Stop Saying “Should”

The word “should” seems innocent–even motivating but a closer look reveals that it leaves a trail of damage.  It highlights inadequacies, robs us of motivation, and leaves us stuck in anxiety, disappointment and frustration.  Removing the word “should” from your lexicon can make a big impact in how you feel about yourself and others.

“Should” is Everywhere

I used to say the word “should” all the time.  “I should have gotten up earlier this morning.”  “I should have been more patient with my kids.”  “I should have started dinner earlier.”

I even used “should” when I thought about others.  “My kids should listen the first time!”  “People shouldn’t cut me off in traffic.”  “They should make this website easier to navigate.”

Sometimes I used it to describe situation around me.  “This shouldn’t be so hard.”  “This meeting should be shorter.”

I also used to feel discouraged, overwhelmed and anxious a lot of the day.

“Should” Seems Responsible

At first glance, the word “should” seems like a benign or even a helpful word.  It seems like it’s helping us notice how things need to be different.  By recognizing how things should be, it’s almost as if we feel we’ve compensated for the fact that they aren’t that way.  It makes us feel more decent and more responsible.

However, as I’ve become more aware of my internal dialogue.  I’ve realized that the word “should” is quite insidious.  It leaves a trail of devastating damage behind.   Should doesn’t help me do or become more.  It has the opposite effect.

The Problem with “Should”

The word “should” causes me to notice all that I am NOT doing and all that I have NOT become.  It accentuates others’ faults and weaknesses, and highlights the less than ideal in circumstances around me.   Because we feel that we and things around us are inadequate, it can decrease our motivation and leave us feeling anxious and frustrated.  You can’t beat yourself up into being better.  You can’t beat others into being better either–“shoulding” others strains relationships because it feels like criticism.  It doesn’t mean we stop making requests of others or ourselves, it just means we don’t keep flogging ourselves with the expectation that it “should” be different.

What to Say Instead of “Should”

Here are some alternatives to the word “should” when you notice it creeping into your own internal dialogue.

Focus on the Benefit

I feel _____________ when I ___________.

Instead of saying “I should have changed out of my yoga pants before I picked my kids up at the bus stop.”  Say, “I feel so much more confident when I take the time to get ready before my kids get home from school.”   This helps you focus on the end result which motivating instead of on the action you didn’t do, which is discouraging.

State What You Value

It’s important to me to ________________.

It’s easy to say “I should be on time to church.”  Instead say, “It’s important to me to be on time for church.”  It’s much more motivating to be on time when it’s couched in terms of what you value instead of what you “should” do.

Change the “sh” to “w” or “c”

I could _______________.
Just substituting “would” or “could” instead of “should” can make a big difference.  It makes our requests much more pleasant and loving.

“It would make our home so much more pleasant if you could hang your backpack up when you get home.”  Consider the difference between that and this.  “You should hang your backpack up when you get home so our house doesn’t look trashed.”

Get Curious

I wonder why I am/they are  ________________.

Using should takes us out of the present—it makes us think of something that didn’t happen in the past, or something that needs to happen in the future.  Most of these thoughts come with stress and other negative emotions. Bringing our attention back to the present can help us abate some of this negativity.

Instead of thinking, “I shouldn’t have yelled at my kids.”  Think, “I’m feeling really irritated right now.  I wonder why I’m feeling irritated?”

Getting curious about what you’re thinking and feeling has a powerful impact on helping us become more of who we want to be instead of just reacting to things around us.

Stop saying “should”

Getting rid of “should” can be so freeing.  I’ve been working on this for a long time and I’m still working on it.  My shoulds everyday are a lot fewer than they used to be.  As a result I feel a lot more confidence, and I feel a lot less frustration with others.

Shoulds are a fixture in our lexicon.  It takes some practice, and some patience but the payout in personal peace and motivation is big.  Saying less shoulds to ourselves allows us to focus on what we ARE doing, and what we WANT to be doing instead of what we’re not doing.  Removing “should” for others can give space in relationships allows people to feel loved as they are; this enables deeper connections.  Eliminating “should” thoughts about circumstances lets us accept the things we cannot change and move forward instead of staying stuck in wishing things were different.

