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Gap Year – Coaching Lesson

Hi, welcome to this month’s coaching lesson. Let’s get started. Gap year, now humans are naturally designed for learning. We are learning organisms. And, usually, experience is the best teacher.

Likewise, although all of us are hardworking in our own way, we all need breaks. We all need to take a break from whatever we’re doing in our normal life.

Taking a break just helps us mentally to refresh. Because if we keep doing the same thing every day, every day, every day, eventually we can lose a bit of our energy for that task. We can lose a bit of our enthusiasm and we can lose our creativity and our innovation. In a business this is certainly true. I’ve seen this myself. If I work too much on the business, eventually I’ll reach a point where I seem to just lose all my good ideas and I get a bit burned out. To be burned out means to lose your energy, lose your motivation.

So a gap year is one way to handle this, to handle this situation. Taking a break, and not just taking a break, but a break that’s designed to jumpstart your learning in some new and exciting and interesting way for you. I can give you an example from my own life and we’ll talk about how you can go about doing this yourself.

Several years ago, many years ago, I was a graduate student and my first master’s degree was in social work. This was back, actually, in 1996. I can actually give the exact year. And I had just finished my master’s in social work program, just finished studying. I got my degree. So I finished that at the end of Spring and then I had a Summer.

And during the Summer I worked a job, a part-time job. But also during that Summer I had to think about what I wanted to do next. What was I going to do? And I realized at that time that I actually dreaded the idea of just getting a normal, full-time social work job and starting my career. Something inside me yearned for a new experience.

I had been…I just spent two years in the social work program, completely focused on this topic of social work, y’know? Every single day I was taking classes, writing papers, and I felt I just needed a break from social work. I didn’t want to immediately go into a social work job. I felt I needed a break, something new. I needed a gap year, in fact. I didn’t call it a gap year but that’s in fact what I was hoping for and what I felt I needed.

And so I got online and I searched around and I found a job in Korea, South Korea, teaching English.

Now at that time in my life I had no experience with teaching English at all. But the idea of going to another country, living in a foreign country, it sounded like an exciting and interesting experience. Just the kind of thing I thought I needed: a complete break from social work, one year to go live in another country, have a new experience, and then come back to America to start my social work career.

And so that’s exactly what I did. I applied for some jobs. I eventually accepted one. And I went off to Korea for a year. Now this gap year for me was not an easy experience, it turned out. I had the idea that I was going to go and it was going to be all exotic and amazing. But, in fact, it was very, very, very tough.

The first tough thing I had to deal with was just culture shock.

Quite obviously I got there and most people did not speak English. Imagine that, they spoke Korean!

And I did not speak Korean. Even worse, my job was incredibly difficult and in fact not very good. We were treated badly at the school, the teachers were treated badly, and they made us just work and work incredibly long hours. So I was exhausted all of the time.

So I was dealing with the kind of the culture shock of a new place with new food, with different kind of culture, different expectations. And then, also at the same time, dealing with an extremely difficult and unpleasant job. So, in fact, it was not an enjoyable year. It was an extremely stressful and difficult year.

On the other hand, at the end of that year, I did have a feeling of accomplishment because as I was teaching at this place, at this school, teaching children English, I began to develop my own way of teaching English. Now it’s not the same as I do now but I did improve as a teacher because when I first started I got no training from the school.

So I had children in my class and I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea. I had never taught English before. And in the beginning I was just trying anything and everything and some of it was quite bad. But as I went forward I gradually improved. And I had a feeling of accomplishment because I could see my students improve.

In fact, after only three months in my class, the students in my class spoke only English in the classroom.

When I came they spoke no English at all. Three months later they were speaking English only in my classroom and we made a rule, English only. Were they perfect speakers? No, but they were only speaking English and they had actually quite good pronunciation.

So that gave me a feeling of accomplishment and kind of pride to see that, oh, I’m actually contributing.

My work is having an effect. What I’m doing is affecting these children. They’re developing this ability to speak English in part because of my efforts. So that gave me a very powerful sense of accomplishment and contribution.

And I think that that is what planted a seed in my mind that eventually, many years later, led to where I am now with Effortless English. It led me to go back to school again to get another master’s degree in teaching English. It led me to try more and newer and more interesting teaching methods. And it eventually even led me to even start my own company, Effortless English and Learn Real English.

So that gap year, even though at the time I didn’t realize it, that gap year had a profound effect on my life.

It’s kind of, y’know, that ripple effect. Y’know, we throw a pebble into a pond and we see the one ripple goes out and then more and more and more and more. And it’s sort of that same idea, this gap year that I had. When I first did it, when I finished it, finished the year in Korea, I went off to travel in Thailand and India. And I just felt, that’s it, it’s over, I survived a year.

