With work, family and Covid-19 to juggle, it’s no doubt Christmas can drive people barking mad. But there’s action you can take to make sure you’re in the right headspace to deal with any coming stress.

It won’t surprise you to know that most people need a shove to find a new job, and the interesting development this year is that Covid-19 has been a massive ‘push’ factor.

When we get triggered at work, it's worth understanding the underlying cause. The better our self awareness, the more we can adjust our environment and relationships for positive outcomes.

In the corporate world, we're often required to write an annual appraisal of our performance. I know that attitudes to this process can vary wildly between companies, but it almost always fills it’s participants with dread.

With so many of us back in lockdown and working from home, it’s more important than ever to make time for your own wellbeing.

Saying yes too often weakens our focus, resolve and commitment. Saying no is a healthy practice to protect our boundaries, time and what's important to us.

It's possible to challenge people and for it to land well but it can require effort and skill to achieve this.

You'll notice that there are things you are doing to prevent you from reaching your goals. This is the first light bulb moment - realising that you create your outcomes. The second light bulb moment is where people then uncover specifically what it is they want to change, in order to achieve the outcome they want - and to be clear about it.

Time goes by, and then...the niggling voice comes back. It says "what's the next thing? You could be doing more". And let's be honest, the voice is tiring. I can't say I greet it fondly when it returns to my life. Pushing me again. But it's definitely better than sleepwalking through life in old patterns.

Whilst setting goals fires off neural pathways that help us to focus and think analytically (helpful), it also shuts down the part of the brain responsible for learning. Our goals can end up being too narrow/ not what we truly want, because we didn't take time to explore first. So it follows that we need to get our juicy creative thinking done BEFORE we want to channel this into a goal or intention.

We can say we want one thing, but sometimes our behavior says something different. Challenging question this week - where in your life are you being a hypocrite?

Frustration can actually be a really useful emotion - it tells us to have a look at what's really going on and make a change.

I expect many of us will face career decisions in 2020, so over the next couple of blogs I'll be sharing mindset hacks and practical tools to help you decide your own next step.

As lockdown eases but prolonged uncertainty remains, leaders need to help staff remain motivated now more than ever. In this context, one of the most important things a leader can do is to keep creating hope.

Fear of failure is a major factor that can hold us back but given that we're bound to experience set backs on any road we take, why not pick a path that has the greatest chance of happiness? The supposedly ‘safe’ path could generate just as much failure/ rejection/ challenge anyway.

When we make excuses and list out all the reasons why we can't do or have something, somewhere else, someone is using that exact same reason to inspire and motivate themselves into action.

We can be guilty of being quite one dimensional at work. We box people off based on their jobs - lawyer, banker, accountant etc - and assume these professions attract a certain ‘type of person’. We reduce people to having just one identity. But the truth is that we’re all multidimensional, and it's our points of difference that are our unique selling point.

We're finding it harder than usual to (try and) predict the future. At the moment, even scientists, governments and think tank specialists don't really know what's going to happen.

What do you need to change about the information you're consuming?