This Simple Action Helps You Escape from Thoughts that Block Joy

[00:00] Damianne President: Thank you for listening to this episode of Changes, Big and Small. I’m Damianne President your host, as we explore small steps that can help you make big changes to build the life that you want.

Have you ever felt trapped by all the shoulds in your life? What in this episode, coach Amanda Hess joins me to explore exactly this topic.

[00:25] Bio

[00:25] Damianne President: Amanda is a certified life coach who specializes in helping women get emotionally unstuck. Break free from overthinking and step into their most empowered selves. Through her relatable storytelling, an actionable process. Amanda has built a thriving community of women ready to embrace confidence and authenticity. As the host of the, how to love yourself, no matter what podcast. Amanda dives into topics like overcoming self doubt, cultivating self-love and creating a life filled with purpose and the joy. Her passion lies in guiding women, especially those navigating midlife and motherhood, to reclaim their personal power and rewrite their stories.

So, Amanda you work with people helping them love themselves no matter what. In fact, you have a podcast with that name. How did you get started with that work?

[01:19] Amanda Hess: Yeah, that’s a really great question. I’ll try to keep it concise. I have been a life coach now for five years, but prior to that, I did run an image consulting or stylist business. And prior to that, I had a lot of struggles. I’ve always been a really sensitive person. I’ve always been emotionally sensitive. My emotions have always been very strong. And when I got married and after I had children, that all came to a head . I was emotionally just not coping. I was, diagnosed with postpartum depression, which helped having like a reason, but ultimately didn’t help me feel any better.

And when I went to a psychiatrist after having some serious issues with medications just making me feel so, I guess, apathetic, I got a personality disorder diagnosis. And in dealing with that, I spent a lot of years trying to fix myself, trying to make myself better so that my life could feel better. And I found coaching, I found a marriage coach and the way she spoke about what she did felt really resonant with me. It felt like it was the right fit. And so I signed up for her program.

It was a one to one coaching program. And in doing that, I discovered that actually there really wasn’t anything wrong with me, that I wasn’t disordered, that I just really didn’t know how to handle emotions or handle the way that I thought.

And so ultimately It was a journey of self love through that process with that coach, and I really did learn how to love myself and what that looked like, which is not a set it and forget it thing. It’s a very dynamic process. And at the end of the day, when I completed that coaching program with her, I just knew that’s how I wanted to help other people as well, because I did find, I found myself in that process. I rediscovered that you can love yourself, even when you’re not perfect, that self love is the gateway to having better relationships with other people and that I could have a really fulfilling and amazing life. And so I started my coaching business and I started my podcast and I’ve been doing it ever since.

[03:32] Explaining Should thinking

[03:32] Damianne President: That’s an incredible journey. Thanks for sharing. And so in your podcast, you talk about joy, which is very aligned with this season of the podcast, since that’s the whole topic. And one of the things that you talk about is that there is a connection between people thinking shoulds, all of those shoulds and blocking joy. Maybe we can start there. What do you mean when you talk about should thinking and how does it show up in daily life?

[04:02] Amanda Hess: Yeah, it shows up in so many different places. What I see is that we become adults and we start thinking about the ways that we should be and the way that life should look and how other people should be. And we start creating this basically manual for how the world should work. And a lot of times that manual is in opposition with the way the world actually works.

And we can get very bogged down by the experience of wanting things to be different all the time. Wanting us to be different, wanting other people to be different, wanting the world to act differently. And in doing that, we start creating a lot of dissonance in our brains. We start having a lot of negative thinking that just is going to happen.

And I also want to just offer that’s how our brains work. We’re negative thinkers by design. It’s not something that we try to do. It’s something that’s kind of a set point cause we have that survival brain that is always looking for what’s wrong so we can survive and not die. If we were out in the forest, we’d want to look for the danger, right? But in our day to day life, the way that we do it, it starts creating all of these thoughts that create a of negative emotion. And then when we have negative emotions, such as disappointment, frustration maybe resentment and other ones like getting hurt by other people, we start having all of this negative emotion.

We don’t know what to do with all of it and we get stuck there. And so therefore we’re not experiencing any joy because we’re trying to get through the battle of all of the negative emotions that are constantly coming up for us. And it starts to be our full time job and our brain, by accident, ultimately, when it starts looking for bad things, will find more bad things and we will just keep collecting that in our subconscious and it creates an experience where we can’t feel joy.

First of all, we’re not allowing the emotion that we are creating so we don’t know what to do with that. And then we don’t have any room for joy because Our brain is busy trying to deal with all the negative emotion all the time. That’s how I look at it. How do you look at it? I’m curious.

[06:11] Damianne President: Yeah, and I think a lot of the time it shows up with overthinking, where we play the same patterns over and over again. And I certainly have had experiences where I’ve spent so much time finding things that do not work the way they should, which is basically the way that I want them to in my perfect world, where I don’t even see anything good anymore to appreciate. And then if you just focus on the negative, I’m right with you where there is no space for joy then.

