I’m not a fan of describing what we’re doing now as “the new normal” … it’s really The New Abnormal. The true New Normal is the promise of better things down the road.
We can’t control much of what’s going on around us right now, but we do have control over the choices we make to set the future path for ourselves and our businesses.
Yes, you need to confront the challenges you face in the present, but you also need to hold out hope for what can be a better future.
Spend some time working on that vision, talking about it with your team, asking for help where it is needed, and taking the steps you need now to prepare.
Transcript
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There’s nothing normal about these times.
And so when I hear someone say this is the new normal, or how are you doing with the new normal, I think it’s really misspeaking, because what we’re dealing with right now is the new abnormal, it’s merely a step on the path to what will become our new normal.
And we need to deal with the challenges that we confront on a day to day basis in our personal lives and our businesses.
But we also need to have that hope and look to the future and figure out how it is that we’re going to navigate the future, how we’re going to decide what we want for ourselves, for our businesses and for society. And there’s a lot of change to come.
You know, in the past, we’ve talked about major events like 9/11, or the Great Recession as things that are going to have a big change on how we live our lives. And the reality is, neither one of those had nearly the impact we thought it would at the time.
I think this one may be different. This one may be a bit more like the Great Depression. For that generation, in that we all come out of this with memories that affect our behavior and our decisions in the years and decades to come.
But it’s the kind of thing where we have the control over what we do in the future. We don’t control what’s going on right now, there’s a lot that’s out of our control.
But we do control the choices that we make and the path that we’re setting up for our own futures. And so we need to be thinking about that we need to be planning for it in our businesses.
We need to be working with our teams to figure out what that path is.
We need to be asking for help where we need it.
But we need to have hope we need to have that vision for what we can become, and not merely dwell on the challenges of the here and now.
And so that’s my advice. Look at this as the new abnormal and look to the new normal as the promise on the horizon and not the existence that we’re forced to live today.
