picked out and test driven. You have your date locked in. What are some of the underlying or quiet fears that try to creep in?

[00:06:22] Laura McClernon: Yes, okay. I think fear number one is, like, small space living, right? So we currently live in Hawaii. Housing is expensive. So we live in a, by mainland US estates standards, a smaller house for having three little kids.

[00:06:37] And we've made it just fine in that. And so going from that to 279 square feet is definitely gonna be an adjustment. So there's that. My almost two-year-old has had some, like, patchy sleeping in the last month, so I'm like, "This is gonna be rough if this doesn't get course corrected." So we'll see how that goes.

[00:06:58] And then the other part too is just, like, what happens after, right? So right now I'm in the process of, like, getting rid of a lot of stuff, a lot of furniture, and just, like, household stuff. And I'm thinking about when we start over, what is this gonna look like, right? And where are we gonna end up?

[00:07:12] So that's the other part, too, is some people come into these types of journeys, they do it for a year, and they already have a house, or they have a community they're going back to. For us, we're gonna be starting over some place new, and we don't know where that is. And so, you know, that whole blank canvas part is intimidating sometimes, but then also on the flip side, leaves you open to so much possibility and opportunity in the future.

[00:07:35] Scott Anthony Barlow: Okay, I wanna point out that last thing that Laura said, because the blank canvas is not just a poetic description. It has a clinical name in sabbatical research. Researchers who study extended career breaks have a term for what Laura is stepping into, an identity workspace. The argument is that most of us are so embedded in our daily roles, career coach, parent, person who lives in Hawaii, in Laura's case, that we literally cannot see ourselves outside of them.

[00:08:02] The separation from those roles creates psychological room for a different, harder question. "Who am I when I'm not performing any of these identities?" That's not a vacation question. That's a year on the road question. And Laura's blank canvas isn't a gap. It's the point.

[00:08:20] Laura McClernon: We've moved seven times in the last 12 years, so we're used to new houses, new beginnings, new setups and everything, so that part feels pretty comfortable because we've moved so much and so far away over the last decade plus.

[00:08:36] Micayla Robertson: I wanna dive into that a little bit, 'cause, you know, you guys have moved so much. What did that constant movement kinda teach you about how adaptable you are and how adaptable life can be?

[00:08:46] Laura McClernon: Right. Yes, absolutely. So all that moving has taught me that, yes, we are pretty adaptable, and we can figure out a lot of logistics too, right?

[00:08:57] Just with the amount of overseas moves we've done in the last couple years, there's been a ton of logistics, whether it's selling cars, figuring out schools, figuring out childcare, figuring out work for me, working remote. And we've been able to navigate that through a lot of change. So being able to say, "Okay, we're gonna take that transferable skill into this next season of life," and saying, you know, whatever is thrown at us in terms of logistics or place, that we're gonna be able to figure out what that looks like in terms of getting settled and being able to find those things that are important to us in a new community to help us thrive and, like, feel comfortable and happy with where we're at in the new place.

[00:09:33] Scott Anthony Barlow: What Laura's describing, pretty casually, is something that takes most people years of therapy to develop. Self-determination theory tells us that the three core psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, they need to be rebuilt every time your environment resets. Most people, when they're forcibly relocated or displaced, they experience that as loss.

[00:09:56] By the way, this is when you get laid off, this is part of what's going on here, and I've definitely experienced that. But, when that happens, you know, layoff or otherwise, their social network is gone. Their professional identity is disrupted. Their sense of control over daily life collapses. What Laura did across seven moves is develop what psychologists call psychological flexibility. The capacity to hold your identity loosely enough that external change does not shatter it.

[00:10:24] You rebuild, you find your people, you get good at new things because you've done it before, and the fear of the next reset is smaller every single time, the more that you do this. This is why the RV year is not a leap of faith for Laura. It's a known skill set being applied to an unusually large canvas.

[00:10:44] Micayla Robertson: A lot of people kinda look at instability as, like, a career obstacle, but you really flipped it, and you're reframing what it truly means to happen to your career and your life. Was there a specific...

[00:10:54] Laura McClernon: There you go.

