‘I should’
I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day and since it’s still the beginning of the year, I asked her if she wanted to do things differently work-wise this year or if she wanted to keep doing what she was already doing.
Yes I started the last post exactly like that too and might start every post in this way because I talk to my colleagues A LOT! Jk - well it’s true but - I just think conversations are absolutely wonderful and they give me a lot of food for thought. Deeply listening to somebody else really helps me understand myself better.
As a side note: I love conversations so much that it lead me to start a podcast in 2019: Elie’s Coffee Talks. It started with Creative Entrepreneurs because I absolutely loved hearing about people’s career paths/choices/dreams/successes/struggles... The full story about how it all started here (scroll all the way down).
But back to the conversation and 2025.
The answer to my question was ‘yes’, she wanted to do things differently this year, she was planning to get back to a ‘proper job’ because ‘she should’ because ‘she studied it and also it’d be more money’.
Oooh those words sounded so familiar!!! I had just spent the whole time of the holiday season, figuring out what I was going to study this year to ‘make more money with a proper job’. I had just made THE ‘I should’ masterplan myself!
Right after sharing her ‘I should though’, my colleague started to talk about her own projects and her whole face lit up, her eyes sparkled, it was such a great contrast!
It was this contrast that made me want to dig deeper on the ‘I should’ topic. When did it show up in my own life and why?!
If I take THE Masterplan as an example, what was behind wanting to ‘study to have a proper job'? Well various things:
the difficulty of having my own business and thinking that having a ‘proper job’ will be easier or better
status anxiety
the difficulty of answering the question ‘what do you do’? Because it’s never a short answer!
not feeling legit or good enough at my work
In short, for me, the ‘I shoulds’ show up in general from a place of: frustration, fear, guilt, shame, lack of self-worth, comparison, people pleasing, societal pressure, status anxiety, financial pressure and conditioning.
I think an ‘I should’ is a disguised ‘want’. It wears a pressure-coat like some conditioning or an emotion we don’t want to feel anymore and we think that pursuing the ‘I shoulds’ will fix it. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t but just like our wants it’s great to figure out what lies behind them. In other words WHY we think ‘we should’. I explain it in more details in this episode figuring out what lies behind our wants with wants.
The ability we have to take a step back and become the observer of our own thoughts, emotions, wants, ‘I should’ and everything else happening inside of us, is one of our most precious skills because it can save us so much time, energy, money and bring us so much more fulfilment!
The better I got to know and accept myself, the less ‘I shoulds’ showed up. They still will cause they are sneaky. TBH they still do, every couple of days or so, usually preambled by ‘WTF am I doing in my life’?! The hardest part is to notice when they come up and take that observer stance, consider them, maybe even thank them for showing us where we still don’t accept ourselves fully and still are conditioned by other people’s perspective. Then we can ask ourselves:
what do I want?
what are MY gifts?
what is easy for ME?
what do I love?
And maybe we’ll still follow the ‘I should path’ for a while and that’s okay! But let’s get curious!
Did any ‘I should’ show up while you were reading this?
How does the ‘I should’ feel like in your body?
What lies behind it?
If you need support, figuring that out, I’m here!
