Discipling Your Dragons: How Your Culture of Origin Shapes Your Leadership

You are what you were, when.

Here's a phrase worth sitting with: you are a product of your past, but you are not a prisoner of it.

Most people nod at that sentence and move on. They shouldn't.

A decade ago, a book was published arguing that Einstein's revolutionary physics was quietly shaped by his Jewish worldview. Academia lost its mind. Scientists hate hearing that. They want to believe they're pure thinkers, uncontaminated by religion, politics, or wherever they grew up.

I find this hilarious. With a PhD in Psychometrics, I've assessed enough brilliant people to tell you, everyone carries their culture of origin (COO) into the room. Every single one. The physicist. The theologian. The guy who swears he "broke free" from his upbringing (especially that guy).

The Two Camps I See Over and Over

Here's the pattern I see, over and over:

Camp One: The Denier. They act like they just popped onto the scene today, fresh, unformed, self-made. They've rejected their parents' religion, their hometown's values, and their family's politics. What they don't see is that rejection is just as formative as acceptance. You don't escape a thing by running from it. You're still letting it steer.

Camp Two: The Blamer. Attributes every flaw, every wound, every bad habit to their parents or their past. There's truth in that, but living there is its own kind of prison.

Both camps mistake the options for a binary: accept or reject.

The Third Way

Understand it. Evaluate it. Then decide.

That's the actual work. You look at the beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes handed to you by your COO, not to blindly accept them, not to reject them theatrically, but to understand them fully enough to make a real choice.

Which ones fit who you want to be? Which ones don't? Why?

This isn't a one-time exercise. It's called growth. It's ongoing. It's supposed to be uncomfortable.

My wife, Mary Kay, sometimes tells me I'm acting like my father. That's my cue. Not to spiral, but to pause, reprocess, and ask: Is this who I actually want to be showing up as?

The Spiritual Dimension

There's a spiritual dimension here worth naming directly.

2 Corinthians 5:17 says: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!"

I believe that. And I've watched so many people struggle to actually live it, not because the Scripture is wrong, but because they won't do the work of confronting their COO. They want transformation without excavation. It doesn't work that way.

The new life is real. It's spiritual, from the inside out. But becoming the person God intended still requires the hard, intentional process of letting the Spirit illuminate your past, so you can see clearly which patterns of thought, belief, and behavior belong to the old and which can be carried forward.

You can't dismantle what you won't look at.

We all have dragons. Inherited ones. Invisible ones. Ones we've mistaken for personality.

But in Christ, those dragons can be named, faced, and diminished.

That's not denial. That's discipleship.

*The book referenced is "Einstein and the Rabbi" / related academic works on Jewish thought and modern physics, notable for the stir it caused among secular scientific communities.