Should Into Must

Should Into Must asks you to look at things you have been telling yourself you should do, and then rewrite them into musts. List the shoulds, all of them. Then take each one and ask what would have to be true for it to become a must, and whether you actually want it to. Here is the honest position on this one. It comes from the personal development and seminar tradition popularised by Tony Robbins in his work on standards. There is no clinical research behind it and no peer-reviewed evidence that we can point you to, but it is here because practitioners have found the exercise useful, not because a trial says that it works. What it does well is separate two piles. Some of your shoulds are genuinely yours, and you have been treating them too lightly. Others were handed to you by somebody else, and you've been carrying them for years without ever agreeing to them. Both outcomes are useful. Prompting a should to a must changes how you schedule it. Dropping one you never signed up for takes the weight off you. The trap is turning everything into a must. Fifteen musts is fifteen shoulds, just dressed up as a must. Three at most. Then put them somewhere that has a date on it, i.e. into your actions list.