Should: How Habits of Language Shape Our Lives

Culled from personal experience and keen observation about the effects of habitual self-talk on human experience, SHOULD is the most practical, in-depth study of the language of self-oppression that exists today. SHOULD helps readers reclaim their authenticity through letting go of the external voices that drown out our inner guidance. When you tell yourself what you should, have to, must, or ought to do, you put on a layer of obligation and identify yourself as oppressed. When you tell yourself that you need something or that you're trying,you put on a layer of frustration and identify yourself as oppressed. When you tell yourself that you can't or you have no choice, you put on a layer of restriction and, again, you identify yourself as oppressed. Chances are good that you don't notice the obligation, frustration, and restriction you heap onto yourself when you say or think these words,but that doesn't mean you don't experience them. The language of self-oppression nearly always comes to us as the voice of other. These words are the echoes of our indoctrinations - messages that come from the influential people in our lives and from the cultures in which we live. When your head is full of the voice of other, another very important voice gets drowned out: yours.