It's peak summer holiday season here in the UK, and this week almost every conversation I've had with clients has circled back to the same question: how do you take a proper break and come back properly rested?

It's a good question, and I don't think there's one right answer. If we never fully switch off, does that mean we never fully rest? I'm honestly not sure that's true. It depends on the person, and it depends on what else is going on in their life and business at the time.

Some people have brilliant phone discipline. They can leave it in a drawer and not think twice about the inbox filling up. Others find that harder, and a lot of the business owners I work with actually tell me the opposite: checking in briefly now and then feels less stressful than coming home to two weeks of unread emails to wade through. Neither approach is wrong. It genuinely comes down to what works for you.

There's a phrase a mentor of mine returns to again and again: "feel like family, play like a team." It captures something most leaders spend years trying to build, a workplace culture where people are accountable to each other not because they have to be, but because they want to be.

You don't need to run a national sports team to recognise this. Whether you're leading a small business, a coaching practice, or a department inside a larger organisation, the same question applies: when things get hard, do the people around you dig in for each other, or do they drift apart?