Jam Session. Where the FORTE team rocks out.

Sigh.

I’ve been saying at workshops recently that I “blog regularly” and avoiding the eye of my business manager who, like all of you, knows that hasn’t been true lately.

After finishing the eBook, May and June have been a whirlwind of activity. I assisted on a high-profile trial, I’ve traveled to Bend, I’ve been down to Marion County, I’ve written and presented three new workshops, and on top of everything–I’m preparing for a three week vacation to Finland in a few weeks.

Throughout it all, I keep saying to myself, “When things return to normal, I’ll…” until one day I realized, this IS normal. Things aren’t going to “go back.”

It reminds me of the keynote I presented back in April called, “Navigating the New Normal.” An organization wanted me to speak on that topic, and I agreed, but when I started putting the keynote together I realized how silly it was to learn how to navigate “the new normal,” since once we learn how to do that, “normal” will change. Which just sets us up to learn how to navigate that new normal. And over and over again…

Part of the problem is the word normal. In and of itself, the word is limiting. It’s a box we create to contain “what we can handle,” and we think by labeling, we can stay safe. But as “normal” starts to fall apart, so do we.

No, what I realized back in April, and what’s been brought home to me personally this month, is that we need to navigate reality. We can only work with what’s right in front of us. Not with what we wish we had or how things used to be.

So I’m going to take my own advice and stop categorizing things as “normal” or “abnormal” and just navigate reality. The “new normal” is just a fancy phrase for what you have right in front of you.