Cecelia Baum Mandryk (01:19.031)
Let me ask you something. When you were growing up, were you considered the good girl? Were you the one who followed the rules, got the good grades, kept everyone happy? Or maybe you weren’t perfect, but you figured out that life went a lot smoother if you smiled, if you stayed agreeable, if you didn’t make waves, if you said the right thing at the right time. If that was you, maybe fast forward to today, do you still catch yourself staying yes when there’s something inside of you, either loud or quietly saying, you should probably say no to that?
Do you feel guilty if you don’t do things the quote unquote right way? Are you the one who feels like you have to keep all the balls in the air and you have to do that in the right way, perfectly. And if one of them falls, then you beat yourself up because things always fall. If you’re nodding along, this episode is for you. And I wanna let you know that I have been there too. Okay, by the time.
most of us reach the middle part of lives, or honestly adulthood in general, we are carrying rule books in our heads, lists of shoulds. And we don’t just have one, oftentimes we have shelves full of them. Right? I should be a good mom. I should work harder. I need to be a model employee or model leader. I shouldn’t need help. I should be able to hold it all together. We collect these rules early on because on the other side of them is safety and belonging. So for me, I learned when I was a kid,
that if I follow the rules, I got attention, I got love, I got approval, and I felt really accepted. Like I was in the in crowd, even if that in crowd was just within my own family, right? I was in good graces with other people. In adulthood, these shoulds look like. So as a kid, the should might be, I get good grades, or I talk to adults in a very polite way, or I make my bed, things like that.
Right, and then by the time we get to adulthood, shoulds look like it’s Sunday night and instead of resting or maybe sitting down with my spouse and hanging out, I’m folding laundry because I feel like it needs to happen before the beginning of the week. Or after I put my kids to bed, I open up my laptop again and do more work because there’s one more task that I just should do today. Or even though there’s a lot going on in my life and it would be more convenient to work from home today, I’m in the office because I feel like I should be seen as a good employee.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (03:35.755)
And below all of those, have guilt, have resentment, we have exhaustion, we have fear of letting other people down, we have the fear of feeling something like shame or like we’re not good enough. We have the fear of losing approval from authority figures, from our friends, of not being in the in-crowd any.
We as humans are brilliant at reading faces and emotions, right? We can see something when somebody else thinks something, right? But oftentimes we don’t actually know what they’re thinking, but we make inferences. And as kids, we do this all the time, right? We put meaning behind something that we read. And our brain turns those moments into ultimatums in our head about how to be in the world. And at first, those rules are semi-adaptive. Like if I think back to when I was a kid and I figured out how to kind of play the game,
I did get love and attention, right? But over time, these hardened into truths about me, truths about the world, truths about how life works, about who I need to be in order to be acceptable. I learned things like being good means I’ll be safe. If I’m good, then people will love me. If I’m good, then I will finally be enough. And being good means acting in a certain way. And so then decades later,
we’re still living by these rules that we wrote for ourselves when we were little kids, when we were watching our family of origin, when we were watching our community, when we were watching our society through media, that we were exposed to books we read. We learn, we pick up these little truths and we say, is who I need to be in order to be a good person. And then circling back around, this is where all of our rule books come from, right? These shelves of rule books that we have. And if you’re in the middle part of life and this is you, I’m…
you’re maybe just nodding along, because I know that I would be. And I’m like, yeah, I do have a lot of rule books. Yeah, I do know where some of them came from. Yes, it feels like there are a million things I need to do. My life is full of obligations, and I feel resentful towards the obligations, but I also feel a lot of guilt if I don’t actually fulfill them. And I think that, like that little tipping point right there, I have obligations and I resent the obligations. I resent all the things I feel like I should do or need to do or who I need to be.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (05:50.275)
but I also feel a lot of guilt, sometimes shame, sometimes fear if I don’t fulfill them because I think that there is danger on the other side of not fulfilling them. So I don’t really wanna fulfill all of them. Maybe some of them I actually do, but some of them I don’t want to. And I feel like if I don’t fulfill them, then I, my love, my worthiness, my me-ness is actually in question. So if this is you, your brain isn’t broken, it’s doing exactly what it was wired to do, right?
