THERE IS ONE WORD THAT does more damage and creates more victims than any other. It is the word “should.” And you should never use it! (Oh my gosh I just did. I should be more careful.)
“Should” actually reduces your motivation every time you use it. “Should” is the most self-defeating word in the English language. It’s like a tranquilizer to the spirit.
When I tell myself I “should” do something, I am actually reducing the chances that I’ll do it. (This goes for the variations “ought to,” “supposed to,” obligated to,” and “they’re gonna get me if I don’t.”)
One of the reasons why “should” doesn’t work as an energizer is its profoundly judgmental and unfriendly nature. I would never use the word “should” with a friend. I would never say, “Hi, Fred. How’s it going? Hey man, you should lose some weight!”
If a victim is sitting at his desk on a Friday, trying to get the paperwork and forms finished before going home, he will probably, out of habit, try to motivate himself with the word “should.”
“I should really get this work done,” he’ll say, in a depressed tone of voice. “I really ought to do it. I know I’m supposed to. Any organized person would have done it by now. Why do I always do this? Why do I always put things off? Must be my personality.”
If someone comes by the victim’s desk at this point, the victim is very vulnerable because he’s put himself in such a distracted state with the word “should.” In a way, he’s been sitting there “shoulding” all over himself. The first person to come by and say, “Hey, let’s go out for a beer. It’s Friday. What are you, a workaholic?” pulls the victim off his task.
The victim gladly goes for the beer. The paperwork is stuffed into a huge, cluttered and deep desk drawer, and the victim is out the door.
What has just happened is the power of language at work. The victim has just lowered his own energy level with the word he was using.
Across the aisle from the above-mentioned victim sits an owner. She is doing her paperwork quickly and with focused energy. Inside her head, there are different words being used for inspiration. “I want to get this paperwork done,” she says.
Does she love paperwork? No. She may hate it even more than the victim does. But she loves having it done. She loves having it out of her mind.
“I want to put it behind me,” she says with increased spirit. “I want to have a weekend completely free of worry. I don’t want to take my job home with me. I want to drive in Monday morning knowing my desk is clear and I have a fresh start at the new week.”
Words are a lot like drugs. They operate in the brain in a remarkably similar way. Where the victim is unintentionally taking a tranquilizer (“I should”), the owner is taking a breath of fresh oxygen (“I want to”).
When you are doing something because you want to, you are doing it with a different spirit. You can set yourself on fire and burn through all of your work. You consume what’s in front of you with a happy vengeance.
When a victim is doing something because he “should,” he is doing it resentfully and reluctantly (if he’s doing it at all). He is trying to drive his car, but there is always one foot on the brake.
Because of the results of the internal language he uses, the victim sees himself as a procrastinator. Then he wonders how that trait became a part of his personality. Then, by believing that procrastination is a permanent part of his permanent personality, he never changes. How could he? It’s a part of who he is!
But procrastination is only a temporary pattern of behavior. It is not a part of anyone’s personality. It’s an option. It’s open to anyone anytime.
Suicide is so tragic and serious that even the slightest irreverence about it can be startling, as when Woody Allen said, “I saw my ex-wife on the street the other day and I didn’t recognize her with her wrists closed.”
Language is a matter of life and death. Life and death issues are at stake in how we talk to ourselves. Repeated use of the word “should” eventually leads to depression. Depression can sometimes lead to suicide.
Even when it doesn’t, we know about the living death we experience when we’re fatigued by the repeated thought that we are living a life different than the life we “should be” living.
When you look for opportunities to shift your language from “I should” to “I want to,” you’ll notice that it’s a life-giving shift. The spirit you connect to when you do it is the life force itself, because you are no longer resisting what is real. You’re accepting it and owning it and letting it in.
Understanding and mastering how you speak to yourself is the most important project you could ever take on. Get hooked on it like a hobby. Make it an enjoyable avocation instead of a grim “change” you “should” make.
It’s not always easy to mentally convert what you should be doing to “what I want to do.” If you’re in the habit of thinking of yourself as a weary martyr who should be doing things, living the life you want to live is like learning to swim for the first time.
But the swimming is good. It is not selfish to live the life you want. Your fear of becoming selfish is something you’ll lose with practice, because you’ll see how many people you benefit when you’re doing things because you want to do them. You will feel reinvented. And your happiness will make other people happy. How can that be selfish?
At one point in my own life, I realized and admitted that I was doing the things I really wanted to do, so it didn’t serve me to keep talking to myself like I was a victim: “Oh no, I have to be at work. I hate this. Why do I have to work? I guess I should be more motivated, but I’m not.”
That kind of habitual language always caused my energy to leak away. And it was only a habit. It was never based on fact. It was based on habitual self-talk. The fact is, when I thought about it, I wanted to work! (All I had to do was think back to a time when I was out of work and longed for a job.) And I wanted to be on time. Why not say it?
Even if you want to change jobs or change professions, you still want to be at work on time today because you know that you enhance your prospect of getting a better job by being successful where you are.
Saying “I want to” is hard at first, but only because you’re not in the habit. So you might have to fake it till you make it: “This is what I want to do! This is my choice!”
After a while, it will start to feel more real, and you’ll access your energy faster and faster each morning. You’ll be inventing an owner’s voice inside you. All it takes is practice.
Your victim voice will actually grow weak from neglect. The less you use it, the stranger it will feel when it speaks up. Soon, the victim voice will feel “sick,” and out of place. Just as when you have a cold, you know you’re not quite right. You know the bad feeling is temporary and dysfunctional. You can have the victim voice be just like that.
Continue to allow yourself throughout the day to see that you’re doing what you’re doing because you want to.
Instead of moaning that you have to shovel the snow outside, you can talk internally about what you want. Think about the clean sidewalk. Think about what you want, not what you don’t want. Talk to yourself about the good feeling you get in the cold fresh air when the task is complete and your muscles are pleasantly humming and the snow is all shoveled.
You want that, you know you do. So accept it. Let it in. You are already happy, deep down inside, so accept it. Let it be real. It’s not going to kill you or keep you from solving life’s problems if you’re happy. In fact, it will help you. Happy people have more creative energy. Nobel laureate Albert Schweitzer once observed, “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”
Be aware of how much you truly enjoy every journey to a goal, even small ones, like the goal of a clean walkway after a snowstorm. Let yourself know how much you enjoy it. Each shovel full. Thinking you do it because you “should” or because you “have to” is just an old habit of moping around like a victim. It often starts in childhood. It’s a carry-over from underdeveloped positive emotions. Don’t keep it up all your life. Your life is about evolving! Building on the good . . . keeping the best and moving on. Being a victim got you sympathy sometimes, but it didn’t get you the life you wanted.
In fact, the sympathy you got probably led you to even more self-pity, and the downward spiral continued into truly depressing fatigue. I once heard the priest Father Jack Spaulding deliver a sermon on self-pity during which he yelled out to his congregation, “Get off the cross; we need the wood!”
That wood he was talking about is something you can build things with. Build a life, don’t try to make a living. Reinvent yourself from someone to whom things happen, to someone who builds.