Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have Her Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. Her Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum.

Erica: We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career in life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside her collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. Hey. Hey. Hey, everybody. Good morning.

Erica: Good afternoon and good evening, depending on where you are. Thank you for logging in and listening to a stepping stone. And I wanna talk to you today and share with you the surprising thing that I did not know about habits. So many of I have spent my entire career studying habits, implementing good ones, breaking bad ones, teaching people how to do so. And that all came naturally through my career as a fitness and wellness instructor, a personal trainer, and then also into human resources.

Erica: But did that your personality influences your habits? I had no idea. So this moment of learning was nothing short of enlightening for me. I have always been grateful that I have had this internal desire to do more, learn more and constantly seek growth. But I don't know that I put much thought into why I've always been a growth minded person.

Erica: Maybe it was my upbringing. I'm not sure, but I have always been willing to work for something that I wanted and I never attributed that to my genetic makeup. Apparently, science shows that it is a combination of your environment. So your upbringing, but also your genetic makeup. Now this should have been more clear to me because as a kid living with my brother, we have always been two totally different individuals.

Erica: I was very organized. I mean, to the point of I color code my closet. So it's in the Roy G Biv line. And I believe that everything has its place and everything should be in its place. And it comes easy for me.

Erica: It's natural. I actually thrive and enjoy on the moments when we are going through the house and purging things that we don't use and organizing things like junk drawers, but my brother total opposite. So we would literally have to push open his door room, and there would be crumbled papers and clothes and just stuff all over the place. You name it. And we were raised in the same environment.

Erica: So why is he so different from me? Well, let me dive in. So in a MedlinePlus article, scientists estimate that 20 to 60% of temperament is determined by genetics. Now while temperament does not have a clear pattern of inheritance, many common gene variations actually combine to influence the individual characteristics of temperament. Your genes have been shown to influence almost every aspect of your behavior from the number of hours that you will spend on electronic devices to the likelihood of getting married or getting divorced to your tendency to become addicted to different substances.

Erica: There is a strong component on how you react in certain situations, if you're more resilient or vulnerable to stressful events, or how proactive or reactive you are, and how you react to authority. Your personality or persona is unique to you. It's the combination of the behaviors, emotions, thought patterns, and motivations that define us. They're often described by action words, such as observant, energetic, or lazy, creative, organized, outgoing. You catch my drift, but did that this actually came around in the year April When it was suggested that each person had a persona that was comprised of four distinct temperaments, it was suggested that whichever temperament was more dominant in a person actually determined their humor and their personality.

Erica: Now Wilhelm Wundt, the father of psychology, was the first person to draw a clear distinction between the human body and the human personality theory in 1879, and it began to lead to a change in how we viewed and understood personality in the social situations with a group of people. Now, all of this leads me to the excitement that circles around personality tests, right? These often fun tests are designed to actually systematically elicit information from you to determine your motivations, your preferences, interests, your emotional makeup, and that the style of interacting with people and situations. I am sure that you have seen them. You've probably taken several of them.

Erica: If you're like me, you take them, like, all the time, but they range from the Myers Briggs assessment, which helps people understand personality differences in the general population to the latest and greatest Enneagram personality test, which is a system of personality typing that describes patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. Now all that being said, the most proven scientific analysis of personality traits is known as the big five. Now the big five breaks down into five spectrum behaviors known as ocean. That's how you can remember it or canoe. Right?

Erica: So o is for openness to experience from curious and inventive on one hand to cautious and consistent on the others. Think practical and prefers routine to spontaneous and imaginative. C is for conscientiousness, so organized and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous. E is for extroversion, outgoing and energetic to solitary and reserved. Easily known as introvert versus extrovert.

