What Is Normal?

Years ago, Sue Sanders taught me to be careful with the word normal.

Sue is the CEO of Schools OUT UK and co-founder of UK LGBT+ History Month, and she encouraged me to think instead about what is usual, or what society has come to expect as usual.

It is a distinction I have carried with me ever since.

Whenever someone uses the word normal in a conversation where I think they actually mean usual, I tend to correct it.

Sometimes I do it out loud. Sometimes I simply change the word in my own language.

Not normal.

Usual.

Or perhaps what usually happens.

Sometimes the usual societal expectation.

It may sound like a small linguistic preference, but I have come to think it matters far more than that. The more I work with leaders, organisations and people navigating difference, the more I notice how often the word normal quietly carries a judgement that the word usual does not.

Normal can imply that something is not merely common, but correct. Expected. Proper. Perhaps even natural.

Usual simply tells us that something happens more often.

Those are not the same thing.

I think the distinction stayed with me partly because my own life has required me to examine ideas of normality more often than many people ever have to. I have had to think about what society expected, what I expected of myself, what other people assumed was ordinary, and what happened when my own life did not fit neatly inside those assumptions.

But some of the clearest examples have nothing to do with the more personal aspects of my identity. They come from my professional life.

I spent most of my corporate career in technology, and back around 2016 I used to make a joke about one of the supposed advantages of being a woman at a technology conference.

The women’s bathroom was always free.

There was never a queue.

The joke worked because everyone understood the reality underneath it. There were simply very few women in the room.

Women were underrepresented in technology generally, and even more so as you moved further into senior leadership. So in many technology environments, a woman in a senior role was unusual.

But was she not normal?

That is where the language begins to matter.

There is nothing abnormal about a woman leading a technology organisation. The fact that fewer women occupied those roles told us something about representation, history, access and opportunity. It did not tell us anything about whether women belonged there.

Calling something unusual describes prevalence.

Calling it not normal can very quickly sound like a judgement about legitimacy.

That distinction became even more obvious to me through another joke from around the same period.

When I was coming out and navigating my own gender transition, some dear friends in the technology world sent me a congratulatory note. They were trying to be funny, and the punchline was essentially to ask when I was going to start working for something like 18 or 20-something per cent less.

I no longer remember the exact percentage they used.

I remember the joke.

And I remember why it worked.

Everyone knew what they were referring to.

Women earning less than men was familiar enough to be part of the cultural shorthand. You did not need to explain the gender pay gap for the joke to land.

That creates an interesting question.

Was women being paid less normal?

I do not think normal is the useful word.

Was it usual?

Yes.

Was it fair?

No.

Was it acceptable?

No.

Was it something we should simply continue because it had become familiar?

Of course not.

That is one of the reasons I find usual so useful.

Usual is descriptive. It is not approving.

Something can be usual and still be unjust.

It can be usual and discriminatory.

It can be usual and harmful.

It can be usual and desperately in need of change.

Frequency tells us how commonly something happens. It does not tell us whether it should happen.

That is a very different question.

And I think our tendency to confuse those two questions is part of the problem with the word normal.

If something is usual, the opposite is unusual.

Unusual means less common. It may be unfamiliar. It may attract attention. It may require us to adjust our expectations. But unusual does not inherently mean wrong.

The opposite of normal carries rather more baggage.

Not normal.

Abnormal.

Those words do not merely tell us that something happens less frequently. They can imply that something has departed from the way things are supposed to be.

That distinction is particularly important because human beings are remarkably good at turning familiarity into authority.

We encounter something often enough and it starts to feel natural.

Then, because it feels natural, it starts to feel correct.

And eventually, what began as a pattern can become an expectation.

That happens in organisations all the time.

Imagine a company where almost every senior leader is a man.

A woman is appointed to the executive team.

She may be unusual within that environment, simply because there have historically been fewer women around that table.

But the fact that she is unusual tells us nothing about her capability or her right to be there.

In fact, depending on the circumstances, perhaps the more interesting thing is not that the woman is unusual at all.

