You are not normal!

Posted on August 03, 2022 by Sue Latiff, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

I had a client tell me that she doesn’t feel like she is a “traditional mother” which makes her feel guilty. She is career focused and doesn’t always have time to make meals for her children who are under 5 years old.

I could only smile and tell her that her notion of a “traditional mother” comes from her own mother. We often look towards living examples around us to tell what typical or traditional is. We continuously benchmark ourselves against those around us in both conscious and unconscious ways. Parents want us to lead better lives not a repeat of their own life – or do they?

We are often prescribed “how to live” from early childhood – whether it be simple words like being kind to others or an extreme like “you must become an engineer”. The world is very little like its past. And yet, majority of us struggle to conform to what we think is the best way of living – which are often examples from the past.

In a world where robotics and AI will eradicate the traditional surgeon role – how long will becoming a doctor be an admirable career to pursue?

In organizations we face a battalion of personal struggles which we broadly classify as “personality development”. We are teaching teamwork that schools essentially destroy by giving away class prizes.

Education alone is being challenged with greats like Elon Musk who started a school called Astra Nova. We are geared to compete, we recruit the “best” when in reality we need people who are collaborators who put themselves before others.
What truly matters is NOT that you are above “average” or have become the “benchmark”. Robin Sharma’s book title – “Who will cry when you die” comes to mind. Identify with your strengths – we all have the possibility to create a legacy and the secret lies in your passion pursuits.

If you spin around the sun long enough – you realize you become a different person with every decade that flies by.

I cringe when clients tell me they just want to be normal. Becoming obsessed with being a replication of a successful model of the past is what we discourage in the corporate world. Every new generation gives birth to an outcry from the ones who created them. It is a mere reaction to change.

A lot of people assign goals with age and life milestones i.e. being married by 30 to building a house and owning a car. These suggestive rules which might have worked in the past have little potency today.

You can play by the law of “known” averages but you run the risk of waking up much later in life to realize you were never built for an “average life”.

The person who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The person who walks alone is likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before.”- Albert Einstein (made gender neutral)