What No One Tells you About a Gap Year

A gap year is a year that you give yourself away from your work, studies, or daily routine for a while to do other things that you like and that will revert positively in your life and your future, such as:

• Dedicating time to your personal growth
• Reflecting on what changes you need or what you can do with your life.
• Dedicate yourself to activities that you like and do not have time in your daily life.
• Travel and see the world
• Reinvent yourself both personally and professionally
• Stop living a routine life to get to know yourself in other facets.

What you do during your gap year is your business, but I insist that you give your gap year a focus on personal growth.

Why? Because you run the risk of going away, having a fantastic year, meeting a lot of people, and seeing a lot of super cool places, but coming back „empty-handed“, to the same place and the same routine as always.

If you don’t come back having done an internal transformation process, don’t doubt that your life will remain the same as before.

The key is to ask yourself: What do I want? What is my priority? What is the life change I dream of?

Most people decide to use that gap year to go on a trip.

You don’t have to go on a trip, and you don’t have to go to Asia if that is not your great desire. There are a thousand options, all totally valid with and without travel. You have to find out which one is yours.

Here are some suggestions of activities to which you could dedicate yourself during your sabbatical year:

• Deepening your personal growth (reading books, dedicating time to meditation, attending seminars and conferences, writing a personal diary…).
• Rethink your professional future (decide if you want to quit your job or not, if you’re going to continue working in the same job but in another company or place, if you like the sector you work in but want to change careers, consider the option of starting your own business…).
• Volunteer internationally or in your city.
• Write a book or try yourself as a writer at an essay writing service helping students.
• Spend some time in another city
• Enjoying a scholarship
• Dedicate time to something you like, for example, crafts, art, music.
• Resting, taking care of your health, playing sports.

Whatever plan you choose for your gap year, it will allow you time to make all those dreams you’ve had since you were a child come true and make essential changes in your life that will lead you to the freedom and happiness you deserve.

Although most people who take a gap year do it before starting college, I think you should take it whenever you feel like it, regardless of your age or professional status.

The important thing is to live a different life, even if it’s just for a little while. It is essential to detoxify yourself from all those limiting beliefs you have always been.

In my opinion, I recommend that the longer you are away, the better. You will have time to question more things, and the changes will be more profound if you are gone for a year than if you are gone for three months.

In addition, a gap year is a good option for you if:

• You want to live new experiences, and you feel that your daily life does not allow you to do so.
• Your job doesn’t fulfill you. You don’t see yourself working in the same position until you retire, and you need to reinvent yourself professionally.
• You feel that you have settled into routine life, and you hate it.
• You love to travel, but you don’t have time to travel as much as you would like to.
• You feel you would like to do a thousand things, and you have a thousand projects, but you put them off again and again because you never have time for them.
• You want to know yourself better and are willing to go inward.
• You are fed up with society, you don’t identify with what is around you, and you need to make changes in your life, but you don’t know where to start.
• You have finished high school, and you are not sure what to study or if you want to go to college.
• You feel that your family, your partner, or your friends influence you too much on the path they want you to follow, and you want to give yourself some time to get to know yourself, strengthen your inner self and find your own.

As you can see, a gap is something essential for most people, and I do not doubt that if you finally decide to take it, you will do great too.

Now tell me, what would you focus your gap year on?