Culture provides a framework for the environment you navigate within, a set of common values and a common language that orientate you.
Culture is ultimately about the transfer of knowledge and experience, of customs and traditions, norms and social behaviors.
It is culture that helps you establish beliefs about the world and your place in it.
But too often we accept culture at face value –
What are the stories being told? What beliefs are being reinforced, by who and for what ends?
What are the cultural influences, influencing you?
Are you able to approach these critically and skilfully?
The thing with culture is that it, by default, relies on a group of people – it cannot exist on a purely individual basis.
Culture can be adopted voluntarily, or imposed on you unknowingly.
It can work with your nature or work against it.
And it can change with the times and have you change along with it.
Your tribal instincts would suggest that you want to remain amongst your people, but who then are your people? And what makes them your people?
Do you have a shared set of ideas about the world?
Common beliefs, interests, values? A shared experience? Shared language?
What binds you all together?
Because you have the ability to either accept or reject the culture – accept or reject people within it or ideas perpetuated by it.
But you also have the ability to be a pillar that reinforces a culture by embodying its language and core values, by living it out and modeling its ideals and behaviors.
And to be a culture leader, in a sea of cultural trends and currents.
