The clearest view of your work often comes right after you step away. It doesn’t last long.

Like many of you, today’s my last day of work before the break. I’ll be offline until mid-January, and then heading straight into a long-planned sabbatical in Paris - three months of language school, dark and cold days, many pastries... to say I am excited is something of an understatement.

One of the reasons I love travelling is that it nudges my brain out of its well-worn grooves. What’s encouraging is that you don’t need a long-haul flight to access that shift. You can recreate many of the same effects in the middle of your ordinary week. Here are five ways travel helps your brain, and how to bring those benefits home.

Imagine two circles. One represents you, one represents your role at work. How much overlap is healthy? Here’s an exercise to help you answer that question.

I would estimate that, oh, approximately 100% of people I have worked with lately are exhausted (a statistic of correlation, not causation, I trust!).

How fully do you trust your team? I am still hearing about many leaders who think that having people back in the office is the only way to “get the most out of them”. How might their teams be feeling? Perhaps resentful, disengaged, demotivated and unhappy?

How could positivity be toxic? It sounds like an oxymoron. Humans do better when we experience roughly 3 positive emotions for every 1 negative one. Most of us have plenty of negative emotions without needing actively to seek them out. Yet we often do cultivate them. That’s toxic negativity… what about healthy positivity? Healthy, authentic positivity allows room for the inevitable negativity we will all experience from time to time.

Contentment comes from appreciating what I have, rather than focusing on what I don’t. Gratitude for what we have is powerfully good for us. But if that means not striving for new experiences, growth, development, achievement – and yes, material things - well, that’s a turn-off.

If your house burns down, it is perfectly natural for you to feel a range of strong, difficult emotions. If you make yourself “wrong” for having these reactions, you are adding more difficulty to the pile. Emotional intelligence is about being able to accept and work with our emotions effectively, not about being sunny no matter what.

Effective boundary setting is so important for both wellbeing and productivity, but it’s something we frequently find so difficult.

When you say “yes” to something, what are you actually saying “no” to?

Creativity is often born out of boredom and there are many people currently struggling with the restrictions on our work and social activity. In this week’s blog, I talk about navigating this new terrain and allowing your boredom to run it’s course.

I’m sharing a couple of quick resources I found helpful this week. It’s important that we allow ourselves to feel all the things but not dwell. Try and get into the habit of swapping the negative state of mind for a positive one.

Now is the time for us to be particularly kind to ourselves. Do away with the pressure to be and do all the things, and find the pace and path that’s going to work for you right now.

Recently I asked you to share three practical things that have been helpful for you during this strange and challenging time. Some very clear themes came through - and I’m sharing them with you today.