You know that nagging feeling you get after someone says you should do something? You’re not alone.
In this WBJM episode, we go through where these ‘shoulds’ come from, the approval trap so many of us fall into far too often, and best of all how to better your life by overcoming the fear and stress to break up with those ‘shoulds’ and make strides in your life.
01:34 Common ‘shoulds’ to look out for
03:05 The real problem with ‘shoulds’
05:11 Where the ‘shoulds’ come from
10:42 The approval trap we fall into
12:49 Steps to break up with those ‘shoulds’
Other Wealth Beyond Just Money episodes mentioned:
How To Broaden Your Focus To Overcome Boredom in Your Life
Full transcript:
All right. Hello there. Welcome back. Today I want to talk to you about a particularly fun topic and one that I really enjoy, because it’s all about taking the necessary first step to do what you want to do next, right? Whether that’s realign with your life goals or money goals or whichever of the Seven Tenets of Wealth you’re choosing to focus on. Now, the one thing that I think that you have to do is what we’re going to cover in this episode. Are you ready?
This episode is all about breaking up with shoulds.
We all know what they are. We are all accustomed to people telling us what we should do, what we are supposed to do, what someone else wants for us to do. And these things swirl around until we start to believe that that is exactly what we think we should or need to, or want to be doing.
Sound familiar?
That’s where we’re going to start at today. We’re going to start with what some of these common shoulds are. Even though I know what you know. I’m even though I know you know what they are in your life. We are going to focus on some of these common ones that creep up so that even if you’re like, oh, that doesn’t apply to me, you can start to recognize them in your life because chances are, whether you realize it or not, there are these shoulds that are in your path, guiding your path, telling you where to go or what to do next.
And we want to get to the bottom of that. We want to know they’re there. We want to know why they’re there. And we want to figure out what to do with them.
So let’s identify some shoulds so we can then break up with them. Are you ready.
So let’s take a step back. And let’s look at your life right now. Wherever you’re at whatever you’re doing, odds are somebody has said, well, you should do this. This happened to me, still happens to me. But as I was starting my career, everyone was like, well, you should go and work at this company, or you should have this type of job or you should go and get your certification.
And again, I did a lot of those things, and I agreed with a lot of those things at the time. Some of them I didn’t know any better. Maybe that’s you and some of them I genuinely wanted for myself in that moment.
And that’s what I want for you to be able to figure out, regardless of where the idea or the should came from. I want you to be able to recognize it, to acknowledge that it exists, and then to figure out whether that should is something you want to do, not should do, or if it’s something that’s simply guiding you down a path that no longer fits what you want for yourself. And either one of those outcomes is totally fine. I’m going to say that up front. I’ll say it again later, I’m sure, but either one of those is totally fine.
The goal is to be able to recognize and decide it for yourself.
So common shoulds, things like, oh, you should go work for a big company. Oh you should. You know, save X amount of money. Oh you should. Oh, you should, you know, continue to invest in those long term friendships that have been around for a while. Whatever it is, whatever shoulds that are sitting with you, I want you to recognize them, okay?
I want you to write them down, Journal on them if you like it. If you’re not a journaling person, you can totally, um, talk to your phone, your notes, app, that sort of thing, and get them all out there. But every time one pops up, when any conversation that you’re in, I want you to jot it down, right? I don’t want you to forget that you realized it was there. And there isn’t anything wrong with the list of shoulds.
But the problem is when those shoulds don’t actually align with what you want. Okay? So it’s okay if some of the shoulds resonate with you and are things that you want for yourself. But it’s also totally okay if the shoulds do not resonate and are not things that you want.
So where do these shoulds come from? Probably your natural next question. And if you’ve heard one recently, then you know that it can come from a well-meaning friend or family. It can come from a colleague, a boss. They can also just come from society in general, right?
We get told so many things as we’re growing up about how we are supposed to be. There’s a lot of gender identity around that. There’s a lot of you should do this by a certain age. You should be married. You should have kids. All of those shoulds can come from anywhere. Really. Also can come from society in general.