How many times a day do you say “should?”

Try observing when you use “should” and how it affects you.
Try substituting a different thought when you notice yourself saying “should.”

How To Not Fear Fear: Metabolizing Emotions

We spend a lot of our time as human beings trying to escape or ignore or change these types of feelings. Why?  Because they feel awful!  No one likes feeling fear, or feeling stressed, overwhelmed, afraid, embarrassed, or depressed.  The problem is that when we avoid negative emotions they stay around longer, get more intense and rarely address the takes up lots of brain space!  There is a better way to handle difficult emotions.

Negative Emotions Are Essential

Our brains and bodies are programmed with these feelings to move us to action.  If a truck is headed straight for us, we feel fear.  And, our fear drives us to move out of the way. If we have too many things required of us, we feel overwhelm.  This feeling drives us to eliminate the unessential.

However, in our modern world, it’s easy to feel that we SHOULD feel happy or peaceful all the time. We think if we feel something negative, we should fix it.  We have so many easy options for escape!

Avoiding Negative Emotions

When our to-do list feels too long, we can turn on Netflix and get lost in a show instead.  When dinner our is crazy, we eat a cookie on the counter to dull the overwhelm and get a hit of joy—even temporarily.  After a difficult conversation that didn’t go well, we can drown our guilt and disappointment by pushing a few buttons on Amazon and a box shows up on our door with a new pair of shoes.

Everyone has different emotions they try to avoid, and there are myriad methods of avoiding them; eating, shopping, TV, staying busy, anger, withdrawing, sleeping, alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling, working etc.  When we avoid emotions, we never process them.  They continue to cause us problems.  And, the things we do to avoid negative emotions cause us trouble sometimes too.

The Problem with Avoiding Negative Emotions

There are 3 problems with trying to escape emotions:

  1. The things we do to escape difficult emotions sometimes have negative consequences.

    Here is an example:  There was a time in my life when I felt so overwhelmed and discouraged I listened to audiobooks all the time—especially at dinner time and crazy times in the car.  It seemed like a benign enough escape.  I knew it wasn’t ideal for my family but I wasn’t sure how else to deal with the chaos without becoming a person I didn’t like. I checked out.  While it saved my kids a lot of yelling, my escape also robbed me of precious time and interactions with my kids.

  2. When we don’t deal with an emotion, it sticks around and continues to resurface

    Emotions are simply chemicals in our body. Their job is to alert us of something important and move us to action if  necessary.  If they are not allowed to complete their job, they continue to resurface. Sometimes the emotion itself rises up again and again and other times it shows up in different ways.
    It’s sort of like those windup music boxes where you turn the crank and the ballerina dances to music.  If you keep the box open, eventually she will stop.  But, if you shut the box, she stops.  However, every time the box is opened she dances and the music plays. It may take many times of opening and closing to finish the cycle.  That is how our emotions work too.
    I had a baby just a few weeks after my mother passed away.  I wanted to grieve my mother’s loss—she was a tremendous presence in my life.  However, I was busy around the clock taking care of a newborn, an emotional toddler, and a needy pre-schooler.  We were in the middle of an international move and I didn’t know how to grieve in the midst of the insanity!  So I just closed the metaphorical music box (unconsciously of course) and kept trying to survive.

    Over the next few years however, when strong emotions surfaced, my grief was often right there.  Our move to a foreign country was overwhelming and difficult and I found myself sobbing nightly.  (I had moved to other countries before and been fine.  But this time I was totally lost.)  I thought it was the move itself—but looking back I see it was that grief resurfacing.  My grief resurfaced again and again as difficult things emerged in my life.  The ballerina had to play her part.

  3. It takes so much work to keep the negative emotions away we don’t have as much space in our minds for the things we really want to do!

