Hanna:
Welcome to this short and sweet episode all about thinking that you should be better, farther along, fitter, healthier, over it, whatever, by now. I should ____ by now. And I’m going to give you a brief run down on why this thought is super dirty.
If you’ve been listening to this show you might recall back in episode 8, “I don’t know, and other lies” I talk about what I call the fucked up five. The five dirtiest little thoughts that hardly ever lead anywhere good and are also the sneakiest, squirrliest, most incognito thoughts that we tend to think. Your brain has these 5 thoughts locked and loaded ready to shoot out your mouthhole at any moment.
And “I should” is one of these fucked up five. The others are “I can’t” “I have to” “I shouldn’t” and “I don’t know”. Now for those HSP’s in the house, highly sensitive persons, you know to pick up what I throw down here on this show with a giant grain of salt, yeah? I am not shaming you or blaming you for having had any of these thoughts or even if you want to keep using them or you use them accidentally, it’s okay. There is a very good protective reason that your brain wants you to think in these ways. The I should I shouldnt I cant I have to I don’t know. Ok, so when I say this thought is F-ed up, I am never saying that YOU are f-ed up. Dear listeners, you are absolutely perfect and worthy and genius. And what you think is not who you are. Right?
So I want to show you why this thought “I should be farther along or better by now” is really dangerous. You might think that this would be a motivating thought like ugh I should be farther along I should be better, let’s go, gotta get it done, but frankly, it’s the opposite with some nasty side effects.
Firstly, you’ll most likely always be able to find backup. Or proof. Like when you start to think I should be better by now, one thing that shows up in our A line, or actions, (When you Coach with me you’ll learn more of this lingo but A line just means the actions you take or don’t take because of how you’re thinking and feeling). So like when you think I should be farther along by now, one thing you’ll do, one of the actions you’ll take because of that thought is to find lots of evidence of why you shouldn’t be where you are now and how if you woulda just done this that or the other differently or if you were different it would be easier, you’d feel better, and basically just all these other thoughts that prove that you in fact should be farther along. Plus you’ll look at other people’s journeys and compare and despair, we talked about that in the last episode.
But the craziest thing is that this thought literally puts you at odds with reality. The reality of where you are actually right now. It dissolves all presence, all ability to see real solutions clearly. It makes you believe that you should be different, but you’re not, so you literally put yourself at odds with yourself. This is where self hate, self pity, exasperation, annoyance, depression, anxiety, even the feeling of just giving up, come in. Right so thinking this way literally makes it impossible for you to feel good now. Impossible.
Arguing with what is is one of the fastest ways to sink into a hole of despair. There is no upside to thinking that you should be farther along.
And I’ll tell you the other dangerous part, which is something that I hope that you’ll take away from this today and that is that thinking “I should be better/farther by now” catapults you into desperately trying to solve for how you feel with action. Feeling better does not happen by taking action. Especially desperate action. Again, you’ll learn about this more intimately in private coaching but the self coaching model shows us very clearly that you can’t Action your way out of feeling bad. But when you think I should be farther along and you feel let’s say, self hate, and you probably don’t like feeling self hate, you try to do the things to get you further along from self hate. And we know that that never works. You can’t hate yourself to a healed heart. You can’t hate yourself to a fitter body. You can’t hate yourself to more clients. You can’t hate yourself to a promotion.
We think that the thought “I should be better by now” is motivating us to do things to feel better, to be better, but really it’s shaming us into taking actions that won’t solve the real problem: which is that we think we have failed. Right? We think we’ve failed or that we shouldn’t have to keep working on this.
I should be better by now makes you believe that the only solution is to have what you don’t have, be what you are not. It also tricks you into believing that there’s some sort of timetable on or necessity to be better in order to live in this world. I should be better by now is like saying “I missed the boat” “I am wrong” “I have failed.”
But none of that is true. You don’t actually have to be any different than you are right now. In fact, you can live the rest of your life exactly as you are now and be totally fine and fulfilled.
Of course many of us do want more, and that’s wonderful, but thinking that you should have it by now is really not helping you to get it. Ok this thought is literally holding you back from what you do want or how you do want to live by making yourself wrong, confusing yourself by naysaying reality. Reality is bad. What is now is wrong. From there you can only get more of the same. And it amplifies the struggle in working toward having what you want. It makes the process feel like torture.
I want to share an example so this thought error is really really clear for you.
So let’s imagine that you want to love your body exactly as it is. And imagine that you’ve been working on this for maybe years. Sometimes it feels like you’re making progress and other times not at all. But in this moment you are thinking Gosh, it’s been years, I should be okay with my body by now!
And you’re like I don’t know why I can’t just get over this. I know that I shouldn’t care about this. I should just be able to feel at home in my body now. I have done so much work on this. I have a coach. I went to therapy. I don’t have an eating disorder anymore. What is wrong with me?!
And you believe that the solution to your suffering is to get to the point where you love your body. Once you feel content and happy with how your body looks, then all of this will be better. But why can’t you just get there?! And you like do all this crazy shit like crash dieting and not going to events because you’re afraid they’ll be serving carbs there, and do forced affirmations “I love my body I love my body I fucking love my body damnit!”. And it gets exhausting and you’re like omg I’m working so hard I should be there by NOW at least!!
You think the problem is that you need to love your body.
But the real problem is thinking that you should already.
