How to Create a Personal Culture of Excellence
Lead yourself instead of letting outside culture define you.
Coaches and captains spend a lot of time thinking about team culture. That invisible structure guides how people act and what they aim for. However, we don’t always think about creating an equivalent personal culture within ourselves and our immediate environment.
When we establish a personal culture, it allows us to infuse our daily life with our values. We can focus on excellence and safety in the ways that make sense to us. Without that deliberate effort, outside cultures can influence us more than we realize. We can end up adopting parts of hustle culture, living to work, or grinding when that wasn’t our intention.
The purpose of this article is to prime you to think about creating a culture of excellence for yourself, defined by your values and separate from external culture.
Below, I’ve outlined four strategies that can help, but they are mainly designed to stimulate your own thinking. Empower yourself to set your course. Don’t read this as a “should-do” list. Treat it as a “could-do” list. Let your own values inspire you. That’s the point.
1. Coach Yourself as if You Believe in Your Talent
Imagine an athlete, Tom, and two coaches: Coach A and Coach B.
Coach A believes in Tom’s talent, capabilities, and work ethic, and Tom can sense it. Coach A even occasionally tells him, “I believe in you.” When Tom receives adjustments from Coach A, he doesn’t feel defensive or stressed. His sense of safety allows him to be highly responsive. He makes the adjustments without overthinking them. He trusts that Coach A has his long-term development at heart.
By contrast, Tom is not sure what Coach B thinks of his abilities, so every comment puts him on edge.
When you are coaching yourself to excel, you’ll be more nimble and open if you channel the dynamic between Coach A and Tom.
2. Design Your Own Processes to Expose What You Don’t See
At some point, we’ve probably all had required recurrent training or continuing education that felt like a waste of time and a box-checking exercise. In your own life, you can design ongoing proficiency procedures that make a real difference.
Examples:
- Every five years, have a lesson with a driving instructor to catch any unnoticed bad habits.
- Use video or screen recording to have an outsider review a work process you do regularly and provide feedback.
- Once a year, track something you normally don’t, such as how long each step of a regular task takes, to see if your perception matches reality.
Again, this isn’t about creating a culture of being spied on or treating yourself like a low performer. It’s about being a competent adult who has a range of reasons for wanting to improve. Unlike external mandates, you’re in the driver’s seat and can decide what aligns with your priorities.
3. Create Standard Operating Procedures
Think of a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) as instructions that would enable someone else to do a task you usually do. This conceptualization can help you understand the level of clarity the instructions should have.
SOPs create consistency. They can seem boring, but they can produce spectacular results. For example, airlines rely heavily on SOPs for safety, and this standardization is a significant factor in why airline travel is much safer than general aviation.
Standardization of everyday tasks provides mental benefits. Even executing the exact same steps in a consistent order rather than higgledy-piggledy can reduce the mental load of tasks. It also makes it much easier to stay consistent. For instance, having a consistent order of steps for getting out the door to go to the gym with everything you need makes it easier.
SOPs can also make your routines more modular. If a routine has seven steps, it is easier to complete steps 1-4 now and steps 5-7 later when the steps are clearly laid out.
As a personal aside, one of my favorite uses of AI is helping me create personal and work SOPs. It can take some of the mental effort out of the process, including handling formatting and deciding the right level of detail.
4. Make Improving Your Processes Part of Your Process
Any action that isn’t part of a routine generally won’t happen. Following this logic, if you don’t make improving your processes part of a routine, it probably won’t happen. You can build process-improvement steps directly into your routines. For example, the last step in an SOP could be asking yourself one to three pre-decided questions about how you could improve the process next time.
Tasks you do annually can especially benefit from SOPs. They’re frequent enough to make an SOP worthwhile, but infrequent enough that you forget the best method. For example, when my family needs flu shots, key things to remember are that the pharmacy doesn’t open until 10 a.m., it’s easier to wear short sleeves, and doing it in two visits works better than trying to coordinate the whole family in one visit. Consider creating SOPs for annual tasks as that event comes up in the year, so eventually they all have one.
On the other hand, if you’re someone who needs role separation to concentrate, you might create a routine of periodically clearing your schedule to work on improving and documenting your processes.
Make Your Culture of Excellence Reflect Your Priorities
Many conscientious people put off striving for excellence because they associate it with hustle culture or perfectionism. As I mentioned earlier, the main goal of this article isn’t really to tell you how to create a personal culture of excellence; it’s to prime you to even think about the concept.
You can create your own strong personal culture that’s free from influences you don’t value. Doing this, however you choose to approach it, will allow you to accomplish key priorities, like safety, and express your values and vision for your life.
If this article benefited you, I'd love to hear how. You can email [email protected].