    Recently I was trying to concentrate on something and my daughter was whistling.  It was really grating on me.  I tried to ignore it, but the harder I tried to not be bothered by it, the more intense the irritation began to be. In fact, it was requiring so much effort to “ignore” it, I hardly had any brain space left for the work I was doing.   This happens with emotions too—when we are angry at someone or irritated and we keep trying to push it down, it often consumes us even when we don’t realize it.

There is a better way to deal with emotions.

Allow Your Emotion

Most people think that if they allow their emotion they will end up doing something they don’t want to do—like yell at their kids, or eat too many cookies, or sleep until 10 in the morning. However, allowing a feeling is different than acting on it.  Allowing a feeling just means that we feel it, we notice it, we don’t avoid it.  It doesn’t mean we act on it.  In fact, allowing an emotion actually allows the emotion to dissipate, so we are less likely to re-act to it.

Emotions are just chemicals in our body.  When we feel them, they are simply moving around inside of us.  The emotion itself won’t hurt us.  This is a powerful piece of knowledge.  When you know that you can handle any emotion, you stop feeling afraid of certain emotions and you don’t have to spend as much time avoiding negative emotions.

Our bodies need food to survive.  When we eat food, the body metabolizes it–breaks it down, absorbs it and sends it out to the body for fuel.  Similarly, emotions are essential to our survival. They provide the necessary impetus to eat, live, reproduce, find purpose and even get out of bed in the morning. When our body encounters an emotion, it’s crucial to metabolize it just as it would food.  It’s important for the emotion to be allowed to run it’s course, be identified and serve as fuel for the appropriate action.

How to Metabolize an Emotion

Become an observer of yourself.  When you notice yourself feeling a negative emotion like fear, stress, anger, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, shame etc. don’t shove it down or numb it away by distracting yourself.  Instead, close your eyes and “watch” the emotion in your body for a minute.

It seems like just when I start to chat with another adult one of my girls decides they need something.  They are often pulling on my arm or nagging, “mom, mom, mom, mom….can we go?”. My two-year old often just lays down and howls.  Even after I’ve let them know we will be leaving in 5 min. they continue to pester me.  I often feel irritated!  Here’s how I process this emotion.

  1. Name the emotion

    I say to myself “This is irritation.”

  2. Describe what it feels like.

    Imagine that you were going to describe to someone what it feels like to feel a particular emotion.  You’d describe where you felt it in the body, what the sensation was like, what color it was, if it was hot or cold etc.I say, “I’m feeling really irritated right now. I feel tension in my eyebrows, my lower jaw feels tingly, and my lungs feel a little short of air.  To me irritation is a warm emotion—I picture it as orange goop sort of slowly building up in my lungs.

  3. Allow it to hang out.

    Remember it is just a chemical in your body, it can’t hurt you!  Many people worry that if you allow emotion to hang out, it will cause you to act on it. Don’t act on it (acting is an escape too.)  Just feel it.

    I say to myself.  “This is fine.  This is just irritation.  I can just be a person who is irritated.  I’m going to calmly continue my conversation, and it’s okay if my kids fall apart for a few minutes.  I don’t have to get angry at them.  Each time I just observe my irritation and don’t act on it, it becomes less intense.”

  4. Continue to allow it until it dissipates

    Of course my brain wants to sell me all sorts of ideas. “My kids are so disrespectful.” “They know better.” “Uh, this always happens.”  The more these ideas creep in, the more irritated I feel.  I just try to go back to noticing the emotion.  At first it seems to become the most important thing in that moment!  I can hardly think of anything else.  However, the more I allow it (and refuse to act on the emotion) it gets less and less intense.  It slowly starts to go away.    Soon I’ve forgotten all about it.

  5. Allow the emotion each time it re-surfaces.

    And it will!  But each time it comes back, it will be less and less intense.

