The first thinking error that I often see is when individuals tell other people in a group what they should do. People use the shoulds as the only way or the only right way things can get done. Albert Ellis defines the shoulds as rules or beliefs that we hold about the way things must be.
Some of the shoulds focus on our own behaviour and performance, while other shoulds focus on the way we believe that other people ought to behave and how the world should be. The shoulds can make us angry because our life experiences do not always match them. For example, when you prepare a change management plan everyone should be engaged in the change effort. This should is just plain irrational and defies logic.
One of the key constraints to the shoulds is that it dramatically limits our mental capacity to be flexible and adaptive. Life is constantly challenging us to be flexible. When things don’t go the way we would like , we can make ourselves totally anxious by demanding things should be different or we can choose to think in a more flexible way.
Below I have outlined an example from a group I was recently working with where the shoulds occurred and what I did to confront the thinking error.
I was engaged by a manager to help his team be more productive. The manager informed me that his team should be more motivated by the project they are on because it is a major implementation of a new CRM system. He felt that the team was lucky to be working on such a high profile project and should be delivery results on time, if not before the agreed time.
I conducted a workshop with his team and before long the manager started with the shoulds. Some of the team members agreed with the manager and suggested they felt disappointed with their performance, other look for opportunities to blame the project management timeline or the lack of resources for not meeting the managers expectations. As the manager continued to rollout the shoulds, I intervened in the discussion and asked the manager if he was aware at how often he used the word should when he was discussing his team’s performance? He replied he was unsure.
I then inquired into his experiences in setting and managing performance expectation and with his permission I invited the team to provide the manager with feedback on his process for establishing and maintaining performance expectations.
At first the group was reluctant to provide feedback, but it soon became clear that the manager used the shoulds all of the time and he his use of the shoulds was actually a de-motivating factor for the team as they felt like their effort where never good enough and measured against a criteria that the manager was never good at articulating.
The manager was unaware of how often he used the shoulds and as a result realised that his thinking error was actually constraining his team performance. Based on the feedback from his team, he started providing the team with clearer performance expectations. Furthermore, he was able to start to work with his team to monitor the effectiveness of the performance over time, instead of telling them what it should be like.
