Want to maximise your learning this summer? Relax, take time out and trust your brain!!

I believe that one of the most important things leaders need to be able to do is to create environments where people learn, everyday and always.  Environments where people feel empowered and enabled to take responsibility for their own learning and to try new ways of doing things.  We shouldn’t expect leaders to instinctively know how to do this - we have to help them to learn how.  That’s exactly what I’m exploring in my new blog series “Lessons in Learning”.

Summer holiday season is upon us again.  Many of us will be heading off on our annual summer holiday over the next couple of months.  For many it will be a much needed break from constant demands, continual meetings and ever-growing email inboxes.  Lack of time to think and reflect is the biggest challenge I hear most frequently in the work I do with leaders at all levels.

Work is broken in many ways.  We need to find ways to redesign work, create new cultural norms and enable ourselves and others to focus on the stuff that matters most, not the stuff that’s shouting loudest.  This will take time, effort, energy and focus.

Being a good leader is a bit like being a good parent.  If we don’t take care of ourselves, how can we give to others?  One of my favourite mantas is “we rise through lifting others”.  This whole blog series is about the crucially important role that leaders play in creating environments where people learn as part of what they do every day.  We lift others - and ourselves -  through continual learning. We can’t create environments where people learn unless we take time to learn and reflect for ourselves.

I don’t know about you but going on holiday is one of the few times during the year when I’m able to truly switch off my energetic, enthusiastic and curious brain for any length of time.  I invariably find that when I allow myself to switch off and properly relax, a little bit of magic happens.  After a few days of doing as little as I possibly can, with people who I love the most, in a different part of the world to where I usually spend my time, my brain feels rested.  It’s had the space it needs to process.  It’s been nurtured with what matters most.  And this is the time when it starts to do its best work.  I often find that without consciously trying, I come up with all sorts of reflections and ideas that are different in nature to how I normally think.  Yes, I have to do the hard work of putting them into practice when I come back to reality but I think that it happens at all is a good reminder that if we want innovation and creativity in our work, it’s really important that we prioritise some down time for ourselves when we allow our brains a rest.

So when it’s your time to take a holiday, switch on your out of office, switch off your laptop and leave your work mobile at home.  You’ll thank yourself for it when you come back feeling refreshed and re-energised.  Enjoy…….