    By this time, I’m likely walking to the car since I had told my kids it would only be five minutes.  However once everyone is back in the car, my brain loves to remind me of the irritating moment we just had.  When the thoughts start again, the emotion starts again.  Back to step 1.  But each time I allow the feeling until it dissipates.

Our emotions are just chemicals in our body.  They won’t hurt us and there’s nothing to fear.  If we try to ignore them or escape them we end up with a lot more trouble than the original emotion created in the first place.  Simply acknowledging and being willing to feel the emotion, allows it to pass.  What would your life be like if you weren’t afraid of feeling any emotion?

How do you handle negative emotion in your life?

What negative feelings do you fear most?
What do you do to avoid them?

Next time you notice a negative emotion try these steps:
1.  Name the emotion
2.  Describe it
3.  Allow it to hang out
4.  Continue till it dissipates
5.  Allow the emotion to hang out each time it re-surfaces

Mental Gardening: How to Grow Happiness Anywhere

They way we feel is the product of what we think.  Just as with physical gardening, we plant seeds in our minds constantly.  Sometimes we choose them, other times we don’t.  However, whether a seed flourishes depends entirely on how we care for it.  In other words the way we think about something that happens will affect how much it grows and impacts us much more than the fact that it happened.  A productive yield of happiness requires both planting and nourishing gratitude and abundance as well as weeding and pruning  dissatisfaction and lack.   As we do we’ll find we can grow happiness anywhere.

The Law of the Harvest

My Dad loved to garden, and he put all of his daughters to work planting, weeding and watering each summer.  Frankly, I thought it was hot and boring a lot of the time; I tried to avoid it whenever I could. One of the pay-offs of our hard work was the tender, rich acidic flavor of red home-grown tomatoes that we picked on summer nights and ate for dinner.

A garden’s yield is directly correlated to the effort put into it.  I remember one summer when we were fairy lazy about watering. Then, we went on a family vacation and returned to find the garden sparse and mostly dried up.  I remember my sister running into the house sobbing because it meant there would be no home-grown tomatoes that year.

The law of the harvest states that we will reap what we sow.  If we want the home-grown tomatoes, we have to plant them, water them, and weed them.

The Law of the Harvest in our Minds

Because I grew up spending Saturday mornings with my fingernails buried in the dirt weeding and watering our backyard garden plot, I find particular poignancy in this quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach about the gardens in our minds.

“Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend… when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present— love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure— the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.”

This quote hung on my refrigerator for a couple of years to remind me that the law of the harvest applies to my mind.  The thoughts I think are like seeds that germinate and grow into plants of feelings and actions and eventually yield the fruit of my overall happiness and relationships and contribution in the world.  I determine my yield by the thoughts I choose, and the paradigms I tend and cultivate.

I love the concept that at any time, there are two mental gardens existing at the same time.  In any situation, relationship or even with our own self-image, there is always abundance and there are always things lacking.  It’s easy to feel that our external situation is the cause of our lack. However, ANY situation has abundance and lack simultaneously.  The abundance we feel is directly correlated to how diligent we are in tending the abundant thoughts and allowing the gardens of lack to shrivel up and die.

 

Mental Gardening Around the World

My husband is a diplomat, which means our family gets to move frequently to various places around the world.  When we embarked on this lifestyle I was optimistic about the many ways we could serve and the blessings it would have for our family.  I love to travel, explore new places, try new foods, and experience how different cultures do things. I hoped to broaden my children’s minds.

Tending My Garden of Lack

The reality of life abroad however, brought many challenges.   I discovered that even the smallest daily tasks were harder than I had experienced in the United States.  The water wasn’t safe, so we had to use purified water to brush our teeth and get a drink. We had to bleach all of our veggies and fruits to kill bugs and bacteria.  Finding simple items was an epic challenge; there was no Target or Office Depot like I was used to. One day I remember spending over 7 hours driving around the city looking for paper clips and came home empty handed.   The difference in time zones made it difficult to call home, and our internet was slow and cut out frequently. I can remember sometimes having to call 6 or 7 times just to make it through a short conversation with a sister.   

