BEST OF: Two strategies to get rid of the ‘shoulds’ in your life

**BEST OF 2021**

‘Should’ is one of the most problematic words when it comes to self-talk. I should go to the gym. I should accept this event invitation. I should call this friend and see how she's going, I should spend less time on social media.

Shoulds are very unhelpful. They have the double whammy of making us feel guilty AND they don’t actually help us change our behaviour.

I’m going to give you two alternative words or phrases to replace the shoulds in your life.This will help you make better choices and also create positive changes in your life. 

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CREDITS

Produced by Inventium

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello there, it's Amantha. I'm currently on a Christmas break,
so I've handpicked a bunch of my favorite episodes from
the last year to share with you. Okay, on with
today's best of episode. Should is one of the most
problematic words when it comes to self talk, and I'm
sure you've heard this before and we all use it.

(00:24):
I should go to the gym. I should accept this
event invitation. I should call this friend and see how
she's going. I should spend less time on social media,
and so on. Shoulds are very, very unhelpful. They have
the double whammy of making us feel guilty and they

(00:45):
don't actually help us change our behavior. So today I
want to share with you two alternative words or phrases
to replace the shoulds in your life. My name is
doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder
of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I

(01:07):
work a show about how to help you do your
best work. So let's talk about shoulds and how to
get rid of them. Firstly, if you've been invited to
do something or a request is being made of you,
it can often feel really hard to say no, and
a lot of people feel quite guilty when they say

(01:29):
no to things that they feel like they should be
doing for various reasons. Thankfully, Marketing Professor Vanessa Patrick investigated
the impact of a four letter word that might be
able to help you a lot when trying to make
it easier to say no. In one of Professor Patrick's experiments,

(01:50):
one hundred and twenty university students were recruited and asked
about how relevant setting goals around healthy eating was to them.
Patrick recruited the type of people who would say to themselves,
I should eat more vegetables, I should eat less chocolate
and sugary foods, and so on. Then the participants were

(02:10):
taught a strategy for managing unhealthy food temptations. One group
was taught to say I can't eat X like unhealthy
snacks whenever presented with an unhealthy snack, and the other
group was taught to say I don't eat X. Then
participants were asked to turn their attention to a completely

(02:31):
different and irrelevant task. But then when they got up
to leave the room, the crux of the experiment happened.
They were offered a choice of two snacks. One was
a chocolate bar and the other was a healthy granola bar.
The experimenters quietly noted which participants picked which bar. It

(02:51):
turns out there was a big difference between the strategy
people were taught and the bar that they chose. Thirty
nine percent of those who were taught to say I
can't eat X, when presented with a temptation, chose the
healthy granola bar. In contrast, sixty four percent of those
in the I don't eat X group picked the healthy

(03:13):
granola bar. In other words, changing one simple word increased
the chance of selecting the healthy snack by over fifty percent.
When the researchers delved deeper into this very significant effect,
the reason they uncovered for the huge shift in behavior
was that those in the I don't group felt more

(03:36):
empowered to say no. Saying you don't do something sounds
like you're the one in control of your choices, whereas
saying that you can't do something sounds like someone else
is calling the shots. So when you're thinking about making
a change to your life, the language that you use
when talking to yourself is critical. Become a dopte person

(03:57):
instead of a can't person or a should person, and
you'll be well on your way. To making some positive
changes to your life. Now, the next phrase that you
might find really helpful is rather than telling yourself, oh,
I should do this thing that's good for me, like
I should try to walk ten thousand steps every day.

(04:18):
Instead a really great reframe that you can use for
self talk, which I learned from a couple of people,
including best selling author Dan Pink and also from burn survivor,
an all around motivational person to repit. So, something they
both do is they reframe their shoulds into get tos. So,
for example, when it comes to doing exercise, rather than

(04:41):
say I should exercise, they instead say I get to exercise,
or I get to eat fresh vegetables. And for me,
when I don't want to do something but I know
I should be doing it, this is exactly what I do.
So I get to walk over ten thousands today because
I'm healthy and my body is working properly. And I

(05:03):
get to eat lots of vegetables because I have access
to fresh food. And for me, I find that this
is a very very helpful reframe. So those are two
strategies that you can use, maybe today to get rid
of the shoulds in your life. Hello, there, that is it?
For today's show. If you enjoyed today's episode, why not

(05:23):
share it with someone else that you think would benefit
and maybe get some useful tips to improve the way
that they work. Hell I Work is produced by Inventium
with production support from Dead Set Studios. And thank you
to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every
show and makes everything sound so much better than it
would have otherwise. See you next time.