[06:40] Amanda Hess: Yeah, it’s so true. I even had that experience this weekend, I was at a basketball tournament for my son, he’s 14 and he made the A team for his basketball team. Anyways, teenage drama is like a whole thing that you get to feel as a mom that I never really experienced beforehand. But it was really interesting how my brain wanted to focus so much on the fact that my son was being relegated to the bench and it’s all my brain wanted to think about. It’s all my brain wanted to do. It just wanted to stay stuck there. I will say this weekend was a lot of emotional effort because it requires a lot of self coaching. It requires regulating. It requires like, it’s a full time job sometimes to get your brain to stop focusing on something that it has decided is a major problem.

[07:23] Damianne President: I absolutely find that too. And even if you’re with somebody, for example, and you’re thinking of what they should be doing, then you’re also not present in the moment for you to even find things that could spark joy for you.

[07:35] Amanda Hess: Yeah.

[07:37] Joy versus Happiness

[07:37] Damianne President: One of the things that listeners sometimes ask is about what does it mean to have joy versus happiness? I think of happiness as being more performative than joy, and I’m curious how you think about those two similar concepts.

[07:53] Amanda Hess: I like that question. I think about it a lot, actually. , I really do because I feel I have a very joy filled life, but you’re right, it’s not performative. And I do think happiness to an extent is performative and we live in a culture where we think everybody should be happy. And so then how do we experience joy when we’re unhappy. How do we experience joy when somebody else is unhappy or something challenging is going on in your life or in the world? And I think that the answer, it lies in how you want to define joy.

For me, I always change the definition. It’s always kind of a moving target for me, but I would say that it’s ultimately, being able to go with what is and finding the pockets where I can experience connection, where I can experience groundedness, where it feels like the life that I’m living is the one that I’ve designed. And that’s how I would look at joy. It’s not being afraid of feeling sadness or grief or disappointment. It’s a knowing that this is the way life is supposed to be. That’s how I would define it.

[09:05] Do you engage in should thinking?

[09:05] Damianne President: Do you have any examples from your clients anonymized, of course, of people that were stuck in should thinking and what does that look like? If somebody is listening and you’re like, that’s not me. What might help them identify or relate to what we’re talking about?

[09:22] Amanda Hess: Yeah I have a lot of different examples. I’m trying to think of one that would be a good way to start. If I think about my clients, they all experience this, first of all. I think it’s very important to understand that this is a very human condition to have this should manual for other people and what’s happening,

I see it a lot in my clients when it comes to their relationships. So this is something that comes up in relationships a lot. I’ll give you a personal example before I started coaching myself, I felt that my husband didn’t really show me that he loved me because he didn’t do it in the ways that I wanted to have it shown. And so for instance, he would buy me flowers, but they would always be like the 5 carnations at the grocery store and I just don’t like them.

I would feel the expectation that I should feel grateful that he bought me flowers. But then I was also frustrated and irritated because he knows that I like peonies or something to that effect, right? And or he should know, right?

He should know. I like light pinks and I like white and they’d be like yellow and purple and green. And I look at them like, these are not what I like. And by the way, this still goes on, but I would make that mean that he didn’t love me. Then I would show up with resentment, and I would be mad, and we would have a pattern of having a fight again and again about him buying flowers because I make that mean that he’s not listening to me, that he doesn’t care about me and that he should, after 20 years of marriage, know what kind of flowers I like.

[10:57] Damianne President: Reasonable expectation. It’s what a lot of people are thinking.

[11:02] Amanda Hess: What you think, right? Is it’s not that I never think that anymore, because I do. I think it a lot. Not on purpose. It’s not a conscious thought. It’s a subconscious thought that pops up I would say that’s the experience of that should. And I give the experience because it just sticks out in my mind as being one of the things that we would always fight about.

And where I could release the should is knowing that he shows me love in a lot of different ways. For instance, I teach spin class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings at six in the morning, and he goes to the gym at five. He comes and brings me a coffee to my spin studio when my class is done every Tuesday and Thursday. And so I can start dropping the should. I can start seeing where there is that actual. love being shown in different ways. That for me is a really personal example that’s very small.

I find that it shows up for all of us everywhere, all the time. The mailman should know to do X, Y, Z with my papers. My children should know that they’re supposed to clean their room before they leave the house. My boss should understand that I want to get home to my kids. Like all of those kinds of shoulds, it blocks you from joy every time.

[12:18] Damianne President: Yeah, and what was coming up for me as you were talking was that sometimes not being able to see the value in things when you’re thinking of shoots. Maybe they’re perfectly beautiful flowers, right? But you can’t even see the beauty in the flowers because they’re not the ones that he should get you, or the ones that he should know you like, etc.

And so, we’re really cut off from the experience of life often when we’re just focusing on the should and not the reality of what is. I was talking to a friend about this recently and of course it comes up in relationships the most, right? Because we expect people to show up for us in the ways that we would show up for ourselves, but they are not us.

And so , one of the things she was saying is that, well, I’ve told him before. And so if he doesn’t do it, then that means he doesn’t love me. I’m like, well, that could mean so many other things. It’s interesting, the stories we create from situations just because our shoulds are not met.

