Joe defines “should” with precision across four dimensions: energetically it’s oppressive, intellectually it’s control-based, emotionally it’s rigidity, and neurologically it’s a threat. This isn’t metaphorical — when someone says “you should really do that,” the nervous system registers it as threat, triggering fight-or-flight responses that work against the very behavior being demanded.
He traces this insight to an experiment at age 26: he wrote down everything he didn’t want to admit about himself, put the list away, and found it months later. Most items had changed through awareness alone. The ones that hadn’t? Every single one carried a heavy “should.” This is when he realized that should is not just ineffective motivation — it actively prevents the change it demands.
“Should is a mechanism of shame… there’s a saying that says shame is the locks that keep the chains of bad habits in place.”
The mechanism is clear: should makes us think we’re bad (otherwise, why would we need the threat?), and thinking we’re bad makes it impossible to see what actually motivates us. We can spot this instantly in a bad manager — “you should, you should, you should” — and know it won’t work. But we do it to ourselves all day without noticing.
Related Concepts
- Shame creates the behaviors it punishes
- Shame stagnates behavior
- Should creates stress, not change
- Shoulds are a cage that reinforces the problem they try to solve
- Shame locks in the very habits it punishes
- Shame fuels the habit that creates more shame