I started a puzzle on my week off. A couple of hours later, I packed it back into the box unfinished. I also started painting and left a couple of pieces about 80 per cent done. Normally, the unfinished nature of both might have niggled at me, but this time I felt completely satisfied. Neither needed to be finished because finishing wasn’t the point.
They were circuit breakers. Something to get me out of my head and back into my body. To use my hands, be creative and lose track of time for a while. There was no outcome I was trying to achieve and no one waiting for the result. I simply enjoyed the process.
What I enjoyed most was that these things were not only unfinished, they were also unmeasured. I wasn’t trying to get better at painting, complete the puzzle faster or turn either into something useful. There was no outcome, score or evidence required of a productive day. For a few hours, the experience itself was enough.
We had a staycation over the school holidays, which turned out to be exactly the reset I needed. I slept without an alarm. Even my son was sleeping until 9am. We had nowhere we needed to be. I walked Rex, dabbled with cooking, pottered around, and allowed the days to take shape rather than deciding in advance what I needed to extract from them.
But this isn’t another article about the benefits of taking a break. There are plenty of those, and you probably don’t need another leadership coach telling you to switch off, recharge your batteries and come back refreshed. What interested me more was my behaviour change.
I spend much of my working life delivering. Coaching sessions, workshops, writing, conversations, ideas, travelling, running a business, organising. Like many of the leaders I work with, I’m accustomed to moving things forward. There is usually an outcome, a next step or something that needs completing. And in working life, there is often a measure attached to it too: performance, deadlines, goals, growth, engagement, revenue, productivity and ambition.
Even our wellbeing can become measured. I have the Oura ring to prove it. Steps. Sleep scores. Exercise minutes. Meditation streaks.
For a week, I deliberately interrupted that pattern. I started things without needing to finish them. I did things that weren’t productive or measured. I followed my energy rather than a schedule. I used creativity and movement to shift myself out of thinking and into sensing. The puzzle, the painting, walking Rex and waking without an alarm weren’t really the point. They were purposeful circuit breakers that changed my behaviour long enough to change my perspective.
There is some good research behind the broader idea. A 2025 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, bringing together 32 studies, found that holidays have a significant positive effect on employee wellbeing and that the benefits may last longer than previous research had suggested. Interestingly, psychological detachment from work and physical activity were among the experiences most associated with improved wellbeing during and after a holiday.
But I’m interested in taking that idea beyond holidays and into the workplace. What happens when we deliberately interrupt the way we normally operate, even when we haven’t gone anywhere?
Sometimes you need to step outside the building
One of the ideas I return to throughout Recalibrate is that it can be incredibly difficult to see something clearly when you are right in the middle of it. Denny, one of the leaders whose story I share in the book, described an experience as being “inside the building”. Sometimes you need to walk outside to see the building itself. When you’re inside, you see the room you’re standing in; when you step away, you can see how the pieces fit together.
I see this with leaders all the time. When you’re deep in the doing, everything can start to feel equally important. The meeting, the email, the deadline, the person who needs something from you, the thing you haven’t finished, the decision you haven’t made. You can become so accustomed to your own patterns of delivery that you stop noticing them.
One of the questions leaders ask me surprisingly often is, How can I care less? But I don’t think caring less is the answer. Caring is often part of what makes them good at what they do. The recalibration is learning to be more discerning about what deserves your care. Where is your energy genuinely needed? What matters enough to warrant your attention? And what are you giving energy to simply because you’ve become accustomed to treating everything as important? It’s not about becoming less invested. It’s about channelling your care and energy towards the things that matter most.
Research into psychological detachment from work supports the importance of creating separation. A large meta-analysis involving more than 38,000 employees found that greater detachment was associated with less exhaustion and fatigue, better sleep, higher life satisfaction and improved wellbeing.
It doesn’t mean you need to disappear on holiday whenever leadership gets difficult. It does suggest there is value in consciously changing your relationship with work rather than simply doing more.
I’ve written before about building a sustainable leadership practice and the importance of managing where your attention and energy go. What my week off reminded me is that perspective doesn’t always come from thinking harder about the problem. Sometimes we need to change the behaviour that keeps producing the same view.
That might mean walking rather than sitting at your desk to think. Writing something by hand instead of opening another document. Talking to someone outside your usual circle. Doing something creative when your work is analytical. Leaving something unfinished or ‘good enough’ when your instinct is to push through until it’s done. Or simply stepping away from delivery long enough to notice what happens when there is nothing to deliver.
And sometimes, once you see things differently, you realise you don’t want to return to everything exactly as you left it.
What has your journey shown you?
At the beginning of this year, I wrote about 2026 being the Year of the Fire Horse. In the Chinese zodiac, the Horse is traditionally associated with qualities including bravery, resilience and hard work, with 2026 combining the Horse with the fire element. The Lunar New Year began on 17 February, ushering in this particular combination for the first time in 60 years. The Smithsonian has a useful overview of the Year of the Horse and its symbolism here.
