Step 1: Stop Shoulding All Over Yourself!

People don't understand that when we say, "I shouldn't have said that" or "I should have done this instead", that we are speaking with regret. Words carry power and fuel our actions. Living a life in regret is not the path to happiness, and generally speaking, we are never fully aware of the impact our thoughts, words and actions have on our everyday life until we hone our awareness skill.

The first step to unphuck yourself is to stop 'shoulding' all over yourself. The first time I heard the term 'shoulding' was from Tony Robbins, and I adopted it immediately. We are all conditioned. Every day I have people, sometimes many people, telling me what I should and shouldn't do. Not only do we 'should' all over ourselves, but other people 'should' all over us as well.

The moment I stopped completely 'shoulding' all over myself is the very moment I stopped feeling guilt; guilt I wasn’t even aware was present. Only once it was gone, did I recognize what had been. Letting go of all that I should do, think, say, and feel, allowed me to see things differently and to change my focus. We are conditioned by our parents and society from the moment we are conceived, and the result of this conditioning is fear and guilt. Think The Handmaid's Tale. After living through a pandemic, it is not too far a stretch of the imagination to understand how the world could become like it is portrayed in this dystopian series. It’s the frog in boiling water scenario. It happens so gradually that it is invisible to our conscious awareness.

Our lives are dictated by our perspective, but perspective is an internal process and not an external one, and therefore is not about what we are looking at. Perspective, in fact, is all about how we look at what we are looking at. The lens we look through is dictated by our internal terrain and status quo. We create what we see by how we respond to what we see. We set the tone. (Who is doing the seeing, and who are you?) When the voices of those telling us we should do things this way, or we shouldn't do them that way, is louder than our own internal voice, is the moment total conditioning occurs, and we begin to march to the beat of another's drum. And we are completely unaware that we are no longer the loudest voice in our own head.

To un-condition ourselves completely, we must let go of everything we have been taught to think about ourselves. Everything. Even if it seems like it is a positive attribute. To become who we really are we need a blank canvas that only we paint on. The reason you become nothing is because then you can become anything you wish. We have no idea who we are outside of our conditioning, and we need the freedom to discover all that we are without the sway of anyone or anything else influencing our perspective. Essentially, we must learn to listen to our own voice. Turning up the volume to our inner voice though, is not the easiest thing to accomplish. Change is never an easy process and always feels unnatural to begin with which is why we fight it so much.

An added, and marvelous, side effect to becoming unphucked, is the amazing sense of freedom that ensues. Freedom is our highest need [mine and Steve’s], and to realize we can feel absolutely free just by undoing all the conditioning has been awesome.

When you go off track and do the ‘wrong’ thing, something you might regret or think you should have done differently the most IMPORTANT thing is to forgive yourself. You are human. You are doing your best. Always. Nobody wakes in the morning and thinks to themselves that today, they will do their worst and be the worst version of themselves. Nobody! Even the serial killer thinks they are doing what is right. Yes, through fear and emotional pain, their thinking has warped beyond recognition, but ultimately, they still believe they are doing what they should be doing. We all operate this way. We all need to feel ‘right’. It is how we obtain our chemical D.O.S.E- Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin and Endorphins. We are all chemical addicts and will do whatever we must to receive our daily fix. We cannot operate without these neurochemicals, we must receive them and if we are breathing, it implies that we are receiving them. So, everyone who is breathing, no matter who you are, will do what they must each day to get their fix. We are Pavlovian humans. For more information on this, I discuss it in the workshop I Am Divinely Guided and Steve has written extensively on it in his hypnotherapy book: The Holistic Guide To Hypnotherapy, Vol 2.

To begin the unphuck process you will need to become aware each time you should yourself, or anytime someone else shoulds all over you. To begin, you may only catch it after the fact. This is ok. It is a process, allow yourself some grace to get it right. It doesn’t happen overnight. You are not conditioned overnight. How old are you? That is how long you have been conditioned for. It will take a moment to undo. Be gentle with yourself. Simply acknowledge that some shoulding has taken place and affirm that you are becoming more aware each day to the shoulding affects and endeavor to notice it next time as you are about to say it.

The process will follow this path:

1.    You will should yourself and afterwards realize you did.

2.    After many attempts to catch yourself before you say it, you will suddenly realize you are about to should yourself and instead use the word ‘could’. For example: “I should really eat a salad but….” This makes you feel guilty when you don’t eat the salad. Instead say: “I could eat a salad, but I choose to eat this cake instead" and enjoy it!

3.    It will take some time before ‘could’ will feel like the natural response instead of ‘should’. Each time you catch yourself as you are about to should yourself, congratulate yourself for your quick response. If a little should sneaks out, correct yourself in the moment. You are rewiring your brain and the magic number is 21 days of doing the new habit and not doing the old one.

4.    After the 21 days of no shoulding, and only coulding, you will begin to naturally remove the word should from your vocabulary when it pertains to you.

5.    If other people should you, just mentally correct it in your own mind. They are giving you a wonderful opportunity to complete this process faster. When you reply to them, use the word could instead. For example of a definite shoulding: “You shouldn’t take that route to the mall, there is a much faster way.” You can reply: “I could take your route, however, I take my route, even though it is longer, because I make a pit stop on the way.”

