One new habit for the next decade?

Here’s a question.... How many times do you find yourself feeling stressed, frustrated, angry, over-reacting or ultimately regretting your actions in response to what ‘should’ have happened or what someone else ‘should’ have done? 

Our shoulds evolve with us from an early age. They develop through our learning and experiences, often as a result of what the significant adults around us tell us should happen. These shoulds then become the innate rules through which we live our lives. In many cases  they serve us well, however they can have a darker side because we rarely stop and ask ourselves whether that should is still valid. What can make matters worse is that we can expect others to follow our shoulds ; even though these others might not know anything about them.

When something happens at home or at work which isn’t what we believe should have happened, we start to react to it, often in ways we end up regretting. Even when we don’t outwardly react, we might bottle it up it adding to our stress levels or allow it to sit in our subconscious eating away at us, reaffirming our judgements or maybe even waking us up at night. Any of this sounding familiar….?

If so, I’d like to invite you to consider developing a new habit for the 2020’s that could help to prevent all this. Put simply this is to challenge yourself to spot your shoulds and reconsider them as a 'could'. 

Why will this help? Well, we are all blessed with having choices relating to pretty much anything we do. Our shoulds are our assessment of which choice is the right one. We might make this assessment through a conscious values guided process or it could be something that we’ve learned to automatically apply. Whatever the route we take the fact remains that our should is actually one of a number of choices that we or someone else could have made. When the choice is out of our hands then the person making the choice will be applying their own shoulds which may compel them to take a different action to the one we’d expect or prefer.

If we can develop the habit to notice our shoulds when they crop up and substitute them with could then we can immediately diffuse our emotional response. Give it a try….. think about something you could do but chose not to and compare this with something you should do but chose not to. Introducing the perspective of could stops us feeling quite so wronged as our should rule hasn’t been broken. 

In practice a could can give you a little more time to consider your response, you could choose to explore the decision process at play with curiosity and learn a little more about yourself or the other person. This insight might then help you work / live better together in the future and for sure will stop you getting stressed or regretting a course of action at a later date. Ultimately as the Dr Pepper marketing team advocate, ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’