You Don’t Need Another Job. You Need a Break: How to Take a Career Sabbatical | Katrina McGhee

What if the answer to burnout, career dissatisfaction, or feeling completely stuck isn’t finding a better job?

What if you need to stop working for a while?

In this episode of Code 3: Life. Reinvented., I sit down with Katrina McGhee, career break and sabbatical expert and author of Taking a Career Break For Dummies, to talk about what actually happens when you give yourself permission to step away.

Katrina shares the moment she realized, “You don’t want another job. You want a break.” At the time, she had roughly $1,500 in the bank, more than $50,000 in debt, and absolutely no obvious reason why taking an extended sabbatical should have been possible. But she built a plan, saved $40,000 in 18 months, left her corporate career, and eventually spent more than a year traveling, grieving, reconnecting with people she loved, and figuring out what she wanted the next chapter of her life to become.

We talk about the real mechanics of taking a career break: how much money you need, how to plan for it, how to talk to your boss or spouse, and why a sabbatical doesn’t have to mean quitting your job and traveling the world.

But the conversation goes deeper than that.

Katrina and I explore the hidden cost of living a life that no longer fits, the ways we spend money to compensate for unhappiness and exhaustion, why misalignment can become incredibly expensive, and what happens when staying where you are becomes more frightening than leaving.

We also talk about grief, burnout, career reinvention, AI-driven job anxiety, and Katrina’s challenge to stop organizing your life around the red flags you’re trying to avoid and start moving toward the green flag you actually want.

If you’ve ever thought, I can’t keep doing this—but I have no idea what comes next, this conversation might give you another option:

You don’t necessarily need to have the next chapter figured out.

You may need enough space to hear yourself again.

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