Are You Thinking About Taking A Gap Year? 10 Benefits For Your Life
The concept of a sabbatical year may not be very popular for those people who confuse life with work, but the truth is that it is one more resource that can help us both gain health and evolve personally.
Unfortunately, Sometimes the sabbatical is confused with simple inactivity and the inability to plan a viable work project (the latter being, by the way, something that does not depend entirely on willpower or effort). No: spending a few months without paid work or receiving formal training does not have to be a waste of time.
We’ll see now the main advantages that people who decide to take a gap year can enjoy before starting a university degree or definitively entering the labor market.
Going from a period of activity to a stage in which free time predominates can cause certain problems related to lack of planning and poor management of expectations.
But that, in many cases, is more than offset by the advantages that the gap year offers.
1. Time to train yourself in a self-taught way
The majority of university courses or regulated postgraduate training orient towards specializations that, in one way or another, limit the range of learning to which we can opt. This is positive in many ways, since becoming an expert in something requires the need to focus on a specific field of knowledge.
The gap year allows us get out of this dynamic and give ourselves time to learn on our own or with the help of face-to-face or online courses. The duration of one year allows us to delve deeply enough into a new subject to continue training in it in a more fluid way when we begin to combine it with work.
2. Traveling, the great gift for the senses
To travel well it is necessary to have time to discover all the secrets of what you visit. The gap year gives us the opportunity to take several trips, either using saved money or using volunteer programs that offer free stay in exchange for several hours of work per week.
3. The possibility of learning languages
Another reason why the gap year It is not equivalent to spending all day doing nothing is that it leaves us a wide margin to learn languages.
In fact, if we put enough time and effort into it, the results after spending about 11 or 12 months learning a language starting from complete ignorance are usually surprising, especially if we already master one that is similar to it in grammar. or vocabulary.
4. You can meet more people
Sometimes we forget one of the most important aspects of life that are reduced when we work or study intensively: social relationships.
Whether to network from a professional perspective or to extend the circle of friends , the gap year allows us to enjoy perfect moments and spaces to come into contact with people with interests similar to ours. Attending festivals, conferences, meeting up… there are many suitable contexts to socialize.
Although it may seem strange, leaving the circuit of formal training and full-time work helps us gain power over our actions and decisions. This is because For the first time we have almost total freedom to prioritize objectives and make plans, something that does not happen in the other two scenarios.
6. Offers an oasis of family conciliation
If communication within the family has been suffering for years due to the lack of time together, this is the ideal time to reconcile or simply resume contact and strengthen the emotional bond that unites us with our fathers, mothers, siblings etc.
Before you take a break, remember…
Now that we have seen the advantages and benefits associated with the gap year, it is good to review the aspects that must be taken into account before opting for this option.
Mainly, efforts must be made to prepare for the sabbatical year in two ways: save and plan
Having a financial cushion is necessary even in those cases in which we are not prepared to carry out projects that require large expenses, because if we need money for unforeseen events, we are more exposed by not having a full-time job.
On the other hand, planning with a reasonable amount of time is essential because if we do not do so, we will possibly spend the year wasting many weeks and simply “embedding” some significant events in our calendar from time to time, without forming a cohesive whole. This last option is an incorrect way to imagine the gap year, a period characterized not by free time or rest but for the freedom to choose where we want to go.
