There Is No Normal

Shaking the snow globe.

Imagine you’re handed a snow globe.

But instead of a peaceful little winter village inside, it’s your life. Your job. Your team. Your relationships. Your routines. Your idea of success.

Now shake it.

Watch the tiny flakes swirl. The familiar landmarks blur. Everything you thought was solid becomes suspended, still there, but not how you remember it.

That’s what happens when we stop pretending there’s such a thing as normal.

Because normal is just a story we tell ourselves to feel safe.

And in leadership, in life, clinging to “normal” is how we get stuck.

The Myth of Normal

We’re raised on a steady diet of it.

This is what a good leader looks like.

This is the age you should have things figured out.

This is how a team should operate, a family should behave, a career should progress.

But here’s the secret no one tells you until something breaks:

Normal is a moving target invented by people trying to sell certainty.

And if you’ve ever felt like you were falling behind, not measuring up, or questioning your path because it didn’t look like theirs, you’ve met this myth head-on.

It shows up in boardrooms disguised as “best practices”.

It shows up in our internal monologues as “I should be further along”.

It shows up in crisis, when the old script stops working but we don’t yet trust ourselves to improvise.

What Gets Lost When We Chase It

I’ve coached leaders in billion-dollar boardrooms and sat with them in the quiet after they admit: I don’t know who I am without the title.

I’ve walked with people who built everything “right” and still feel wrong.

I’ve lived it, too.

When we grip too tightly to what’s supposed to be, we stop seeing what is.

We filter people through systems.

We mistake predictability for peace.

We micromanage creativity out of our teams.

We confuse performance with presence.

We lose the weird, wonderful, wildly human parts of ourselves that don’t fit in spreadsheets or five-year plans.

The Leaders Who Get It…