[00:10:55] Micayla Robertson: Moment... or was it gradual how all of this took place for you? Like, at what point did you realize that you were happening to your career?

[00:11:04] Laura McClernon: Oh, yeah, good question. Honestly, I would say that the part that I realized that I had a lot more control than I thought is when I came to Happen To Your Career. I had worked at the same company for four years. I had been doing remote career coaching, and I knew I wanted to do something different.

[00:11:20] I wanted to level up, and I also wanted to have a bit more autonomy over my schedule. And so being able to take my own principles for job searching and networking and apply that, it made me realize just, like, how much opportunity can be possible when you put yourself out there and you network, as well as being able to say, "Okay, I have my guiding light as far as my most important things that I need to find in this next job, and the rest is maybe details or doesn't matter as much to me."

[00:11:51] And in this last job search that I did coming to Happen To Your Career, I think my biggest piece was autonomy and being able to work in a weird time zone, right? So I was in the process of moving to Hawaii, which is six hours different from East Coast time, so having that guiding light and that principle as we call at Happen To Your Career, the ideal career profile, and having that criteria of flexibility and autonomy was what I used to then figure out what could be possible and what would be a good next fit for me in this season of life.

[00:12:21] Scott Anthony Barlow: What Laura just named, the ideal career profile, is the practical application of what self-determination theory calls intrinsic life goal orientation. The research distinguishes between two kinds of goals, extrinsic ones, which are about external validation, like status, income signals, other people's definition of a successful life. And then of course intrinsic, which are anchored to what you actually value.

[00:12:45] Growth, genuine experience, real connection. The research is unambiguous. Chasing extrinsic goals, even when you achieve them, does not produce lasting wellbeing. It'll be short-lived. The satisfaction is real, but it's very brief. The identity workspace that we talked about earlier doesn't function if it's filled with other people's answers.

[00:13:08] What the ideal career profile does, and what Laura's sabbatical design does, is force you to produce your own intrinsic answers before the options are on the table. So when the option appears, you're filtering it against something that you actually built, not something the culture handed to you.

[00:13:23] Micayla Robertson: Let's walk through your actual design process. Like, when did the idea of an RV first come up? And how did it go from, "Wouldn't it be wild if we did this," to, "This is an actual path, and let's set a date"?

[00:13:37] Laura McClernon: Absolutely. So I think that the foundation was laid about 10 years ago with my husband's decision to stay in the military until retirement age, which is 20 years, right? So he was at 10. He had to make that decision if he was gonna stay all the way to 20. And I think the idea was in the back of our minds, but it seemed very far in the future and very, like, harebrained idea, right?

[00:14:01] So it didn't have a lot of legs at all. But it was like, "Oh, if you stay in the military until 20 years, this could open a lot of doors for us in terms of what we do immediately after that time is up." And so that seed was planted. At that time, we didn't have any kids, so it was just the two of us, right?

[00:14:18] And so, you know, as time passed and we had kids and we were thinking about, you know, getting closer to that 20-year milestone for the military, we started to think more about, "Okay, what are we gonna do after?" And it's like, we don't own any homes anywhere. My job is remote. He also is totally fine not working for a period of time.

[00:14:41] And then financially, we really just started planning for it too, right? Saving money, thinking about what this would cost, thinking about, is it really gonna be impactful to not work for a year mid-career? And what does that look like long term? And, you know, I've talked with clients about this too. If you were to take every year that you work and put it on an Excel spreadsheet, and let's say you work from 22 until 62, right?

[00:15:08] We're just pulling some numbers there. That's 40 years. If you were to stop working for one year in the middle and you had no obligations like a mortgage or a car payment or anything because you've put it all into this portable thing that you have, what's one more year of working at the end, right?

[00:15:24] To work it from 62 to 63 versus calling it quits at 62. And then on top of that, you think about the memories that you're making midlife, right? And there's a book that I read more recently called Die With Zero. And in that book they talk about memory dividends. So you could make these memories at the end of your life, right?

[00:15:45] When you're older, you feel more financially secure, you know, you don't have kids in the house so you can be more footloose and fancy-free. Or you can make those memories in the middle of your life, and then have those memory dividends that you're thinking back on or you're reflecting on, or the pictures, or those experiences, or the sentiment of that time in your life, and be reflecting on that for the next, you know, 40-plus years versus the last 10, 15 years of your life.