If you don’t know if you can’t pinpoint a specific person or place that that it came from, odds are it probably just came over time as you were growing up. There were things that you were told or somebody said in passing without giving it a lot of thought, and you hung on to it for one reason or another. And knowing where it came from isn’t so much as important as knowing that it exists. Right?
You may never know exactly why you believe something or how you should pop up in your life the way that it did. That’s okay. But. All of these shoulds create this external pressure that we have to do it right, that we are missing out, or that we are doing it wrong. If we don’t do that specific, should that specific thing that someone else has identified. And so.
I want to say that acknowledging that, like I acknowledge that pressure exists 100%. I’ve experienced that pressure myself, that that push to do something. But I also want to note what it’s followed up by, at least in my own experience. There’s this feeling that you get when you feel pressured to do something, particularly when you don’t want to do it for one reason or another.
And it’s usually there’s a push that I was just talking about, right? That’s the pressure, the external. You have to do this situation. You have this push and then it’s followed. Almost always, in my experience, by this sort of nagging feeling. And sometimes that works, and sometimes it’s just not what works for you. And that’s totally okay.
And then sometimes there’s this more clear and forceful sort of pressure where somebody is maybe telling you multiple times that they think you should do X, or they’re sort of forcefully encouraging or swaying your decision, trying to tell you what you should do or why you should do it, and why there isn’t anything else that you should consider.
These are the things that you should sort of be aware of and maybe be a little leery of, because it makes you feel as if you don’t have a choice in the matter. And these are things that when we feel like we don’t have a choice, a lot of times we just shut down. We don’t make any choice at all. We take no movement, we take no action. And it makes things even harder for us to move forward, to enjoy our lives, to make progress on the things that we really want to make progress, whatever that may be.
And so that’s why recognizing these shoulds is so important, but recognizing them really isn’t enough.
Once you know it’s there, once you know someone is projecting onto you a thought or idea that you don’t want and kind of. Pushing you down a path that’s maybe not right for you at the moment. We kind of fall into this trap of approval, if you will, where the should is out there, and we feel like we’re going to let people down, or we feel like we’re doing it wrong if we don’t do exactly what we said or what somebody else said for us to do, and then we do it to get their approval. But we realize after we’ve done it that it’s not what we want.
This comes up a lot when we talk about checking off boxes and doing all the right things, because as it turns out, there are not right things. There’s only the right things for you. And when you give too much time and energy, too much effort to the wrong things, the things that don’t fit what you want for yourself, you kind of fall into this trap where you just feel like, well, if I just do the next thing, if I just get to the next achievement or the next checkbox, then it’ll be great. Like, I’ll be perfect.
But the reality is that that’s not your problem, right?
It’s that trap right there, that cyclical. Somebody said I should do this, so I did it. And then now I don’t want it or I didn’t like it or it didn’t solve my problem. That little cyclical trap is exactly what keeps you stuck. It keeps you frustrated, maybe keeps you bored. If that’s you, I have an episode short episode on that, um, that I’ll include the link to below if you want to check out my thoughts on boredom, but.
Whatever it is that led you down that path, it this idea that you need to keep doing it to make everybody else happy keeps you stuck. It’s. And it makes things harder for those who want something different. And different isn’t bad. Different is totally fine. In my book I like different.
So. If that’s you, if you’re feeling frustrated, if you’re feeling like I did everything right, but it’s not working or it’s not right, I know exactly what you mean. And this is exactly what we’re talking about here with these shoulds. It’s a hard place to be, believe me. Feeling like you should be doing something or supposed to be doing something. And really, for the life of you cannot figure out why you would be doing it though, right? It just does not fit what you want.
And so that brings us to once we know they exist. Once we can start to recognize the problem with just following the shoulds and checking the boxes, then we can get to what you actually want.
It sounds so simple, and yet it’s so difficult to get there to that point where you’re like taking the step back and taking the awareness and taking the knowledge in yourself to say, what is it that I want? And removing all of the shoulds and the supposed tools from that thought process. It takes creating the space to let yourself figure that out, to let yourself clearly dream and explore what it could look like if you weren’t overwhelmed and stuck in all of these shoulds that you’re supposed to be doing.
