What are we really saying when we say 'I SHOULD …'
I was speaking to a good friend and shared with her that I'd been feeling really tired and I actually went to bed at 8pm which is unheard of for me.
She then congratulated me on listening to my body and doing what I clearly needed to do.
The fact that she congratulated me felt significant.
It felt significant because I was thinking to myself – well isn't that what anyone would do when they are feeling tired and depleted?
In that moment, I had forgotten that probably a year ago or so I wouldn't have gone to bed.
And why would I not have listened to my body's call for rest?
Because I would hear a voice in my head that said
I SHOULD – i.e.
clean the house
do the washing
clean up the kitchen
get dinner ready for the next night
go out with that friend
go to the that party
organise the cupboard
call your family
turn yourself into a pretzel (that's what it feels like sometimes when you do things you don't want to do)
and any number of other things before I go to bed.
And you may recall from my last newsletter relaxing wasn't part of my programming growing up Click Here to Read.
And then I realised my shift, I wasn't running on SHOULD's anymore.
I was following my intuition, my knowing, my body's call and nothing else mattered in that moment except getting myself to bed.
I've realised that SHOULD is a very unconscious part of our programming that is invisible most of the time and I've been working on making it more conscious and more visible to me. And the results are very refreshing.
I got curious about the word Should and its definition.
According to the Collins Dictionary the definition of the word Should as it relates to what I am referring to is
“You use should when you are saying what would be
the right thing to do”
Nothing seems amiss with that definition.
It doesn't seem to, however, I have a question - The 'right thing to do' for WHO?
For your parents, your partner, your kids, your family, your friends, your neighbour, your boss, your Whoever?
What about asking the question: What is the 'right thing' to do for ME?
There are these invisible rules that we think someone created at some point in time around the right thing to do and we have gone through life conditioned to check in with these invisible rules all without even being aware of what we are doing.
When we don't question these rules, we don't get to tap into a whole new world.
This world is a place of infinite possibilities, opportunities and directions that are available to us when we take aligned actions.
How do you know you are taking an aligned action?
You can feel it, it's the feeling you get when you think about it and you feel calm and clear and content and certain. It's a full body YES.
It's your gut feel or your intuition.
I know that living a life that is aligned with what feels True to me is where I want to live my life.
Living from this place makes me feel just so much better - I feel more powerful, calm, content, energised, free, resilient and relaxed.
And when I make decisions from the Should's, it's so exhausting for my nervous system and it makes me so tired.
Have you ever noticed a connection between how you feel when you push yourself to do something because someone told you that you should do it or just because you think that you should, it's an uneasy and tense feeling.
In comparison think about a decision to do something that felt so right for you and the feeling of being in Flow and at peace.
I feel like I'm done with the rules from someone else's rule book – maybe I'm a rebel but I know I am certainly a contrarian.
And its taken me a while but I am happy to live from that place.
Now when I say the word Should it's like an alarm bell for me, inviting me to Pause and reflect and connect with my knowing in the moment.I invite you to be curious…
How often do you tune into your intuition to make a decision?
How often are you swayed by what society tells us to do and what other people think is the right thing to do?
How often are you on automatic pilot and don't really stop to ask yourself “Is this what I really want to do"?”
How is this affecting your life, your quality of life, your feeling in the world?
Hope you are having a wonderful day