What Can Halloween Costumes Teach Us About Personal and Even Professional Life?
These types of photos are probably not what you expected to find in a newsletter on coaching, where we typically focus on different, more “serious” topics. But stay with me. Inside these photos, there are embedded lessons about the nature of relationships, teamwork and how we go about building a shared vision together, whether at home or in the workplace.
My husband and I met in 2015, and, as all true New Yorkers, we took Halloween very seriously. Every year, as October started to approach, we would dive fully into costume planning—and by “fully,” I mean spending a crazy amount of money on professional makeup that we would ultimately wear for just a few hours. Those early years were full of excitement and laughter (and quite a few heated discussions on what we should dress up like this year). I always wanted to be something silly—a grape, a minion, a voodoo doll. Erik, my husband, was the opposite, consistently drawn toward characters that were darker and more dramatic—the Joker (multiple times), a vampire banker, anything with sharp lines and serious energy.
For a long time, there was no middle ground. We couldn’t even agree on being characters from the same movie, let alone a matching pair. But then, one or two years before we had kids, something changed. We started compromising. We still chose very different characters, but at least they lived in the same “universe.” One year Erik was a dalmatian and I was Cruella de Vil; another year, we swapped genders for a night. We still chose our own ways of expressing ourselves, with our visions of how things “should look,” but we had now become a team.
So this is what happens (most of the times). At the beginning of any relationship—personal or professional—people naturally bring their own ideas, expectations and ways of doing things. This is normal. It’s healthy. It’s even necessary. But when each person holds tightly to their own vision without leaving space for collaboration, the work becomes a negotiation rather than a creation. Halloween, in hindsight, was our metaphor for that stage.
As the years passed—and especially after we had children—another shift happened. Without ever naming it, we gradually began operating as an even more integrated team. All of a sudden we could now agree on characters from the same movie, or even create an entirely made-up storyline that connected all of us. One year we became a Star Wars family, another year we were cows, another year the Flintstones, this last year a band of police officers and convicts. The costumes were still fun, still expressive, but they had evolved into something collective. They belonged to the whole family, not just one of us. We started thinking with a shared vision rather than two parallel ones.
Curious how this applies to a professional environment?
This is exactly how teams evolve, too. People join a team with their own “costumes”: their backgrounds, preferences, work styles, egos, strengths and underlying assumptions. At first, teamwork often looks like individual visions bumping into each other, trying to negotiate space. Everyone is still wearing their own version of what they think things should look like. But the real breakthrough happens when a team shifts from “my idea vs. your idea” to “what do WE want to build together?”
A team succeeds when there is a shared vision, when everyone understands the direction, when goals are aligned, and when each person operates not simply as an individual performer but as a contributor to the same story. As a result, the “costumes” start matching because everyone is working from the same script.
