Can learning about growing turnips help you to develop your career?
Whilst at first sight you may think this question is only relevant to farmers, the concept of leaving the fields ‘fallow’ for a year to recover their goodness and increase future crop yields, is a concept that can have enormous relevance to our professional lives.
Today, it isn’t uncommon for us to work until retirement without any real tangible break, apart from our annual holidays from work. Even where a decent work-life balance provides the opportunity to explore other interests, how many of us have thought, ‘I’d love to have a bit of break and then give ‘X’ a proper try’ or ‘It would be great to take a year off to recharge the batteries and learn ‘Y’’, but then not pursue that activity/interest any further, only to regret that we didn’t later?
The time conundrum
Time is often an issue, because we don’t feel that we have the time to pursue something fully, because our jobs and lives are simply too busy. The only alternative might be a short career break or to take a complete break from work. However, when posed with that conundrum, we may decide not to embark on a career break because:
- we fear that we won’t get another job, or keep our existing role if we have a break;
- we fear that our skills will become rusty and make us less employable;
- we fear what other people may think of us (e.g. that we aren’t serious enough about our careers);
- we fear that we won’t become good enough in the thing that we want to pursue/try, because the expectations we place on ourselves are too high;
- we fear the financial consequences of having a break.
Whilst the above are not uncommon human thoughts, the common denominator in all of these thoughts is one of fear and the unknown.
However, we never have complete control over our careers anyway and they can end suddenly and unexpectedly. Therefore, we should never be too afraid of stepping back a little, trying new things and stepping outside of our comfort zones from time to time.
The benefits of career breaks
Having a career break, laying ‘fallow’ for a while and trying something that interests you, can have potentially enormous benefits, including:
- you learn to become more creative and imaginative, as you aren’t stuck in your day to day working habits and you have to open your eyes and ears more to learn new things;
- you meet new people and develop new networks of friends;
- you acquire new skills, which can often be applied to existing jobs;
- you become less fearful of trying new things and forming your own opinions, as the only way to learn something new is to make mistakes;
- you become more rounded and confident as a person;
- you become less bogged down in detail and more focussed and aware of the bigger picture and how to improve things in manageable steps;
- you may end up having a new career or developing an interest that develops into a side-career that you can continue through retirement;
- you can become more resourceful, as learning something new enables you to become more open-minded to trying new things.
The benefits of stopping and trying something new can far outweigh the negatives & fears. In any event, if the downsides are dwelled upon, worst case scenarios simply get churned around unhelpfully in our minds. That in turn, could make us more prone to lack of decisiveness and lack of direction in our existing careers.
What would you like in your harvest?
The most difficult step is often just stopping to allow ourselves the opportunity and the space to try something new. In medieval times, the optimum turnip harvest would not have been achieved without allowing the fields to lay fallow from time to time. So, stopping for a while and doing something completely different from time to time, might just enable you to develop a whole variety of new skills and to cultivate your own very rich harvest.