Driving was challenging.  Many of the streets were not marked, and not knowing the language made it difficult to ask for directions. There were times I spent hours lost and driving around with a crying baby in the car.  Traffic was oppressive–one time it took me over 3 hours of white knuckled driving to get my children to school.  They struggled with bilingual schools; they felt overwhelmed in an environment where they understood nothing.  There were no libraries, and the pollution was so bad it often prohibited going to the few rusty parks nearby. Medical care was not always optimal, and sometimes it was in a foreign language.

On difficult days, I would compare my experience there with the idealized life in America I imagined…the mini-van, the cul-de-sac, walking to elementary school, clean water, and the list goes on.  When I compared my life abroad to this, things seemed difficult and unfair. Without even realizing it, I began to tend my mental garden of scarcity. The more I noticed how much harder life was, the more I collected evidence of the challenges in my life and my resentment about our lifestyle grew.  My garden of scarcity grew and began to take over some of the real estate in my garden of abundance.

My husband and I accepted a posting in Hawaii–I did finally get a little home with a yard on a cul-de-sac.  We could brush our teeth in clean water, shop at Target and my kids could speak English in school. I could communicate easier with my extended family.  I had all the things I had dreamed about in an American life. My ideal of life on a cul-de-sac—while wonderful had just as many challenges as my life abroad.  They were just different. We lived in a small home, abundant with bugs! We had no A/C and it was oppressively hot. The schools were not as stimulating as our previous experience and everything was SO expensive.  My children still struggled, but with different things. I still felt discouraged and frustrated. And, I found I missed many of the wonderful things about our ex-pat life.

Tending Abundance

I realized it didn’t matter where I was–there would always be lack as well as abundance.  I was focusing on where I was, trying to get to the right place–thinking that the abundant garden was an actual physical place or situation–I realized it wasn’t.  The abundant garden is in our minds. We get the abundant garden by the positive thoughts we plant and nourish by intentionally focusing on. Lack will always be present as well.  But we dry out that garden as we give it less attention.  

With this shift in my understanding of abundance, I began to see my life in a new way.  The challenges didn’t evaporate, they stayed the same, but I began to notice the abundance in my life and focus on that.  I could walk to the beach! My children could go slip-and-sliding in the backyard and we could be outside year round! There were breathtaking hikes just minutes away.  We made some wonderful friends and we had lots of family come and visit. Hawaii became my garden of Eden…not because of where or what it was, but how I thought about it.

Similarly as we’ve moved abroad again, I have found a life full of abundance in our ex-pat life as well.  The difficult things of living outside of the US are still part of our life. There is still traffic, food and sanitation issues, and language barriers.  None of that has changed. At times I get frustrated by them, but I’m learning to prune those thoughts and not allow them to overtake my garden of all the abundant things I do love about our life.  When those thought arise, I just allow them to pass through, but don’t let them take root. I try to think of the inconveniences as part of the package deal that comes with so many benefits for our family.

I spend a lot more time noticing the amazing education my children are getting, nurturing relationships with other ex-pat women who have lived all over the world, and relishing our family outings on Saturdays to ruins, natural wonders and historical treasures.  I try to stop and notice things; the other day I saw a man riding a bicycle stacked high with cardboard boxes several times taller than himself riding through a developed intersection full of cars. I thought about how fascinating this life is–and how amazing it is to have a car to drive.

This mental gardening has helped my emotional garden of abundance to grow and has helped to prune back my garden of lack. It has indeed caused “the wasteland of illusion to fall away, and allow me to experience Heaven on Earth.” (Or at least moments of it. 😉

Tend Your Garden of Abundance

What area of your life do you want to improve?  

When you think about that area, what is in your emotional garden of lack?  What about your garden of abundance?  Tend the garden you want to grow.  Nourish the thoughts of abundance by thinking of them often, talking about them, writing them down.  Acknowledging the lack is fine, but dwelling on it will diminish the sense of abundance.