[00:16:12] Micayla Robertson: How long did it take you to get to this point where you were like, "You know what? This is what we're gonna do." And what went into that planning process?

[00:16:20] Laura McClernon: Through one-degree connections. We found two other families that had done the exact same thing with their spouses retiring from the military. So exact same career timing, kind of almost the same age as us.

[00:16:33] Some of them had a little bit older kids. But they had the one-year mentality, which was kind of hard for me to find on the internet. There's a lot of people that do this [00:16:40] full time, kind of open-ended, and they've like, you know, sold the house, sold everything and this is it. This is, you know, their livelihood.

[00:16:47] But we were able to find two families that had done the same thing, and just hearing their confidence about doing it and how much they loved it, and how excited they were for us to even be thinking about this, it gave us that vote of confidence to move forward and to continue to pursue this as an option.

[00:17:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: What Laura just described, the test drive conversation, the two families whose experience gave her permission to proceed, maps onto one of the most important predictors of sabbatical success in the research. A study out of Tel Aviv, Davidson et al., published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, well, it tracked actually 129 faculty members before, during, and after a sabbatical against a matched control group who stayed at work.

[00:17:32] The sabbatical group showed significant gains in well-being and significant drops in resource depletion. The control group showed no change whatsoever. But the people who gained the most weren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the most exotic destinations. They were the ones with the highest sense of perceived control over how their time was structured, and the highest respite self-efficacy, which is the belief that you actually know how to use the unstructured time well.

[00:18:00] Micayla Robertson: For someone who's saying, "I could never do that." Financially, logistically, for any other reason why. What conversation would you have with them, since you've been able to test drive conversations with people who have also been in your position?

[00:18:15] Laura McClernon: Yeah, exactly. I would say the first thing is being able to say, "Well, maybe you could never do it right now, but what would you have to put in place to do this in three years, in five years, in 10 years, if it's not now?" And then also being able to say to someone, having the confidence to being able to rebuild after something like this, right?

[00:18:35] Or saying like, "What could this look like if I rented out my house for just one year? What would this look like if I sold 50% of what I owned and put it into storage?" And being able to kind of think through those things, and saying, "There's a lot of people out here who have done this, and what makes them so different than me," right?

[00:18:53] And so that gives you some ideas, then, of what could be possible and what might be out there.

[00:18:58] Scott Anthony Barlow: Here's the piece I really want you to pay attention to, though, because it directly addresses the, "I could never do that," response. It's called the fade out effect. Studies on sabbaticals and extended vacations consistently find that well-being gains erode within one to four weeks of returning to the same environment.

[00:19:17] So if you take six months off and come back to an unchanged situation, unchanged job, unchanged relationships, unchanged physical space, you've had a meaningful experience, but you haven't really solved the underlying problem. The well-being decays back to baseline. What Laura is building is structurally different.

[00:19:35] She isn't hitting pause on her life. She and her husband are literally using this year to actively redesign the container they're coming back to. New city, potentially new career configuration, new daily rhythms. The sabbatical is the design tool, not the destination or not trying to get away from something just to have a little bit of space.

[00:19:56] The smallest version of this that works isn't a year in an RV. It's any intentional break where you've also done the work of deciding what you're returning to. The break creates the space. The design work fills it with something better.

[00:20:10] Micayla Robertson: You work with people every day when it comes to designing their career. So how does designing a sabbatical overlap with traditional elements of career change or career design?

[00:20:21] Laura McClernon: Yes. I think that one of the biggest overlapping parts is being able to take charge of your career, right? 'Cause I think a lot of people, they would say leaving two jobs is risky, but also, people involuntarily leave jobs every day, right? Through layoffs.

[00:20:39] So I've seen people navigate that component, and if I would let the fear of not getting a next job hold me back from doing this, I think that that would be a huge mistake. So being able to say, "Hey, I know that there's gonna be a next job after this. Maybe it's not gonna be perfect, but it's gonna enable me to do this thing now that I really wanna do."

