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. 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 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 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 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, 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 taught a strategy for managing unhealthy food temptations, and 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 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 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 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 that I don't group felt more 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 dope person 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, I should try to walk ten thousand steps every day 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 and all around motivational person to Reapit. So something they both do
is they reframe their shoulds into get tos. So, for example, when it comes to doing exercise, rather than 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 thousand steps a day because I'm healthy and my body's working properly, and I 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 to day to get rid of the shoulds in your life. That is it for today's show. If you know someone who is maybe a victim of the shoulds, you might want to share this episode with them and maybe they might find it helpful. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you to Martin Nimber who did the audio mix and makes everything sound awesome. See you next time.