Let’s Talk Presence

Ever heard the statement that we must be present in the present moment? Makes sense, right? But have you ever wondered how to actually be present in the present moment? What does it look like when we do it? Yoda said: “Do or do not. There is no try.” This is a hint about the present moment. Try is a future projection. As well as removing ‘should’ from our self-talk we can exponentially increase our personal power by talking in the present tense. We tend to speak in the past or in the future tense. For an example of a future tense statement: “I am going to enjoy this cake”. Like ‘try’, ‘going to' implies a moment in the future, not right now. The problem with future tense is ‘tomorrow never comes’. It is always the present moment, because that is the only moment of time that exists outside of our imagination. To tweak this into the present moment we can say: “I am already enjoying this cake, just the smell of it is making me drool”.

An example of past tense speech is: “Ah, it was so much fun when we went to the fair. We had a blast. I wish we could do it again.” To tweak this into the present tense, our perspective must be in the here and now. It must be focused on what we are doing right now. This is the only moment of time that exists, therefore, we can only FEEL in the present moment. When we are in past or future tense, we are not feeling, we are imagining what we could or did feel. For an example of present tense we could say: “I am having such a good time with you right now. It reminds me of the time we went to the fair. Do you remember everything we got up to. I peed my pants laughing!”

If you are not going to enjoy yourself right now, when will you? Right now, IS ALL THAT EXISTS! The past and future are all in your imagination. If you are not happy right now, this very moment, when will you be? We only EXIST in the present moment, so that is the only moment of time we can feel gratitude. It is the only way to be grateful; by being present in the present moment. If you are not present in the here and now, you are only imagining being grateful. It is not the same as being grateful.

How we speak is really important, because what we say, we create. That’s exactly what affirmations are designed to do. I Am is the most powerful affirmation there is, because we become what we say we are. For affirmations to be fully effective, they must be worded in the present moment. We cannot affect what will come to pass, what we will have in the future, if we are not aware in, and focused on this present moment of time.

Right now, is ALL that matters. Right now, is EVERYTHING. Right now, is where we exist and right now is the only moment, we can actually feel connected, and connection is why we are here. It is the antidote to separation and duality as well as to addiction, we’re all chemical addicts remember. It sucks to feel alone. Loneliness feels like nobody can understand how you feel. It is possible to feel lonely while being surrounded by people. This is what separation and duality feels like. Gratitude is the cure. For it to work its magic, we must feel it in this present moment.

Again, embodying this principle takes practice. We are deeply conditioned to NOT be present. All day long there are message units vying for our attention. Think the News! It is all about making you focus on what is out there to fear. War. Crime. Famine. Rising prices. Man, it is depressing and how many people turn on the news as soon as they wake up in the morning? Pavlovian humans that are totally unaware of what they are doing right this very moment. If they were, they wouldn’t be watching the news. They wouldn’t waste one more moment worrying about the future. We create the future in this very moment. Anything that grabs our attention removes us from the present moment.

Recently I saw someone on Facebook shout out indignantly that we are all entitled to be angry. Their response to comments suggested the indignant tone. Yes, we all are entitled to feel any emotion we choose. Of course, everything is our choice to make, but when this is the only moment of time that means anything, do you want to spend it in anger? Do you want to spend it feeling hurt? Do you want to spend it suing someone? Do you want to spend it worrying about something? Do you want to spend it fighting the system? How do you want to spend this present moment? You get to decide. But the decision must be felt in this present moment. We must be present to experience life. We are spiritual beings here for a human experience. If we experience it all in the now, we can choose to experience it all in joy. It is a choice we get to make.

Every single one of us can choose to change our story right now! The past has no bearing on this moment unless we allow it. Here’s the problem with the past. Nobody remembers it as it happened. We all remember it as it made us feel. We cannot experience the past as it happened. That moment has passed. It’s dead. Gone! We are conditioned to reminisce about how good life was and to worry about the future. How do you think an alarm company sells their product, how most companies sell their product? They make you fear not having it! The reason for this is, a person who is present in the now, doesn’t need much. And a person that doesn’t need much, is hard to control, and control our buying habits, or our voting habits, is their agenda. They condition us to buy their product through fear. Religion works the same way. They make you fear going to hell so you will follow what they say. All religions are man made. Just some human’s interpretation of the bible. Even if you believe, as I do, a divine presence did the dictation, it was still filtered through a human experience. Each human experience is clouded by what the individual thinks, says, does and most importantly, feels. How does the king get the workers to pay their taxes? By beating them if they don’t. They beat conditioning into us through pain if we do not comply. Physical beatings are as painful as jail. The pain is the same, the time has changed. Today we have global warming, carbon emissions, animal species going extinct. All these things to condition us to worry about our future.

We get to choose how we wish to spend every moment of every day. And we get to make the choice over and over and over and over again. One Thousand and Forty Four Times per second! That’s right. That’s how many present moments per second exist.

To understand this further, we’d love you to watch our video about a new element that scientists have recently discovered. We are using a metaphysical metaphor to explain our concept. We hope you enjoy watching it as much as we did making it.