When you were little, following rules kept you safe. It kept you connected to the people who you depended on. And your brain logged that in the code, in its lines of codes. And because, and I’m not a coder, but I love, I think this just captures it so well. So you learn a good mom does this. And you’re not even a mom at this point, but your brain kind of writes it down in this line of code and sort of like a computer code with a computer program with legacy code in it.
Your brain keeps running that line of code, even if you don’t even know that it’s there. It’s in the subconscious, non-operating part of your brain. And it keeps running it until you edit it. And this is why rules don’t feel like choices. They feel like the truth, and they often feel life or death. Because when you’re a kid, if you think, if I’m not in the in-crowd anymore, I’m actually going to be kicked out, and that does kind of mean death. So your brain’s not being dramatic. It’s actually kind of helping you.
You’re in midlife, you’re obeying these rules that you picked up before you were seven, you’re shrinking around authority figures, you’re proving, performing, over giving, and some deep part of you believes that if you stop, the whole world will fall apart. And so this is why it’s so important to start to understand these shoulds. So this is why it’s not just trivial and like stop shoulding yourself is something that I sometimes see on social media, right? just stop shoulding yourself and you’ll feel better. Yes, that’s true. You will actually feel better if you stop shoulding yourself.
but it’s not a matter of forcing yourself to stop shutting yourself. It’s a process of understanding the programming that’s in your brain so that when you rewire them, you don’t end up with a full calendar and an empty sense of self. You don’t feel, you don’t end your days and your weeks full of resentment, but also kind of feeling like you’ve escaped guilt or danger, right?
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (08:10.488)
This is why you also can’t just relax or stop caring what people think because your brain is actually wired to care what other people think. And so it sounds really great. Just stop caring or just stop shitting or just do these. Just use willpower to kind of change how you operate right now. What we actually need to do to kind of change these things and why it’s important is actually to go back and rewrite that code, right? Because if you think about it like the legacy code, the legacy code doesn’t get rewritten by itself. You actually have to go back in and do that. All right. So
If you’re still here, your life is probably full of lot of shoulds or you’ve noticed that, man, I do have that sense of resentment at the end of the day, or I feel like my life is not my own, or I feel like I actually don’t know myself because these shoulds, these ways of being, in some ways they’re almost dressing in drag, right? There’s this persona or this costume you have to put on. You feel like this person you need to be that is very often separate from our authentic self. And when we have that separation, this dissonance,
that’s when we start to lose ourself and feel like we’re not living our life or we feel pretty empty in what we’re doing. And one of the keys, right, this is how to break free from these shoulds, is actually moving out of autopilot, right? It’s getting your brain out of just running that legacy code and actually going in there and seeing if you can look at the legacy code. So the very first step of rewriting this code, the very first step of this
work and getting out of autopilot is understanding the rules that you’re living by. And you can start this this week. And so I’m to give you free options, but then I want to I want you to actually choose one of these to go off and do so you can catch shoulds in the wild. So the next time you’re feeling that pressure or guilt or resentment, pause and ask yourself, what rule am I following right now? See if you can name it. I have a rule that I’m supposed to fold the laundry as soon as it comes out of the dryer.
Right? Whose voice does this sound like? Was it a grandmother? Was it another parent? Was it somebody else that you heard? Was it a TV show? Right? Whose voice is this rule in? And you don’t always need to actually identify that, but sometimes it can be really helpful. And then you might ask, what would I choose if I didn’t believe this one right away? Or what if there’s something else that’s true? So that’s kind of catching the should in the wild.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (10:35.758)
Then you can also listen for the word should. So pay attention to your language, right? I should go to the gym. I should say yes to this project. I should stay in the office, even though I feel like working from home would be more beneficial for me and I can actually do more, get more things done, right? I should be more patient. I should do this. Starting to notice the word should is a little indicator that you have some obligation or some rule that you’re following.
