Why you need to hit pause on your busy work life
It’s better for your career
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Michelle Singletary.
Rachael O’Meara was a customer support manager at Google, and she was miserable. Her employee performance evaluations weren’t good, and she was getting the message that she wasn’t working out in her position.
But before her career imploded, O’Meara took a break. She requested three months of unpaid leave to reboot.
And out of her experience came the book “Pause: Harnessing the Life-Changing Power of Giving Yourself a Break” (TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House, $15).
“All I could think about was work,” O’Meara writes. “I would be at friends’ houses, and while everyone else was engaged in conversation, I was in my own world, two feet away, lost in my emails and worries.”
O’Meara is still with Google, now a sales executive. But her break led to a breakthrough in what she calls “the power of the pause.”
5 signs you need a break from your job
- You loathe the job you once loved.
2. Your manager is complaining about your performance.
3. You spend too much time with technology. Not being plugged in makes you panic.
4. You’ve been hit with a major change — good or bad.
5. You’re faced with a new opportunity. You could get laid off, but it might be an opening for you to set up a new business.
Hitting pause
Taking a pause from work — whether it’s vacation time or five minutes of deep breathing — can help you know what matters and what aligns with your values.
How to do it
Many people don’t have the luxury to take extended time off, but pausing isn’t about any amount of time.
O’Meara writes, “It’s about the quality of how that time is spent. I define a pause as any intentional shift in behavior that allows you space to experience a mental shift in attitude, thoughts, or emotions that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred.”
If you’re going to pause for five minutes, a few hours or months, you’ll need a strategy. O’Meara provides a wealth of tips and resources, including how to budget for a break, on her website.