[00:20:59] So I think that's a big part of the design process, is just having that confidence to know that you can enable yourself to take that next job after. I think the second part of it is being able to say what are your priorities, right? And that's something that at HTYC we talk to people a lot about.

[00:21:15] If there are seven criteria for, you know, happy career and life that we've defined, being able to kinda say, "Well, what's my criteria for the sabbatical? Is it the places I'm seeing? Is it the life, the everyday life I'm living? Is it about, you know, taking time to pause or whatever that looks like?"

[00:21:33] To say, "What are my priorities in the sabbatical, and what do I hope to end with this time?" For me, my big priority right now is being able to have this intentional time with my family, and then also to be able to create these memories across the United States and see the beauty of the United States all within one year.

[00:21:51] Micayla Robertson: Do you have a specific map that you guys are following? Is it going to be all the way across the country to come back toward the West Coast? Are you staying toward the West Coast for most of the year? What does this trip look like for you?

[00:22:03] Laura McClernon: Great question. So in planning this out, we had to plan with the seasons, right?

[00:22:08] 'Cause we can't be in, like, subzero temperatures and snow with an RV. So we kind of took the seasons and put that in mind. We took some major places that we wanted to see and had those as anchors, and then in doing research, we read about places that book up or get crowded or that would be extremely difficult to try and flex last-minute, and then said, "Okay, we're gonna need to book in advance."

[00:22:29] So we're sitting today at a month and seven days away from our launch time. And we have roughly 70 to 80% of all of our places booked for the next year.

[00:22:43] Scott Anthony Barlow: Laura didn't just decide to take a year off. You know, this was actually many years coming. But she talked to people who had done it before. She mapped the route. She booked 70% of her stops. She researched weather patterns. She built a homeschool curriculum. This, by the way, is almost the opposite of anxiety to some degree. That's the work that the research says predicts transformation versus a very expensive vacation.

[00:23:10] Micayla Robertson: What would you say would be the primary difference between the mindset shift that had to take place between burnout within a traditional career and the need for a sabbatical versus intentionally designing a sabbatical experience?

[00:23:23] Laura McClernon: Right. I think that comes back to kind of what we were talking about earlier with, like, the memory dividends and everything. So being able to say, like, "Is it required that I maintain consistent employment," right?

[00:23:37] And I think that's the first question that you have to ask yourself. And sometimes that's a requirement that people put on themselves that is actually not required to get hired again or to lead a fulfilling career. And so once you get past that whole concept of I have to stay consistently employed, then you can say, "All right. Well, if I'm not gonna be consistently employed, what do I wanna do during this time?" And for us, that was travel, and that was spending time with our family.

[00:24:07] And then, you know, for the timing too, with my husband leaving the military, it just made sense that this was gonna be the time. After we are just making this major life transition, and we're feeling that we don't have a lot of, like, anchors in our community, 'cause we're leaving our community and we're starting over, that this was gonna be the jump-off point to do that.

[00:24:29] Micayla Robertson: What's one thing you wish you would've done earlier in this whole process?

[00:24:32] Laura McClernon: I think in the beginning of this process, I worried a lot about the outcome of where we're gonna go after, and then there just came a point where I, like, got let that go, because I realized that that was gonna spoil the trip. And so I just had to say, "You know what? This is my leap, and the net's gonna appear, so I'm just gonna go for this."

[00:24:51] And we have figured everything out up until this point in life. Why would we not figure out where we're gonna live after this trip? So I would've given myself a lot more grace at this time a year ago in thinking about obsessing over what's gonna happen after, what's gonna happen after.

[00:25:06] Micayla Robertson: It's so funny that you mention that this is your leap, because I know that The Big Leap is one of the... your favorite books.

[00:25:11] Laura McClernon: One of my favorite books, yes.

[00:25:12] Micayla Robertson: How did that play into, you know, just your mindset and psychology around taking risk?

[00:25:19] Laura McClernon: Yeah. I think that you have to look at a lot of the facts, right? You don't know what's gonna happen in the future. We don't know those facts. But how much you've proven yourself in situations leading up into this point. And so that gives you a lot of confidence as far as, you know, I have navigated things that are different, but you could see some relation between them, right, of logistics and having things go wrong and being able to, like, recreate your life in a new place, and just having that confidence to know that I can do that.