What interested me then wasn’t an invitation to move faster. No one needs encouragement to do that. It was the idea of movement and momentum, and how we might harness those qualities consciously rather than simply being carried along by them.
Now, with most of the year behind us, I think there’s a different question worth asking. At the beginning of a year, we tend to look forward: What will I create? What will I change? Where am I going? By this point in the year, we have something January couldn’t possibly give us: evidence.
You’ve lived the journey. You know more about what has worked and what hasn’t. You’ve seen what gained momentum and what quietly fell away. Some of the things you thought would matter enormously may not matter quite so much anymore. Other things you couldn’t have predicted may have become surprisingly important.
This is why I have little interest in adding to the inevitable final-quarter chorus of there’s still time, push harder, finish strong. I don’t want October to become another arbitrary deadline that leaves people measuring themselves against everything they haven’t achieved.
Perhaps there’s another way of looking at it. Instead of measuring the distance between where you thought you’d be and where you are, ask: What has the journey shown me that I couldn’t have known when it began? That’s a different kind of progress. It requires perspective rather than acceleration, and curiosity rather than judgement.
A season for changing foundations
There’s something fitting about considering this just after the September equinox. An equinox occurs as the Sun crosses the celestial equator, creating an almost equal balance of day and night. Here in the Southern Hemisphere, it marks the astronomical beginning of spring, while in the Northern Hemisphere it signals the beginning of autumn. You can read more about the September equinox here.
One half of the world is moving towards greater light, growth and emergence; the other towards shorter days, release and retreat. Different seasons, but both are transitions. Spring naturally gives us the language of fresh starts, but I don’t think a fresh start always means tearing everything down and beginning again. Sometimes new growth requires us to pay attention to the foundations already underneath us.
That’s one of the reasons I included the five foundations of leadership in Recalibrate: sleep, breathing, hydration, movement and fuel. They’re not particularly glamorous leadership tools, but they influence our capacity to use all the other tools available to us.
Sleep was the one I noticed most on leave. Without an alarm, I slept until my body was ready to wake. Sleep can easily become the thing we trade for an extra hour of productivity, yet the consensus recommendation from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society is that adults regularly get at least seven hours of sleep. Insufficient sleep is associated not only with poorer health outcomes but impaired performance and increased errors. For me, this is where wellbeing and leadership stop being separate conversations. Our foundations affect the perspective, patience and energy we bring to everything built on top of them.
The same principle applies beyond our physical foundations. One of the shifts I explore in Recalibrate came through Brad, whose leadership increasingly became about less = more. By creating space, prioritising and becoming clearer about what genuinely deserved his attention. Paula’s recalibration was different. She had built much of her identity around self-reliance and knowing the answers. Her shift was towards partnership, and understanding that being a strong leader didn’t require doing everything herself or always having the solution. It meant trusting herself to navigate what came next with other people. Neither needed to become a different person. They needed a different perspective on the foundations they were already building from.
I’ve written about this same principle in relation to defining your leadership vision. Leadership isn’t static. Your circumstances change, your ambitions evolve and you learn more about yourself. The foundations may remain, but the way you build on them needs to be recalibrated.
Experiment a little…
Rather than making another list of everything you want to accomplish before the end of the year, try deliberately interrupting one of your usual patterns.
Choose a circuit breaker that changes your state rather than simply giving you another thing to complete. Take a walk without listening to anything. Pick up a pencil or paintbrush. Sit somewhere you wouldn’t normally work. Write by hand. Leave your phone behind. Start something you have absolutely no intention of becoming good at. Or, perhaps most radically, allow something inconsequential to remain unfinished and unmeasured.
Then let one or some of these questions marinate:
- What can I see now that I couldn’t see at the beginning of the year?
- Where am I giving my care and energy because it genuinely matters, and where am I giving it out of habit?
- What doesn’t need to be finished, fixed, perfected or measured?
- What behaviour could I interrupt to give myself a different perspective?
- What don’t I want to return to in quite the same way?
- And finally, knowing what I know now, what do I want to build from here?
You don’t need to answer them all immediately. In fact, I’d encourage you not to. Let them sit for a while.
My puzzle didn’t need to be completed. My paintings didn’t need the final 20 per cent. Their value was in what happened while I was doing them. And perhaps even in my willingness to leave them unfinished. They interrupted a pattern, shifted my attention and created enough space for something else to emerge.
A fresh perspective doesn’t always require a new destination, a holiday or another goal. Sometimes it begins by deliberately changing something about the way you are moving through what is already here. So rather than asking yourself what else you need to get done before the year is over, perhaps there is a more useful question to marinate on:
What could I do differently to get a fresh perspective on what matters now?
If you’d like to explore more of the stories, experiments and practical tools I use to help leaders recalibrate from the inside out, you can buy your copy of Recalibrate here or see more about my coaching programs here.
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