Career Break...Day 1

So you don't need to worry, I'm not going to be doing a blog post every single day of my career break! However, as the 1st September 2017 is officially day 1, I didn't feel as if I could let it go past without some form of recognition!
In the first post of this blog I gave the reasons for having the career break but the 'personal development' reason I gave on my career break request form at work, whilst being the most accurate of UCL's three reasons for requesting a career break (as I'm not off for caring duties or doing a course that would qualify as professional development!) they weren't just the right words for me to use to get a big chunk of unpaid leave, it's what I want to achieve - or at least work towards!
As many of you know, ten years ago I did a trip around the world and I came back from that on a complete high that lasted approximately... 10 days. It was followed by a period where my self-confidence was subterranean,  which made no sense - I'd just traveled around the world on my own! In the months and years that followed, I built myself a new career and a life that I can be proud of and feel really lucky to live. Before the year away, I'd done a fair amount of traveling; being a scientist there's always a conference in an exotic place that can relied on for tacking a few days of holiday onto. The difference with the round the world trip is that it made me realise just how amazing it is to spend time in the unfamiliar; to see new places and meet new people and to push yourself to do something unexpected and challenging is a real privilege. Importantly, it also made me appreciate just how wonderful being in familiar locations with family and long-term friends is too. In addition to this, the life that I built upon my return showed me that losing my self-confidence didn't mean that I was incapable of achievement.

So having learnt all this in life, in what ways do I want to develop personally over the coming year?

Some ways are exactly as they are described - personal - and so I'm sorry, but you don't get to find them all out!! The others maybe don't seem so very huge, but for me and possibly other people's perceptions of me they could be quite profound. So, a few of them that I'll share with you are:

• I want to get my self-confidence back, fully back, so that I stop second-guessing myself all the time and start truly believing that I'm doing pretty damn well in life.
• I want to be proud of myself and my achievements, to stop comparing myself to others and always feel I come off worse.
• I want to become more spontaneous and stop planning the life out of everything.
• I want to be someone who does things differently to the way society expects you to and really feel that that's OK.
• I want to learn to be silly again (I feel my list of challenges from Shalini, Kate, Amanda and Andrew will help with this - they know what they are and that's enough to be said about that!).

So as you can see, this year isn't just about having a year off work, it really is for me to develop more as a person. But you know, seeing that I can do that during a year off work it'd be daft not to, and utter madness to not take advantage of being able to do it in some really interesting and exciting places!!