Quotes About Shoulds

You mainly make yourself needlessly and neurotically miserable by strongly holding absolutist irrational Beliefs (iBs), especially by rigidly believing unconditional shoulds, oughts, and musts.

The intercommunication system also includes the expectations and demands that people place on themselves and others—something that has been labeled "the tyranny of the shoulds." 2 It is important to recognize these injunctions and prohibitions because rigid expectations or compulsive attempts to regulate the behavior of others are bound to lead to disappointment and frustration.

When we are capable of living in the moment free from the tyranny of "shoulds," free from the nagging sensation that this moment isn't right, we will have peaceful hearts.

The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination.

Shoulds keep you from owning your power to create the life you want. They keep you in denial about your actual feelings and situation.

There is a particular whir of agitation about female hunger, a low-level thrumming of shoulds and shouldn'ts and can'ts and wants that can be so chronic and familiar it becomes a kind of feminine Muzak, easy to dismiss, or to tune out altogether, even if you're actively participating in it.

All rights and wrongs of every description represent shoulds of one kind or another. And the shoulds get in your way, particularly when they conflict with another person's need to have his own as well.

Other-Directed Shoulds lead to feelings of anger and frustration when others don't meet our expectations ("He shouldn't feel that way" or "She shouldn't have said that!"). Other-directed shoulds cause conflicts with others, such as marital problems, arguments, and even violence and war.

World-Directed Shoulds lead to frustration and anger when the world doesn't meet our expectations. For example, I sometimes tell myself that this or that software program shouldn't be so dang complicated and hard to learn!

It is normal to be curious. The only shame is if all the musts and shoulds drown out the wants that we hear inside ourselves.