Be Wary of the Shoulds
This post is the start of a series that attempts to synthesize lessons from all the books I’ve read over the last three years, starting with the lessons on Finding Joy, Meaning, and Satisfaction at Work.
This is perhaps an odd “insight” to start with, but it was hard to read the notes from those books without concluding that most people, when you really get down to it, are just making things up.
One occasionally finds research-backed guidance, but most 0f the advice we read about how to be more successful or happier at work is simply anecdotal. For example, none of the advice-giving authors include stories of people who followed their suggested tactics, yet failed to achieve the authors’ wild success.
At least Colin Powell hits the right sentiment in his humbly-titled leadership book—It Worked for Me.
If we accept the notion that much of the advice we’re given comes from people who are also just making things up, then it might cause us to place skepticism on the shoulds that surround us.
How does this connect to the overall goal? Across all the literature, as well as my experience coaching leaders, one takeaway is that the shoulds can be a major hindrance to finding joy and satisfaction at work.
The shoulds in life come in many forms, including:
Advice, even from those who sincerely want to help
Competency models at work
What society esteems
The stated expectations of others
The stories in our heads about the expectations of others
At a very basic level, the shoulds can drive a feeling that whatever we’re doing is somehow wrong or not enough. That alone is not a fun feeling.
They can also hinder our joy and satisfaction by closing us off to opportunities and ways of operating that could be wonderful even though they don’t fit the “norm,” or what everyone else is doing, or how it’s been done in the past.
We can resign ourselves to a mediocre experience because the shoulds convince us that saying No to the conventional path, or what’s placed in front of us by others, is a risky bet.
In that sense, the shoulds are in a prison gang with Have to, Required, and Urgent.
It’d be ridiculous to conclude this with advice about what to do with the shoulds, but the lesson I’m taking is that the path to maximizing our joy and satisfaction at work entails, at minimum, understanding (a) how these shoulds operate in our lives and (b) that they almost all come from outside of our soul.