September 14, 2025- Personality and character

Personality is how you respond on a typical day. Character is how you show up on a bad day. 

~Adam Grant

How do we make sure the best of us is available to show up when the best of us is exactly what we need? Practice.

We can’t expect ourselves to rise to the occasion if we don’t ask for that extra gear consistently. We can go deeply into the science of the impact on performance of our stress response, that our release of glucocorticoids into the bloodstream will allow us to do things we can’t otherwise pull off, but that only impacts us in the margins. The quality of our work can be established by habit, then those habits can still rule the day in our moments of crisis. Ideally, our character and our personality should be hand in glove.

At the same time, we must acknowledge that these moments of crisis can be draining. We do not have an unlimited capacity to face them. We must have reliable routines of self-care that allow us to recover between the waves of stress. If we don’t allow ourselves time and space to breathe, to come back down from a stress response, we lose our ability to regulate to the moment. We end up being a light switch that has only on and off positions, rather than a dimmer that has the ability to adjust to the nuance of the moment. Let’s practice all of this.