The interesting thing is that you don’t have to actually ignore or get rid of all of these, but you do actually want to pay attention to them. So you want to notice where you are doing this. I should work out today. Well, why should I work out today? What is the rule there? Well, if I don’t work out today, then I’m going to be lazy, right? Or I’m never going to be fit and healthy when I’m 80. So pay attention to that should and then ask and inquire what is the rule that’s behind this. And is it one that I actually want to be following? And check with your body.
When you’re doing things, you can see, and some of us have an easier time of doing this than others, if something feels heavy, if it feels draining, if it feels tight, if it feels restrictive, then it’s probably following some rule that maybe is in alignment with you right now. There’s some dissonance there. And if it feels lighter or expansive or something even more joyful, it’s a want. And I want to say here that if you are human with children, then you might have a certain number of obligations. But understanding
the rules and the obligations and the choices you’re making and the intersection of those, the Venn diagram of those is kind of where we’re going right now. We wanna figure out where those intersections are so you can start to feel empowered in your life, even if you do have obligations. That you do want to, because some of the obligations I have, once I understand the rules that I don’t wanna be following or what I’m telling myself, the obligation feels a lot lighter and I understand that it’s something that I do wanna do. Okay.
I want you, if you want to take this on, if you want to, because this, I really, this work works when you work it in your life, right? Intellectually knowing these things can be helpful, but implementing them in your life is where the real change happens. So you might ask, you might give yourself a mini challenge. This week, I want to catch just, I want to catch a should, or I want to catch shoulds around my body, around food, or around parenting, and see if you could write one of them down or all of them down and inquire where did this come from.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (12:58.221)
And do I want this rule in my life? I like to remind myself when I was going through this, I still do this by the way, this is not, this is an ongoing process. It’s not something I don’t think that perhaps ever ends. But when I was going through this, I would come back and back, back again and again to this line from a Mary Oliver poem from Wild Geese, which is, do not have to be good. And it was my permission to start to see the rules and understand that I did not have to obey all of them.
implicitly. I could actually choose which ones that I wanted to bring into my life and use. And every time old rules start pressing in, I would just say to myself, or even if when I noticed that I was shooting myself, I’d remind myself, you don’t have to be good. If you didn’t have to be good, what would you be? If you could be loved either way, what rule would you choose here? Okay, so if you take one thing out of today’s episode, let it be this, that naming the rules you’re living by
isn’t just a first step, it’s a way out of your brain’s autopilot. It’s such a crucial component of rewiring your brain because what you’re doing is you’re bringing the subconscious into the conscious. You’re bringing it back into kind of working memory and working brain power. If you want to use the coding example, you’re actually like opening it up and looking at the code, right? Instead of it just running back on autopilot.
And you don’t even have to change anything this week. You don’t even have to make drastic changes to the rules or even how you talk to yourself, but you do need to start seeing them if you want to start making shifts and changes. Because until you start seeing them, these lines of code, these rules are running your life without your consent. And once you do see them, you start to have agency and you start to have a choice. Do I want to keep this rule? Do I want to break it and write a new one? What is more true for me in this moment?
Why am I following this rule? Do I like that I’m following? Am I choosing to follow it? And then it shifts from autopilot into conscious choice. You’re kind of reassessing the rules that you have in your head. And then from here, it starts to move into what we’ll talk about next week in the next episode is if I’m not living by shoulds anymore, if I’m not trying to be this good girl, then who am I really underneath all of these? Okay, you’re not alone. You do not have to be good. Thank you for tuning in this week. Let me know.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (15:17.85)
someplace, either on social media or you can write me an email, but let me know some of the shoulds that you’d prefer to not be living by or some of the rules that you’ve rewritten in your life and how that shift has been powerful. All right, thanks for joining and I will see you next time.