Erica: A is for agreeableness, so friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached, and n is for neuroticism, anxious and sensitive, often pessimistic, to confident, calm, and stable. So each one of these traits represent is represented on a continuum, and you can fall anywhere on that spectrum. Now while you can work to alter these habits, they are relatively stable throughout your lifetime, and scientists believe that they are significantly influenced both by genes and by your environment with a heritability of up to 50%. Now each trait can encompass a multitude of other facets. So for example, a trait of extroversion could be seen as gregariousness or assertiveness, energetic, adventurous, and positive and warm.

Erica: Now a study by Soto and John in 2021 attempted to track the developmental trends of the big five, and they found that overall agreeableness and conscientiousness increased with age, but that there was no significant trend for extroversion overall. Openness to experience neuroticism decreased slightly from adolescence to middle adulthood. Now this study found that there were more significant trends when it came to specific facets. So for example, how positive or adventurous someone was rather than that big five overall. So let me ask you this question.

Erica: Does it drive you crazy when someone says, it's just the way I am? Oh my gosh. That is a trigger phrase for me, and it gets under my skin. It is my biggest pet peeve because I believe that it is not who you are. It's what you do.

Erica: So I believe that we have control over our actions while we might be predisposed to act or react a certain way. If we develop an exercise, emotional intelligence, we can learn to react differently. Now, one of the greatest benefits of taking personality tests is that it brings you awareness to who you are as a person and how he might typically react in a certain situation. If you have a deep understanding of who you are and how you're genetically predisposed to react, you can start to control your responses. Now I once had a mentor who described himself as an introvert.

Erica: He was quiet. He listened more than he talked, and he's very, very smart. And he also had a very respected and high level position in the company that he worked for that required him to network. It required him to schmooze and boos all the time, give speeches and presentations and be outward facing and just turned on. Now clearly that did not jive with his natural personality.

Erica: But before he would head out to these events and sometimes week long events filled with late night networking and after hour cocktails, he would make sure that he had time to himself to gather his thoughts and gear up for the event. And then afterwards, he made sure that he had time scheduled to decompress and unwind because it took a lot out of him. He really had to be laser focused and intentional to break out of his natural introverted state. Now on the flip side, I am somebody who puts the extra in extrovert. Now I joke with my circle that I could talk to a wall and have a full blown conversation.

Erica: And I have taught myself to learn to be quiet, to listen, and to let others lead when the situation calls for it. While my natural personality is very adventurous, gregarious, and take charge, not all situations call for my level of extra. And I know this. So while I have learned that it is who you are, right, you can control it. Your genes do play a role in how you form good habits and how you break bad ones, but it is mainly what you do.

Erica: Our deeply rooted preferences will make some behaviors easier or they may make others challenging. Now to stick with extroversion, if you wanna cultivate a larger network and you're introverted, it's gonna require you to get out and connect with people. When you're introverted by nature, it's not gonna come easily and you have to design a strategy to really help you achieve that goal. If we look at conscientiousness, if you're someone that's messy by nature, you have pile of books and sticky notes everywhere, but you have a desire to be more productive during the day and that you need to be more organized, you may have to design a strategy to do that. Maybe you use technology to help you organize sticky notes, or maybe you set a habit for cleaning up at the end of every day.

Erica: Now my point here is if you want to be a person that's organized so that your outcome is higher productivity, you certainly can be a person who's organized. Does it come naturally? Maybe, maybe not, but you are a product of your environment and your genes. The trick is you have to cultivate those habits that work with your personality for the best result. Now, while color coding, my closet comes easy to me.

Erica: And it's something my brother would have never done in a million years. He has to work to create small daily habits to get to my level of organization if he chose to do so. Now I work from home and he doesn't. So his home life may not need to be as organized as mine, right, to be as productive as me. Now, yes, it is who you are, but it is what you do.

Erica: Genes do play a part. I am certain of that now that fun fact is ingrained in my memory. And now that I know that I will be more aware of the habits that come easy to me and the ones that don't. And I just want to leave you with this. You have control over how you react over what habits you form and how you move forward throughout the day.

Erica: Yes, it is who you are. Yes, it is in your genes, but it is what you do. The power is truly yours.