“What’s that as…le that just cut us off?”
My friend blurted out as we drove to a flower show. Then, laughing, she added, “I don’t think he is, just expressing my sentiment”
Self/other-aware people understand that most behaviors are very situational - they are a response to what happens, not an indication of how someone is in their entire life permanently.
And what is also true - if you respond the same way to the same trigger all the time, often, without realizing it, you allow your situational response to become your mindset, your character trait… your culture?
Harvard Business Review put out something brilliant about organizational culture:
“Culture doesn’t shift because a new narrative is introduced. It shifts when systems change. When leaders take personal risks. When norms are not just declared but demonstrated. New research shows how culture doesn’t fail because it’s forgotten; it fails because it’s misunderstood. It’s treated as branding, not behavior.”
Or as Seth Godin reminds us,
“Culture is what we repeatedly do.”
That’s not just true for companies, it’s true for people like you and me.
You might not care about “culture,” but you probably care about who you’re becoming. Your fitness. Your career. Your character. How the world sees you.
And if you do, then here’s the lesson: don’t obsess about identity, of who or how you are. Focus on behavior. On the things you do. On making the right actions easier, more rewarding, more obvious and visible.
You can’t change who you are in one leap.
But you can change what you do consistently.
And what you do, over time, will quietly change who you are.
So how do you change what you do? Behavioral science, behavioral change, coaching seem to agree -
By shaping the context (what's around you). By tweaking the triggers. By aligning incentives with what actually matters to you.
That’s your leverage. Not your willpower.
Over to you dear reader,
Who do you want to become?
And what would that person do - consistently, reliably, on autopilot?
How can you shape your environment so those behaviors are the simplest, most obvious, most rewarding moves you can make?
"Our research found that across companies that had launched formal culture initiatives since 2022, 72% showed no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention one year later. Despite the visibility and investment, employees perceived these efforts as surface-level — more performance than practice.
The reverse was also true. In companies where senior leaders changed how they led—how they ran meetings, gave feedback, made decisions, and responded to challenge—trust scores rose by an average of 26%, even in the absence of a branded campaign. As one executive told us, “We didn’t write our values—we reverse-engineered them from how we wanted to behave.”