What December Reveals About Your Culture at work (or your family!)

It’s early December: Some questions I heard people ask each other this week:

• "Are you nearly at the finish line?"

• "Crazy busy, right?!"

• "Are you managing to remember to breathe?"

• "Surviving December?"

It's interesting to reflect on what we're doing collectively to normalise this. The overcommitment. The people-pleasing. The sense of running out of time. The drive for completion and perfection.

Our culture is shaped by the patterns we agree on (implicit or explicit). 

A culture under pressure will show it's most automatic responses to that pressure. 

December doesn't create these patterns. It just makes them visible.

So check what's showing up. Not to judge it. Just to notice it. To name it. To ask, is this pattern serving us? Is it there even in a milder form at other times? Is it there in pockets or between two teams or are we all in it? Can I do anything to shift this pattern or my experience of this pattern if it doesnt serve me? 

Perhaps next December will be different? Or if you don't think so, perhaps it's time to check the patterns your culture is running and deliberately shift it before we get here again. 

ps. read this post again and substitute the word 'family' for 'culture' if you want to play this for your home world too.

And....see below for deliberate ways to work on this in 2026!