Summary
In this coaching session from a live Q&A, Joe works with a woman caught in a cycle of guilt and shoulds around productivity. She feels guilty for not doing things, tries to stop feeling guilty, then feels guilty about that — a self-reinforcing loop. Joe identifies the layers beneath the should: under the guilt lies aimlessness, under the aimlessness lies panic, and under the panic lies a fear of purposelessness that she equates with wanting to die.
Joe reframes the existential fear: what if purposelessness is actually freedom? If there’s no point, you can do anything you want. The woman’s resistance reveals that she doesn’t trust herself with that freedom, so she uses shoulds as a cage to feel safe — but she’s sitting in a room beating herself up and worrying about death, which isn’t safety at all.
Joe notices that the woman repeatedly covers her mouth when laughing and suppresses her emotional expression. He identifies this as the core issue: her emotional repression is causing the depression, the shoulds, and the entire cycle. Her natural self is spunky and willful, but she learned from parents that this was “too much.” The solution isn’t more productivity tactics — it’s moving anger daily to reclaim the life force that’s being turned inward as shame and shoulds.
Key Concepts
- Shoulds are a cage that reinforces the problem they try to solve
- Purposelessness reframed as freedom
- Emotional repression causes depression and shoulds
- Anger turned inward becomes shame and shoulds
Key Quotes
“Your first distraction from this feeling is should. Your second distraction is spacing out.”
“You try to avoid aimlessness by telling yourself you should, but it reinforces the aimlessness.”
“If there’s no point, you can do anything you want.”
“You’re sitting in a room beating yourself up worrying about your death. How is this safe? There’s no safety in this.”
“What’s actually happening in your system is every time you’re pissed, you’re beating yourself up. So all the shame, all the anger that’s going outward is going inward as shame, as shoulds.”
“I guarantee you if you move anger every day for a month, your entire everything would change.”
Transcript
A woman describes being caught in loops of guilt about productivity — she feels guilty for not doing things, tries to stop feeling guilty, doesn’t do the things, then feels bad about that. Joe notes the density of shoulds: “You’ve got a cage of shoulds.”
Joe asks: if you couldn’t feel the should, what would you have to feel? The woman answers “aimlessness.” Joe guides her to feel it somatically — her stomach is clenched. She spaces out, which Joe identifies as a second avoidance layer after the shoulds. He connects this to the Golden Algorithm: avoiding aimlessness through shoulds reinforces aimlessness.
Joe invites her to fall in love with aimlessness, noting that he personally loves driving aimlessly versus rush hour traffic. He asks her to feel the aimlessness rather than think about it. She discovers panic underneath. Under the panic: “there’s no point to being alive at all.”
Joe reframes: what if purposelessness is freedom? She resists — she doesn’t trust herself with freedom because she keeps trying to do things she wants and doesn’t do them. Joe points out that she trusts shoulds (a habit) more than freedom, despite the shoulds providing no actual safety.
Joe notices she covers her mouth when laughing and suppresses emotional expression. Her girlfriend says her emotions are “too much.” Joe asks the audience to confirm whether her tears are too much — unanimous “no.” He identifies that her emotional repression is the cause of her depression and the entire should cycle.
Joe summarizes: she has a freedom available to her, doesn’t want to feel it because she’s emotionally locked down, and the solution is to stop locking herself down. She turns this insight into another should, which Joe catches. He asks: what’s the problem right now, in this moment? She recognizes there isn’t one.
Joe traces it to childhood: she was likely spunky and willful, and parents who weren’t spunky shamed her out of it. She confirms she rebelled hard but still believed them. The prescription: move anger daily for a month — out loud, visceral anger. But crucially, she can’t make it a should.