What You Normalize, You Multiply

What you normalize, you multiply.

If you normalize excuses, you get more excuses. If you normalize lateness, you get more chaos. If you normalize disrespect, you get more damage. If you normalize poor communication, you get more confusion.

It runs the other way too, and I need you to hear this part. If you normalize excellence, you get more trust. If you normalize accountability, you get more growth.

This applies to your family, your business, your friendships, your team, and your own personal habits. There's no corner of your life this one skips.

Nobody decides to lower a standard

Here's what makes this hard, y'all. Nobody wakes up and decides to run a sloppy operation.

It goes one exception at a time. Somebody's late and there's a good reason, and there was. So you let it go, and you were right to. Then it happens again six weeks later and you let that one go too, because you let the first one go and it'd be strange to make a thing of it now. Then a new person watches you let the second one go, and they learn what time the meeting actually starts.

Nobody ever announced the new standard. It just became the standard.

There's a name for this

A sociologist named Diane Vaughan spent nine years studying how the Challenger came apart, and what she found wasn't a villain. It was a process she called the normalization of deviance.

Here's what she meant. Engineers kept seeing damage on the O-ring seals on flight after flight. Every single time, the shuttle came home fine. So the damage stopped reading as a warning and started reading as normal, and each flight that came back safe made the next one easier to accept. They weren't ignoring the signal. They had redefined it as the expected result.

Then one cold morning in January the thing they had all agreed was acceptable, wasn’t.

Now hear me. I'm not comparing your business to a national tragedy. I'm telling you the mechanism is the same one, and it's running in your company right now, because it runs anywhere a small thing gets accepted repeatedly and nothing bad happens the first forty times.

The culture of your life is being shaped by what you repeatedly allow.

That is why standards matter

Not because you are trying to be difficult. Not because you think you are better than anyone. Standards matter because whatever becomes normal becomes expected.

Expected by your team, who will give you exactly what you have shown them you'll accept. Expected by your clientele, who calibrate on what you did last time. And expected by you, which is the expensive one, because once you expect it you stop seeing it.

The inventory

So today, look around your life and ask yourself: “What have I accidentally normalized that is producing results I do not want?”

Take twenty minutes and go looking in four places.

Your calendar. What meeting starts late every time? What have you moved three times? A thing you keep rescheduling is a thing you have taught everybody is optional.

Your inbox. What sits there for six days? Somebody is on the other end of that learning how long you take, and they’re not writing it down but they’re learning it.

Your money. What do you discount without being asked? What invoice have you not sent? Every rate you came down off of taught somebody what the werk is worth.

Your mouth. What do you say you’ll do at a time you know you won’t do it by? That one costs the most, and it’s the one nobody will ever bring up with you.

Pick one. Not all four. One.

Now, the good news, and I don't want you to skip past it

You've already normalized a pile of good things and you've stopped noticing every one of them.

You answer people. You show up. You've built something where the people around you know roughly what you'd do in a room you're not standing in, and that came from somewhere. It came from you doing the same thing over and over when it was inconvenient and nobody was handing out credit for it.

God's divine timing has a way of showing you what you built only after you built it. Most of your standards are already good. You're looking for one that isn't.

Then change the standard

Then change the standard. That's it. That's the whole assignment.

Changing it is smaller than you think. You say the new one out loud to one person. Then you hold it the very first time it's inconvenient, which will be within about a week, and that first time is the entire thing. Everybody is watching to see whether the new standard is real, and they find out the first time it costs you something.

Hold it once and it's real. Let it slide once and you've just taught everyone the standard is a mood.

So which one are you changing this week? Say it out loud to somebody today.

Start with prayer. Then go change one standard.

If you want help finding the one that is costing you the most, that is the kind of thing we work on together. You can book a strategy discovery call here.

And remember, God Loves you, I love you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Don't be average, be world renowned.