Whew, I just was really at that point I was just focused on how difficult and stressful it was and was happy that it was over. So in the moment, at that time, that’s all I realized. I didn’t realize that the experience had really changed me very much. I didn’t…I certainly didn’t realize that it would lead one day to me becoming a full-time professional English teacher and starting two companies teaching English. I didn’t realize it would lead to Learn Real English.

I didn’t realize any of that. In the moment it just felt like a tough experience that I had survived and that I had learned a few things and I was glad it was over. So why did it have such an effect on me? Because years later, now I can look back and realize that those ripples. They went out. I threw the little pebble, that one-year experience, and it continues to have an effect on my life even today.

The first thing I did was I broke from the familiar, right? By taking this gap year I took a big break from what was familiar, from my current pattern at that time. So my pattern at that time was I was focused totally on social work. I had spent two years taking social work classes, writing papers on social work, doing internships and jobs in social work. I was completely focused on that.

And then I suddenly took a break and did something completely different, English teaching to children in Korea. So it was a big break from what I had been doing before. Now it turns out even though this experience was really, really tough for me, it was also refreshing because I came back to the United States at that point then and I was really excited and motivated to go back into social work.

And so at that time, I did. I came back to the States. I got a job at a youth shelter, my favorite social work job, in fact, and I had a great experience there. And I came back full of excitement and energy because I had had this year break. So even though it was a tough and difficult experience, it gave me a break from social work and it gave me that spark of creativity that I needed again. So this was a great benefit of it.

And this is a great benefit in general of breaking from the familiar. Creativity comes from combining different elements, especially unexpected elements. So when we get in a habit and we’re doing the same thing again and again and again, we’re doing it week after week, month after month, year after year, it becomes harder and harder to be creative in our projects, in our job, in our family and whatever.

So it’s quite helpful sometimes to do like a gap year or a gap month, however much time you have. Take a break and go do something very different, a different experience, a different learning experience. Learn about something completely different. Number one, it’s fun because you get to learn something different and have a new experience. But number two, what will happen is you will find that it gives you a spark of creativity. It refreshes you so that when you go back to your normal job or project, you go back with more motivation and more creativity and more innovation.

The other thing is that the gap year is an experience. It’s not just reading books. It’s doing something.

And that could be anything. A gap year could actually be going back to school if you’ve been out of school for a long time and you’ve been working. You might go back to school and study something different and new, or just take workshops or seminars. And again, if you only have a month then you can do it for a month.

And then an important part of the gap year idea, or gap month, is that you then return. That you return and you integrate your new experience into your life. Integrate means to combine with. So I went off and I taught English to small children in Korea and then I traveled a bit in Thailand and India. But I didn’t stop there.

Then I returned home and I got a social work job. And I added in this new experience into my social work. I didn’t really do it consciously, I did it unconsciously, but I can see now that I did. That teaching experience I got in Korea affected how I did social work. I became a better teacher so when I was working with children and youth who were having problems in the United States, I had more confidence as a counselor and as a teacher and being in that role because of what I had done in Korea.

So that’s a big part of it, too, is that whatever you do during your gap year, whether it’s a traditional thing of going off and studying for a year, like a sabbatical, or if it’s non-traditional, it’s just some kind of sport or other kind of experience that you create yourself. Whatever it is, when you come back you try your best to take some ideas, some elements, some experiences, some learning from that gap time and apply it to your regular life, apply it back to your regular life. That might be your family or your job or whatever. So reintegrating it is important.

So let’s talk now about actions. What can you do this month? First of all, I want you to design a break.

Design your own gap. Now I know that sometimes we don’t have a year. Sometimes we don’t even have a month. So we can have a gap week perhaps. But we need these. They’re necessary in our lives.

They reinvigorate us. They refresh us. They spark our creativity. They’ll help your work.

It may seem like, “Oh now, I can’t take a week off from work. I can’t take a month off from work. Then I’ll have too much.” But it’ll actually help. You’ll be more productive by taking a break than by not taking a break. Now the second thing is, when you design this gap break, this is not just a vacation. I want you to think differently about it.

Going off to the beach and swimming around in the water is perfectly fine and I like to do it, too. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Remember that the gap year or the gap month, this break is a learning experience. So a learning experience, two important words. So number one, it should be about learning something.

It could be something you already have been learning and you want to get better at. Or it could be something totally different and new you would just like to try. But when you design this break I want you to make it focused on learning something.

The second part of that is an experience, so make it experiential. So you’re not just going to study books, you’re going to do something. You might have an apprenticeship where you learn from a master. Or you might just go and learn by doing. You might do some little internship with somebody. Or you might combine book-learning and learning by doing. But make sure you have some kind of experience, too.

Do those two things. Go have your gap time, whatever it is. And then when you come back, come back refreshed and do your best to take your new learning and somehow combine it with your old projects, your old job, your family life, whatever. Bring that new element back into it. Reintegrate into your life.

That’s your homework for this month. Enjoy it. And, as always, tell us about your experiences with this on our social site.

Alright. I’ll see you there. Have a great day. Bye for now.