When you successfully standardise something, particularly valuable action, it becomes your new norm.
Over time, what was scary and difficult at first becomes something that you can do on any given day of the week.
What used to seem extraordinary, becomes ordinary. That is progress. Once an activity is normalised, it becomes part of your routine and no longer triggers dramatic emotions. You don’t overthink it or negotiate with yourself.
You just do it without fanfare.
I recall when I wanted to get over my fear of speaking to large groups. I started by making an agreement with myself to never internally debate with myself when I felt the need to say something in team meetings.
I standardised the practice of expressing my views in small settings. After anything is standardised, then it must be optimised.
Optimisation is when you learn to perfect that which you have standardised. Once I got comfortable expressing my views to individuals, I began to naturally learn what, when and how to speak.
Over time, this progressed to being comfortable speaking to any large audience.
Not because I perfected public speaking, but because I standardised then optimised the practice of expressing my views. Often, we don’t start something because we want to be perfect from step one.
That is not always ideal.
Rather, start with standardising practices in a small sense. At the beginning, no one needs to know and no one needs to see, as long as you have entrenched a daily practice that is consistent with your goals.
What you will see is that optimisation begins to occur naturally because you have removed all emotional resistance around doing an activity.
If you try to standardise and optimise in the same step, then that is a recipe to overwhelm.
