Q. I've been trying to make forward momentum on my career, but the recession seems to make everyone unwilling to start anything new. I'm frustrated, bored and exhausted. I've considered taking a month and going on an adventure. Will a sabbatical hurt my career?

A. No, a sabbatical may well help your career. Americans are well known internationally as being workaholics. In Europe, it is expected that nearly everyone takes the entire month of August off. In many other countries, it would be unthinkable to let vacation time expire like many Americans do!

When I traveled through Europe in my 20s for three months, Europeans, Australians, and travelers from New Zealand all asked, "Why do you travel for such a short time?" The Americans I met were astonished my trip was more than a week.

Unfortunately, our lack of vacations, breaks and experience of other cultures can make us lose our creativity and become professionally stagnant. We get stuck in a routine box of problem solving that doesn't allow for innovation, strokes of genius or new perspectives.

Many brilliant minds, including Einstein, observed that most of their brainstorms occurred when they weren't working on the problem. We can become so dogged in our careers that we rigidly keep applying the same old solutions even though they stopped working years ago.

Over the last decade, researchers have discovered one of the secrets of getting better as we get older. Shake up your brain! Change your routine! Force yourself to learn something new.

Scientists now know change forces your brain to grow new neural pathways thus expanding the part of your brain you can use. If you just do the same thing day in and day out, your brain grows flabby. Your career suffers when your brain becomes a couch potato. Continued...