[00:25:51] Scott Anthony Barlow: Laura's describing something that positive psychologists call self-efficacy that we mentioned earlier. Not generic confidence, but the specific evidence-based belief that you can handle what you don't yet know is coming based on what you've already handled in the past. Albert Bandura, who developed self-efficacy theory, found that the single most important source of self-efficacy isn't encouragement or motivation.

[00:26:16] It's actually mastery experience. Evidence from your own history that you've solved hard problems before. Laura has seven international relocations, a career pivot, a job search conducted from six-hour time zone offset. This is not personality type. This is a case file. The leap, as she described it, isn't faith in an outcome. It's trust in a process. A process that there's a lot of evidence that she's run before.

[00:26:41] Micayla Robertson: As you step into this, what's the question you're hoping that this year answers for you or for your family?

[00:26:48] Laura McClernon: Yeah. So I think that one of the biggest questions I have, you know, I just talked about, where are we gonna live next, right? So as I mentioned earlier, I've decoupled myself from obsessing about it or thinking about it too much. But, me being able to say rather than trying to have Google answer that for me, or God forbid, AI answer that for me, where I should live, where's my family best gonna thrive and all that, why don't I just get out there and experience it?

[00:27:16] And I'm gonna learn experientially from all the different places that we go, from the people we meet, from, you know, the random ice cream place we go to on a Tuesday night and we're like, "We like this vibe. We like this city," right? So being able to have all those different experiences, they're gonna shape me and help me get even more clear on what's important, and give me a much better filter for, like, okay, what's my shortlist? And then a radar for knowing it when I see it as far as this is the opportunity or this is the city that we're gonna wanna end up in.

[00:27:46] Micayla Robertson: For anyone that is listening and they wanna start designing their own version of this, maybe not an RV, and maybe not a whole year, but, like, what's the first step that they should take today? Not a concept, but an actual action step that you would encourage them to take to get started.

[00:28:03] Laura McClernon: Yeah. So I would think one action step to get started would be to first think hard and long about, like, is consistent employment the answer, right? Is that really the answer to successful career and successful work for you?

[00:28:18] And if it's not, then being able to say, "Okay. Well, what else could be possible if I took a break from work, or if I downshifted into part-time work? What would that allow me to do?" And I think that right now there's no better time from now for being able to come back to work after a sabbatical because of the fact that, you know, we've seen so many shakeups in the job market, and people getting laid off and industries changing, that there really is no better time than now to be able to take these breaks and confidently come back to work after them.

[00:28:51] Scott Anthony Barlow: Laura's story is a reminder that a sabbatical isn't a luxury for people with unlimited resources. It's a design problem. And like any good design problem, it starts with getting honest about what you actually want.

[00:29:03] And of course, you probably won't be surprised, but the research backs this up in a specific way, that people who gain the most from extended time off aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the most dramatic destinations. They're the ones with respite, self-efficacy, or a real practice belief in their own capacity to inhabit unstructured time.

[00:29:23] They're the ones who've satisfied the three core psychological needs, genuine autonomy in their choices, real competence in things that matter to them, and deep connection to the people that they love. And critically, they're the ones who treat their break not as an escape, but what the research calls as an identity workspace, a rare and deliberately created chance to ask who you actually are when the role and title and the routine all get stripped away.

[00:29:47] Laura's done all of that. The planning's done. The RV's ready. She's good to go. By the way, fun fact, when Laura's around traveling, then I'll actually get to meet up with her for the first time in person ever, even though we've worked on the same team together for many years.

[00:30:02] If you wanna go deeper on this, including building your ideal career profile, identifying your signature strengths, or understanding how you can navigate and build the life that you want and work that supports that in your next stage of your career, then drop me an email right now.

[00:30:17] Open up on your phone your email and put Scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and I'll connect you to the right person on our team. We'll figure out the very best way that we can support you.

[00:30:30] And to Laura, on behalf of everyone here on our team at Happen To Your Career, thank you for bringing us into the chapter before it even began. Travel well. We're of course all rooting for you and really excited to hear along the way.

[00:30:44] Until next time, this is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.