I’ve not been my best lately and whenever that happens, I know that I’m probably not calm enough or happy enough with the way my life is going.
Usually that’s because I’ve had too much on my plate. More specifically, there has been too much I SHOULD do.
I should go to work. I should work out. I should make dinner. I should mow the lawn. I should do the dishes.
You’re probably not a stranger to feeling overloaded with stuff you have to do. But when you get into that mindset, you will probably start doing some things just because you “should”. But to be honest, most things won’t get done or will be forgotten about or overlooked simply because we should do them.
But I read a great trick: how changing just one word makes so much difference – switching from I SHOULD to I MUST every time it pops up in my head. People are always saying I should do this or I should do that, I should, I should, I should, I should, and pretty soon they are shoulding all over themselves.
When you change your should to a must you are committing yourself to fulfilling that act because it now must be done, your brain will always see the outcome differently if it’s a should and it doesn’t get done as apposed to if it’s a must and it doesn’t get done.
I must go to work. I must work out. I must make dinner for . I must mow the lawn. I must do the dishes.
When we break our patterns and commit ourselves by changing a should to a must, it’s amazing how engaged we become and how committed we are to every situation in our lives on a massive level. To make massive changes in our lives we must take massive and immediate action, we can take this massive action simply by changing our should to a must.
We’re normally not aware how often we say “I should” on a daily basis. Paying attention instead to the stories we tell ourselves, giving ourselves a way out of doing the job that needs to be done, or jumping on the lounge with facebook and ignoring the things we should have done that day. While telling ourselves a different story so that we are ok with not having done them, like there’s not enough time in the day or where did the time go or I just ran out of time.
Here’s the tip, you didn’t run out of time or daylight to do what needed to be done, you made your entire day a should. When you get out of bed at 9am and sit on the lounge playing social media or games or watching tv until late in the afternoon, you are going to run out of time “EVERY TIME”. You need to make your should a must, and you must commit to it.
We never run out of time, more often than not we run out of energy, or we never had the energy or the motivation in the first place. This is because we often see the things we have to do as painful or annoying or time consuming. They may be but they still need to be done and unless you have an endless bank account to be able to pay someone else to do it, you are going to have to find that motivation.
The easiest way is to retrain our brain to seeing things as they are and not worse than they are, we all have this ability to see things worse than they really are and this always gives us the ability to avoid doing something if in our heads we have already built it up to momentous level that’s almost unachievable.
The moment I switched from “I should” to “I must”, I started enjoying life again. I never thought I had time to do the basic things that needed doing at home without being overwhelmed by anything else being thrown into the mix, but now I have a job, set up my own website and face book page, I have written my own blogs and a book, I am currently working on another few books, I have massive support for what I am doing from my family, friends and the public, I am following my passion, I have people that want to be friends with me now, and I am helping others in the community in there journey of abuse and depression, I have good health, I go out and exercise, all because I changed my should to a must.
Living With Depression 