‘Give us this our daily bread’?”
What a marvelous lesson about purity of heart and strength of faith being more important than all the shoulds in the world. From birth we are told by those around us what we ought to and must do. Your family, religion, school system, workplace, media—each and every structure in existence adds its ideas to the pot of dos and don'ts. By the time we are adults, these voices are not only outside us, but inside as well: I should go to the party; I ought to send a baby shower gift; I must work ten hours a day or else look like a slacker. These musts, oughts, and shoulds can be so strong that what we want in our heart of hearts can be completely hidden—even from ourselves.
The word should comes from the Anglo-Saxon “sceolde,” and scolding is just the effect it has on us. Indeed, shoulds and musts set up civil wars inside our psyche. Psychologist Neil Fiore points out that as soon as we have “one voice say[ing], ‘I should,’ another says, ‘I don't want to.’” So we go back and forth between the two, feeling bad no matter what we end up doing.
When we live from a list of shoulds, we end up in a tremendous amount of self-recrimination and regret. This is a great energy sap. Wayne D. Dyer puts it this way: “When we discuss what we should have done, or what we could have done, or what we would have done, we are not tuned in to our reality system. No one could have done anything differently than they did. Period.” Trust in ourselves gets us off this no-win roller coaster because it gives us the ability to do what we think is right and not look back.
These days, I'm practicing letting go of shoulds, musts, and oughts. I say, Sorry, I'm too tired to come to the party, even if it's at the last minute. (Friends can attest to how often I've bailed on them.) I let my work speak for itself rather than worrying whether others will think me a slacker for taking time off. And when I do find myself stuck in a should, I seek a solution that I can do whole-heartedly—pick flowers from my garden for a friend rather than buy a gift, for instance, if that feels more authentic.
What I've learned from outside the “should” pile is that life is so much simpler. How about you? Would you have more time, more mental energy, by not dwelling on the oughts in your life and acting more from the wants? You might even get to something on your list that you actually enjoy.
Here's an added benefit: You let other people off the hook, too, because you're not as focused on what they “should” be doing either. Ah, freedom—it feels pretty darn good!
Creativity and Success Flourish
There are 152 distinctly different ways of holding a baby—and all are right.
—Heywood Broun
Dick Fosbury was a high jumper. But instead of facing the pole and jumping it feetfirst, he somehow got the idea to throw his body over headfirst, with his face looking at the sky. “I was told over and over again that I would never be successful . . . that the technique would never work,” he is quoted as saying in Attitude 101. In fact, he was so criticized that the position soon got a name—the Fosbury flop. But despite the ridicule, Fosbury trusted that he was onto something. He kept at it. Then, at the Olympics in Mexico in 1968, the laughter stopped as Fosbury not only won the gold medal with his flop, but set a new world record. Today, all high jumpers use his technique.
I love this story because it is such a great example of how the new is born. Someone dares to do something different. If it succeeds, pretty soon everyone's doing it. But for the first person to stick his neck out, it's a very big deal. My friend Fuping tells me that there's a Chinese proverb that says, “The gun shoots the first bird.” No matter what culture you come from, going against the crowd can be challenging. That's where trusting yourself comes in.
You get a new idea. Because it's never been done before, the world is full of folks who will tell you that it will never work. With self-trust, you have the capacity, like Dick Fosbury, to let the naysaying slide off you, like water off the proverbial duck's back.
Without this ability, our ideas can be stillborn, and we can live a life full of regrets. I once knew a woman who had an idea to do a book about the inner workings of mechanical objects. “Wouldn't it be great,” she said, “to see how they make M&M's or understand how the electric can opener functions?” “That's ridiculous,” said her husband. “No one would want to buy that,” said her sister. She let the idea go. A few years later, David Macaulay came out with The Way Things Work, which was a massive best-seller. She's bitter about her self-betrayal to this day.
Self-trust gives us the capacity to say to ourselves, I think I'm onto something. I believe in this, even if no one else does, and I am going to take it as far as I can. With this capacity, we are able to “go where no man has gone before.” Our energies are spent on making what we want happen rather than second-guessing ourselves or warding off potential dangers. So the chances for success increase.
Consider the tale of a cabinetmaker who lost his job in 1978. Trusting himself, he teamed with a friend to start a hardware store. Today that business does $30 billion in sales—for the cabinetmaker and his friend are the founders of Home Depot.
Or consider the trust in oneself required for scientific discoveries and innovation of all sorts. Many of the world's greatest scientists—Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin—had to withstand ridicule, contempt, and in some cases persecution for trusting that what they knew was accurate despite its unpopularity. But they refused to back down and were ultimately proven correct.
When we stick our neck out and succeed, we get a sense of pride that is attainable no other way. Precisely because we did it ourselves, against the odds, we feel victorious, powerful. That sense of accomplishment fuels us to trust ourselves even more, creating an upward spiral of increasingly joyful satisfaction in ourselves and our efforts.
The Bonds of Perfectionism Are Loosened
If the derelicts and ragamuffins Jesus hung out with were good enough for Jesus, then so am I.
—Esther Armstrong
I have a friend, let's call her Allison. Her house is always impeccable, even if you drop in unexpectedly. She is always tastefully dressed and coiffed, even to go to the park with her children. Her husband is an extremely successful businessman. She has an interesting part-time career as a freelance writer.
Sounds like a wonderful life, right? Yet Allison is miserable most of the time. In her eyes, her house is never clean enough, her accomplishments never good enough. She is perpetually fearful of making a mistake and constantly anxious that she is not measuring up to some standard that she can't even articulate.
Does Allison sound familiar? Do you freak out if your child leaves a dirty sock on the floor? Do you hyperventilate if your layer cake is lopsided? Are you afraid to try something new because you are not good at it already? If so, you more than likely are caught by the demon of perfectionism. Inside that demon is the great fear that we are not enough in and of ourselves. If we slip up, it will be proof that we are worthless. So we try to control our fear by being perfect: perfect looks (hence all the cosmetic surgery), perfect parents (hence all the anxiety over whether our preschooler will get into Harvard in fifteen years), perfect spouses (hence all the articles telling us how to be hot in bed), perfect leaders at work (with the list of twenty or so leadership competencies that we are evaluated on yearly).
Perfection is impossible. Each of us will stumble over and over; each of us will not measure up against the hypothetical yardstick of the quintessential
