To Be Successful Give Up Your Shoulds

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To be successful in blogging you should give up your shoulds. Today is Give Up Your Shoulds Day so I wanted to talk about shoulds.

Common Shoulds Regarding Blogging

How many times have you heard some of these shoulds either from the mouths of other bloggers or in blog posts or websites or even at blog conferences?

“You should post more often, You should post less often, You should get a better blog design, You should promote all posts on Google+, You should never promote on Google+, You should have a Facebook page, You should not have a Facebook page, You should only have one blog, You should send auto DMs on Twitter, You should NEVER send Auto DMs on twitter, You should spend more time blogging, You should spend less time blogging, You should do what successful bloggers do, You should go your own direction and not copy what other bloggers do, You should listen to my blogging advice, You should listen to (fill in the blank’s) blogging advice, You should read this blogging book etc…”

Give Up Your Shoulds

They go on and on and on. I’m certainly not against blogging advice or I wouldn’t write about blogging, but I give you information so you can take what makes sense to you and scrap the rest. There is not one thing that works for everyone in blogging or in the rest of our life.  So give up your shoulds and make decisions and then stick with them.

If the should is from your own ideas such as you want to blog more often because you believe it will be helpful, then stop saying should and start planning to make it happen. Schedule it in and make yourself do it so you can’t say I should.

What’s Wrong With Shoulds?

What’s wrong with shoulds, aren’t they just a to-do list? Worrying too much about shoulds is not good for our mental health and can affect our physical and emotional health as well. Shoulds are a list of things that are never quite done well enough and when they aren’t completed, they nag us, making us feel bad for not doing something we should. Shoulds make you think it’s something that must be done without letting you think about it and decide for yourself if it’s important to you.  It’s better if we just don’t use that word at all.

The Definition of Should

Look at the first definition of Should and you will see why it’s not a great word to be using.

“used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone's actions.”

Exactly. It’s not used in a nice manner. It’s used to criticize someone.  Do yourself a favour and nix it from your vocabulary and next time someone else tells you that you should do something, tell them you will take it into consideration and decide if it’s right for you.

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