Perhaps the unusual thing is an organisation whose leadership has remained so homogeneous for so long.

That is the kind of perspective shift that language can create.

We tend to locate difference in the person who does not match the majority.

She is different.

He is unusual.

They are not what we normally see.

But sometimes what we are really observing is not the individual at all.

We are observing the shape of the system around them.

The same thing happens with behaviour.

Someone says:

“That is not how leaders normally behave.”

It sounds like a complete statement.

But it usually is not.

What does it actually mean?

Does it mean the behaviour is ineffective?

Does it mean it is unethical?

Does it mean it is harmful?

Does it breach a legitimate organisational standard?

Or does it simply mean:

“That is not how the leaders I have usually encountered behave”?

Those are very different claims, yet we often collapse them into one another.

This is where the idea of professionalism becomes especially revealing.

We often talk about professionalism as though it is entirely objective. Some elements should be. Integrity matters. Competence matters. Accountability matters. Respect matters.

But other elements that have historically been bundled into ideas such as professionalism or leadership presence are much less objective.

Certain clothes.

Certain accents.

Certain educational backgrounds.

Certain ways of speaking.

Certain expressions of confidence.

Certain ways of using power.

Certain expectations around emotion.

Certain ways of appearing authoritative.

When one version of leadership dominates for long enough, familiarity can start masquerading as competence.

What is usual becomes what is normal.

And what is normal becomes what is expected.

That is where I think we need to become curious.

Because perhaps the question is not whether someone fits what leadership has traditionally looked like.

Perhaps the question is whether they can actually lead.

This distinction matters enormously in what I call the Messy Middle: those situations where people with different experiences, beliefs, histories and expectations have to navigate the same space together without the comfort of an easy answer.

It is very easy in those moments to use normal as shorthand.

“That is not normal.”

“That is not how we normally do things.”

“That is not normal behaviour.”

But before we allow the word to do the thinking for us, perhaps we should ask what we actually mean.

Is it harmful?

Is it unfair?

Is there evidence that the expectation is necessary?

Does it violate a legitimate standard?

Is it simply unfamiliar?

Or is it merely different from what I have encountered before?

Those questions require more thought, but that is precisely the point.

The word normal can close a conversation surprisingly quickly.

Usual leaves room.

It leaves room to recognise that my experience is not the only experience.

It leaves room to acknowledge that something may be unfamiliar to me without requiring me to declare it wrong.

It leaves room to disagree without automatically turning difference into deficiency.

That is deeply connected to why Acceptance without Understanding™ has become such an important framework in my own work.

Acceptance is not agreement.

It does not require people to abandon their beliefs.

It does not demand that we all arrive at the same conclusion about everything.

Human beings are different. We hold different values, different experiences and different ways of understanding the world.

The challenge is learning how to navigate those differences without assuming that what is familiar to us represents some universal standard everyone else should meet.

There are behaviours that should be challenged.

There are injustices that should be confronted.

There are boundaries and standards that matter.

But something being unusual is not evidence that it is wrong.

Sometimes it is simply evidence that we have not seen very much of it before.

And what is usual changes constantly.

Women being unusual in technology leadership did not mean women lacked the ability to lead technology organisations.

Women being paid less did not become legitimate simply because it happened frequently.

The capabilities of women did not suddenly change as representation improved.

What changed was access.

Opportunity.

Expectations.

Culture.

What society considered usual changed.

And it will change again.

That is why I have become increasingly cautious with the word normal.

Because today’s usual has an extraordinary ability to disguise itself as something permanent.

History tells us otherwise.

The usual tells us where we are.

It does not tell us where we should stay.

So perhaps the next time you hear yourself saying, or even thinking, “That isn’t normal,” there is a useful pause available.

Not because you have to change what you believe.

Not because everything unfamiliar should be accepted without question.

But because a more precise question might lead somewhere more useful.

Is it actually wrong?

Is it harmful?

Or is it simply unusual to me?

Sometimes changing one word is enough to change the conversation.