Because thinking that you should already makes you feel less-than, incapable, defeated, maybe even self hate. The exact thing you’re wanting less of, is literally created through thinking that you should be cool with your body by now.
It isn’t even thoughts about your body per say that are hurting you, it’s thoughts about you and your failure or shortcoming and inability to have what you want.
And to prove that it’s those thoughts, not the ones ABOUT your body that are the most unhelpful, that make it tough for you to show up for yourself and move forward, let's imagine for a second that your best friend, or your daughter, or your wife was having a tough time loving her body. Picture the woman or girl that you love unconditionally. Imagine she’s been struggling with her image, maybe for years. This back and forth, and you see her, trying, moving the needle a little bit, but still feeling stuck, still getting caught up in comparing herself or thinking that she should look different. What would you do if someone like that who you loved, was struggling?
Now, IF you harbored the thought “she should be further along by now” you’d probably be condescending towards her, maybe tell her you didn’t know what the fuck her problem was or how to help her, maybe you’d talk about her behind her back like omg she’s never going to get past this, it’s a lost cause. Maybe you’d be like well it’s her fault she got herself there. Maybe you’d suggest the crazy crash diet becuase you would also be thinking that if she was just skinner then this wouldnt be such a fucking issue so c’mon just do two a days at the gym and do a juice cleanse and take these diet pills.
Right but imagine that you approached her, like most of us probably would with someone we truly loved and cared for, without thinking that she should be further along by now. What would you do if you were just loving her, believing, thinking, that it’s okay. She’s okay. She’s going to figure this out. She’s exactly where she’s supposed to be. Of course she’s hurting and of course she’s exhausted, but that just might mean she’s on the brink of something, maybe even a breakthrough. You might show up and say some really positive and nice and helpful things to her. You might hold her while she cries. You might give her reassurance that this is part of the process and it’s okay. You might be like you know what I know that it’s hard and I know that you feel lost but this is temporary. And I know you might not see it yet but you actually have come so far. You might say you know what, let’s figure this out together! How can we make this 1% better? You might tell her I love you.
And I wonder how many times, you’d be willing to do that, to be there, for someone that you truly truly love. If she came to you a week later or a month later or a year later and said I’m still struggling with this. I still don’t know how to love my body fully, would you be like “omg jesus woman what is wrong with you you should have gotten over this by now!” No. You would not. You would love her though it, as many times as it takes and beyond.
Why? Why would you not say oh this is impossible you’ll never get there and you shoulda done it by now? It’s probably because you will love that girl whether she is fat or skinny or has a six pack or blonde hair or freckles or loves herself or not. It’s probably because unconsciously you KNOW that loving her through it is way more effective and powerful than berating her through it. Maybe because you actually do believe that one day she might love herself, even if there is literally zero evidence from the past that that is true, you still have faith in people doing things they don’t think they can do, and you’re willing to wait for evidence from the future. Maybe you don’t want to give up on someone you love.
I think about this sometimes with Michael and I didn’t ask him if I could share this on here but since he wrote a book about it I’m sure he’d be okay with my listeners knowing that he struggles, like I do, with mental health. And I think about this with him like how many times am I willing to be there, to let him go through what he’s going through in his head, before I say like “ok you should be done with this depression thing by now, it’s been long enough!” And my answer is forever. Eternity. I am going to love him through it without needing him to change or get better or be healed forever because that’s what I think unconditional love is. I’m not here holding a stop watch or looking at the calendar waiting for the time that he says okay I’m done getting pangs of anxiety now, we don’t have to deal with that any more.
If we are 100 years old on our death bed and I’m over here like do do do I did tons of thought work and la la la we’re about to die I’m so curious what’s about to happen how exciting, and he’s laying next to me silently, gloomily, not speaking much but to say I’m sad or I’m depressed or this sucks. I’m going to hold him and love him so hard through that moment, not trying to change his mind about how he feels or shame him into feeling excited with me, because I know that however he feels, whatever he’s doing, is exactly what is supposed to be right now, because it is. And I would never give up on him, or even the possibility that maybe the peace he needs isn’t found in this life. Right, there’s nothing in me that would ever feel compelled to say you shoulda gotten over this by now, because that doesn’t feel like love.
Right so we can see that most of the time, when we think we should be farther by now, it’s because we want to skip the line, to collapse time, and we CAN do that, with thought work if we want to. We can work on changing how we think to get different results. But not with hate or shame or the self defeatist feeling that comes from thinking we should be done with this work by now. We can go farther faster, by doing the WORK, that might take a lot longer than we want it to take. So like it’s not that we are stuck and can’t get what we want, it’s that we think that we shouldn’t have to try any more. And that’s obviously a lie. If you don’t have what you want yet, you absolutely will wanna keep going.
So maybe how we try to go forward needs to change. Maybe when this thought comes up it’s actually the perfect segway into learning how to have compassion, how to sit with yourself while you cry, how to let yourself know that it’s okay and it’s going to be okay and you’re growing whether you see it right now or not.
So whatever you think you should have by now…
You think the problem is that you need to get over your ex.
But the real problem is thinking that you already should have.
You think the problem is that you need to make more money.
But the real problem is thinking that you should’ve by now.
You think the problem is that you need to heal your anxiety
But the real problem is thinking that you should be healed today.
Thanks for tuning in, I hope this is helpful in some way and you can stop shoulding on yourself and get to work taking action from love.
Love you! See you next time.