At the end of the day. It’s about listening to yourself because only you know what you really want. Only you know where you want to spend your time. Only you can hear your inner voice when it says, this is not the right way. This is not what I want. I don’t want to be that person doing that thing.
And if it’s you saying, I don’t want that corporate job anymore, if it’s you saying, I don’t want to save all of my money for a rainy day, if it’s you saying I don’t want to wait to. Have this relationship or have this experience or whatever. Those are the choices that you get to make for yourself. You just have to listen to yourself.
So with all of that being said, once you kind of go through this process, once of realizing there are shoulds and starting to break up with them, then the last thing that I want to talk about is keeping yourself from getting in that situation again. Right. Staying out of the trap. Staying independent and free of thought so that you can continue doing everything that you want to do.
And so what we want to do is design checkpoints with ourselves. And so as I said, you know, if you want to journal when a good pops up or if you want to, you know, do the text to speech on your phone and, and just have your notes app write out when these shoulds pop up. Keeping that log gives you a place to start. But.
It’s also important to kind of regularly check in with yourself and make sure that you’re acting on your desires and your goals, and not someone else’s. It’s this becoming aware of how many times you tell yourself you should be doing something. If you have to tell yourself that, you should be doing it. To me, that’s a red flag to look at.
Why are you doing it?
Why should you be doing it?
And if you really don’t want to do it, then what is there that you would like to be doing instead? Right. To me, that’s a great checkpoint. As soon as that goes up and you’re like, I should be. Hold on. Take a step back. Take a pause and ask yourself, should you be? Is it is this really the right thing?
I think that’s an incredibly easy but important thing to understand. And so having these checkpoints, having these little segments where you look after yourself and you think about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. It helps you understand where you’re at, but it also gives you the clear indicator of where you want to go from here.
When I first got started with this new sort of mindset tool, it was after I’d been working in my corporate job for almost a year and I was burnt out. Too busy doing everything I was supposed to to care about myself and what I actually needed and what I actually wanted for my life. I was working all the time, and the one thing that I realized when I took a step back was, I’m not a procrastinator. And I say that because it is fundamentally not my personality to procrastinate.
But I was doing it constantly. I was always backing myself into a corner at work and backing myself up against the deadlines, because I did not want to be doing it right. I did not enjoy the work that I was doing. I didn’t like spending my time on those things, and I didn’t want to get it done early. I didn’t. I didn’t want to push forward through it so I would back myself into a corner. And I would stress about it, and I would stress through the deadline.
And I got so difficult that I was so burnt out that I was like, sleeping way more than I normally would just. It. It affected every aspect of my life, work and non-work. And I started to realize that I needed to pay closer attention when I was resisting things, when I was putting them off, when I did not want to do them, I had to talk and coach myself into it.
And so that was really the first clue that my body and my mind knew my inner voice. They all knew better than I did, and they were trying to tell me, but I was too busy going through the motions, doing the shoulds, keeping that corporate job, being successful, climbing the ladder, running on the hamster wheel.
I was too busy doing those things to realize that it was not where I wanted to be, because I’m going to bet that there are thoughts and feelings and behaviors that you have right now that are trying to guide you to where you want to go. They know what you want. They are listening to you when no one else is, and they’re trying to help you get there.
And you’re not listening.
That is the place that you start.
So go through these exercises. Come back to them as you need them. And let’s start breaking up with those shoulds. Getting ourselves clear on what we want for ourselves. And taking the time to check in and make sure that we’re doing what we want to do and not what anyone else is going to do. All right.
Breaking up with shoulds takes time. So give yourself the time and the space, right? Give yourself a little grace to understand what your desires and goals are. Now, to understand what influences are happening in your life, to push you down a certain path and let go of what everyone else wants for you, and the things that are no longer serving you so you can start living your own life by your own definition. That’s all for today.
Until next time. Good luck breaking up with those shoulds and keep building wealth beyond just money.