What Is Your Normal?

What is normal for you?

In recent weeks a thought has come into my head: There is a normal in life for everyone — a standard or a way of life that becomes routine for us individually.

The question then is, what is your normal? In other words, what is acceptable and tolerable to you?

In this great world we live in, the greatest people in it are great because they just have a different normal — things that may appear difficult to us have become routine for them.

It is “normal” for high performers to wake up early and show up in the wee hours to training, for example. It is also normal for them to eat right, sleep on time and study more, and this is their secret sauce.

In reality and in isolation these are pretty simple things; there is nothing that special or difficult about you waking up at 5AM tomorrow morning.

The difficulty lies in doing it over and over because it is not what we have normally done. So, that is the difference. Someone who wakes up early over a period of time comes to find it normal. Their body is adjusted to it. On the flipside, it is abnormal for us to do the same; instead, waking up late is our normal and our system.

Unfortunately, as W. Edwards Deming put it, “every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.”

What is normal — either good, average or bad — compounds over time and for the great ones it manifests into something incredible.

Waking up on time is a basic example but generally I have realised that we often sell ourselves short because we view certain things as impossible for us, even though they can be quite normal and doable.

An example is this every day exercise journey I started at the beginning of this year. It is almost normal for me now to train every day. Obviously there is difficultly here and there, but I am sure the day I fail to fulfil my exercise routine I will feel quite abnormal.

Now, whenever I mention this exercise crusade to someone else, it sounds amazing, but it is not at all; it is just a small fitness commitment on a daily basis, and it is normal for me.

It all just depends on what we consider to be normal and this extends to everything in our lives, even our relationships, for instance.

Is it normal for your partner to treat you badly? Is it normal for you to accept low standards from them?

Sometimes something which is not normal — and should never be normal — becomes normal because we accept it. At some point it will become normal for your to partner to put minimal effort into your relationship, if you allow it over time. At some stage poor service delivery becomes normal.

What is normal for your family?

This all ties into our personal standards and how we view ourselves which is reflected in our communication, principles and quality of work.

A lot of times we forget that to achieve a goal we must live our lives in a certain way. We tend to overlook that we must do certain things and expect higher standards of ourselves. Daily we wish for more and although it is not the only determining factor, our normal will have to change if we are looking to get that promotion at work or make any other leap.

It will have to be normal to read more. It have to be normal to do more and do extra work. It will have to be normal to get to work earlier than you did before.

There is a price to be paid for everything worth having and our normal is the daily down payment.