Write your own rules down. If you don’t, somebody else’s rules will quietly fill in the blanks.

Nobody operates without rules, the only question is whose. Wherever you have not decided anything, the defaults get supplied by whatever is nearby, a group chat, a coach, an app, whoever spoke last, and defaults never announce themselves as choices. That is how people end up living by standards they would not defend if asked directly. Putting yours in writing makes the swap visible when it happens.

Set down three of your own rules this week, the concrete kind rather than the noble kind. What you do when a friend is being talked about, or how you handle being asked for money. Concrete rules hold under pressure.