2026 February 10 Stop should-ing on yourself!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me today to talk about getting the shoulds out of your life. If you like what you hear, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

This week we're going to talk about one word and its many forms. Should. Or its close cousin, shouldn't. "I should have done this or that." "I shouldn't have said that." "I should have married somebody or other." "I should have studied to be a..." "I shouldn't have gone to college." The list is almost endless, and it's always easy to blame ourselves.

"In retrospect, I should have known that would've been a waste of money." "I shouldn't have tried doing so much in one trip." But in reality — why should you have known any of those things? And even if you feel that perhaps you did make a mistake, blaming past decisions neither changes the present nor helps you learn.

Remember that mistakes and life's challenges are there to help you learn and improve. As one of my coaches often says, stop "shoulding" all over yourself.

But it goes deeper than just retrospective self-blaming, and the future version can be even more limiting and harmful. When you set up arbitrary future expectations, you're telegraphing to your brain that you're preparing to fail. "I brought food for the party, but I probably should have gotten more things — or different things." "I started a little side business, but I'll probably only get a few sales." The reason those last two are so destructive is because nothing has even happened yet, and you are already preemptively blaming yourself for a failure that hasn't even occurred.

And while those examples are pretty obvious, we actually do this to ourselves nearly constantly — and at great personal cost. "My line at the checkout is always the slowest." "I always buy something right before it goes out of style." "I'm not very good at writing thank-you notes." We're always predicting our own bleak future, then seem shocked when it turns out that way.

What part of this whole self-fulfilling prophecy is about trying to limit future disappointment? For most of us, I think society is also telling us that life is hard. "We might not have enough cake at the party, so we'll have to run out to the bakery." Sigh, what a pain. "Our business isn't doing very well, so we probably shouldn't have even started it." Sigh, what a waste. And a thousand other things we often say to ourselves.

But what if we change the script instead? What if instead of predicting failure, we celebrate every success? And instead of thinking that life is hard, we look at all our little tasks and say, life is easy.

Stop for a second and try to imagine what a difference that would make.

Instead of being disappointed that you didn't bring six kinds of cupcakes to the party, you can be thrilled that you remembered some of the kids needed gluten-free snacks — and you brought some. Instead of being disappointed that your little side hustle didn't get ten customers the first day, you can be excited that you got four customers, and two of them were brand new and didn't even know about you before. Instead of being disappointed that the checkout line is slow — it usually isn't — and instead of comparing yourself to others in other lines (which, by the way, is never a good hobby), you can be amazed that in only five minutes you can get whatever you need, and you had five minutes to send a friendly check-in message to that friend you've been meaning to write to.

In many — even most — situations, we get to decide how we want our life to be. Will it be hard and a failure because it's less than perfect? Or will it be easy and rewarding because we made progress toward our goals and noticed the good things going on around us?

Why should life be perfect? And why should life be hard? Are those really realities, or are they our own choice of how we want to perceive things?

Before you say, "Jim, you don't really know how hard my life is" — well, in the details, I probably don't. But what I do know is that over the course of interviewing people for this podcast over the past seven years, I have spoken with many people — often in very challenging circumstances — who were living what I would consider very difficult lives. And yet they kept telling me how fortunate or blessed they were, especially compared to many others. They decided to look for the good. And they had very different "shoulds" than many of us.

This isn't about ignoring life's challenges or pretending everything is just dandy and perfect. It's about where you want to put your focus and how you want to perceive life. And that decision to focus on the positive aspects — to be pleased with progress rather than expecting perfection — actually energized them to turn the hard things into easy things.

Their "shoulds" were actually more like "wills." We will have a good dinner and it will all be fine. We will have enough money for what we really need and we can all be grateful. We will work through this challenge, and now we will know more about what to do the next time.

I asked a few of those people to be on the podcast, and they all declined — they're pretty shy, and they didn't think what they did was particularly amazing. But in reality, they didn't realize how amazing they really were. Most of them were raising families, often with multiple generations living together, and they celebrated the successes instead of predicting failure when things didn't go perfectly.

Almost all of us have the ability to make that same choice. Instead of covering ourselves in "shoulds," we can live our lives from the viewpoint of what we will do and how we will perceive it. We can celebrate our successes instead of mourning the less-than-perfect outcome. We can learn from mistakes and challenges and know that the next time will be better.

Most of all, we can reframe our life from hard to easy.

Remember what I said about comparing yourself to others. It's very easy to assume that someone else has things much easier than you do. Chances are, they're looking at you and wishing they had your life because it looks so much easier than their current situation. Every path in life has its own challenges — it's just that we often don't really understand what they are when they belong to someone else.

So try to reframe life as just being what it is, and consider that the easy way — instead of the hard way — might actually be the real way to do it. Stop looking at what you should do. Instead, celebrate your progress and your wins. Learn from the challenges, and live life from the viewpoint of what you will do.

Your homework is to think about how many times, in one form or another, you said what you should do, or what should have happened. Keep a list for a few days. Extra points if you then go back and look at that list and think about how you can turn those "shoulds" into "wills." Then reframe your whole life's viewpoint from life is hard to life is easy.

That's it for this week. Thanks so much for joining me.

Remember: one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Please take a peek at UKR7.com — that's a link to help the people in Ukraine — and WCK.org, which is World Central Kitchen, Jose Andres's organization. They do amazing things, helping people rebound more quickly after a disaster comes through, often providing food and basic necessities. Both are great international organizations, but local charities can always use help too. And even something as simple as a smile to someone you meet on the street can change someone else's day in ways you can't even imagine.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along, subscribe, and hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment about what you'd like to hear.

Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of — because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.