Dropping your ‘shoulds’
I’ve called this nudge ‘A nudge about dropping your shoulds’ because I’ve been ‘shoulding’ all over myself in the last couple of months for not writing a nudge sooner. Since I’m pretty sure I’m not on my own with this habit of shoulding, I wanted to share some things I’ve found about how unhelpful it is.
First, I hope you’re having a great summer if you’re UK based. Notice I say having rather than had as I’ve yet to go on my summer holls so am hoping for an Indian summer. It will be my first trip away in my sister and her husband’s camper van with these two above and I’m looking forward to it…what can possibly go wrong!?
Less shoulding = nicer feeling
This idea of dropping your shoulds actually builds on my last nudge about how well we work, and especially so when we’re living more in a calmer, less noisy headspace. Continually telling ourselves we should be doing things, or beating ourselves up when we’re not…not to mention all the ways in which we can feel we (or others…) should be acting or behaving in certain or better ways or whatever, just doesn’t feel good. And it’s easy to know when this is happening because our feeling level will quickly alert us.
Freeing up headspace
Aside from living in a nicer feeling, the other huge benefit of dropping your shoulds is how much headspace this frees up. It is fascinating to me that the more I leave my should thinking alone, the quicker I find myself naturally getting more done. As with this nudge, as soon as I stopped pressurising myself, it left space for inspiration to strike.
And likewise when it comes to judging myself or others’ behaviour about what I/they should or should not be doing. Boy can that eat up a whole heap of bandwidth and time, and quickly put you up in your thoughts vs living in the present moment.
Living more in the moment
As I often share in my nudges, we’re made to live in the moment, not to live in our thinking. When we drop out of our noisier thinking there’s a space that opens up for what I’ve come to see as a quieter, common sense of knowing to show up that invariably brings us what we need. We do really well in real time, and just noticing, and trusting, that is so much nicer than shoulding ourselves.
As always, I hope this is helpful, and would love to hear what resonates with you.
Wishing you a lovely weekend when it comes.
All the very best for now
Tamsin
If you want to ‘live more in your life and less in your thoughts’ then I share more in my Living in the Flow series of insights. Just click on the link and you’ll receive a short nudge over the next 7 days. See it as a quiet moment of reflection to start off your day, and help minimise any overthinking.