[13:15] Amanda Hess: Yeah, it’s so true. And it’s not that we’re saying that you shouldn’t ask for what you want or that there isn’t room for improvement or that you can’t have conversations about these things. It’s true that their best maybe isn’t good enough for you, but the problem is when we’re trying to solve these things in our brain from the place of should, it keeps us stuck in that overthinking loop.

And then you have nowhere to go. It’s not solvable inside of your head. You’re not going to solve anything up here. It’s just, you have to start understanding what are you missing? When I look at myself and I look at that flower example, I posted a TikTok about that and I had several people go that’s not even a problem.

Of course, they don’t think it’s a problem because they haven’t been married to my husband for 20 years. But ultimately, I just really realized that beauty, looking at beautiful things is something that’s very important to my wellbeing. Knowing that, I can buy myself flowers that I really love to look at.

I can have a flower delivery service, bring me flowers once a week, knowing that’s really regulating for my nervous system. It makes me feel happy. There are many places to go with this. There’s many places to move around, but when we’re stuck in he should, or she should, or they should, well, now you can’t solve it because you’re trying to control how they are. And so you’re stuck.

[14:33] The Trick of Escaping Shoulds

[14:33] Damianne President: And I think that’s the key part, right? Because should comes from a place of control. It doesn’t come from a place of generosity or abundance or love. It really comes from a place of control. And so in the example that you gave, your approach was to look at what else is happening and not fixate on this one situation with the flowers. What else can people do to question the whole concept of should?

[14:58] Amanda Hess: I think the first part is developing an awareness, of what are you thinking and what is that creating for you? To be able to release the shoulds is first to just really recognize the manuals you have. One exercise that I’ll give my clients is I want you to write down your manual for this person, how you think they should be, the way they should act, what they should do, what they should do for you. Just write it all down, make it 15 pages if it needs to be write down every way that you think they should be. Then look at it and recognize that is blocking your joy. That is blocking you from the life you want. So what are we going to do now?

It’s a confronting exercise. And I will tell you, it takes more than one time to get through that, right? That takes coaching. That takes time, that takes intention, that takes somebody helping you through that sometimes because it is very difficult work because it’s not the way that our culture works. We live in a culture where, and we’re in different countries, but I still think it’s very much the same when we do have this all or nothing black and white thinking this is the way people should act, this is the way people should be. It’s inundated into our world, into our minds. So you are going against the grain. It’s going to take work.

[16:20] Damianne President: And as you say that, the other thing that comes up for me is that now in our world, we have relationships, we have interactions with people of many different cultures all of the time. And so your shoulds are very likely to be different from somebody else’s shoulds. And then how do you reconcile that?

[16:39] Amanda Hess: Yeah. And when you talk about joy, one of the things that I think truly brings us joy is connection to be connected to other people should will always block that. It will block you being able to be connected because you won’t be able to find that common ground, be curious about the other person, be curious about what they’re experiencing, be curious about why they do the things they do and why you do the things you do and finding that ability to, connect your humanness to each other.

When I look at. People that I coach that are going through divorce and separation and parenting agreements, you can create connections with your spouse, like your ex spouse, your ex partner, you can it requires dropping that should, it requires dropping that manual. What’s the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. At the end of the day, if you want a new result, you’re going to have to change how you approach it.

[17:43] Fear associated with dropping shoulds

[17:43] Damianne President: When we talk to people about shoulds and dropping shoulds and the whole idea of a manual being something that blocks their joy, sometimes there are fears that come up. What kind of fears do you see come up for people around that?

[17:59] Amanda Hess: You’re right. There is a lot of fear. I think for one thing, people don’t want to be a doormat. And so they feel that if they drop that should, then that means that they don’t get to have standards. And that’s not true. It is very nuanced because you can drop the should and still have the behavior be a no.

I think about even clients that have partners that were abusive in one way or another When we think they shouldn’t act that way, what I find is that we internalize that to mean that I’m the kind of person that deserves or that is somehow creating this or like I wasn’t strong enough or I didn’t do the right things because this person is doing this to me. And then the only thing I can do is lay down.

That’s not what we’re saying. It’s not that at all. It’s going, this person shows up in this way when they’re like this, and that has to do with them and I get to decide whether or not that’s good enough for me. I don’t think he should be different or she should be different, but they are who they are and they act how they act. I get to decide what I need to do for me and to take care of myself because there is so much gray area here.

Flowers are not that big of a deal. Nobody’s going to die or be injured or be hurt by flowers. But that’s not true when it comes to people’s words and actions sometimes. And so we definitely want to know that we can have boundaries and that this is the nuanced thing. It is not static. It’s going to change from day to day. And it’s getting to know yourself and growing that sort of trust inside of your own ability to be able to determine. whether or not you feel ready to have that interaction with that person, or if you just need to put up a boundary and come back to it later.

[19:42] Damianne President: Yeah, and I think that’s the key part here, where should is really about what somebody else would do whereas when you have a boundary or when you’re acting from values or principles, really it’s about how you’re going to show up, how you’re going to behave in the different situations. And exactly as you said, sometimes it means walking away.

Sometimes it means doing something the other person might not like. Figuring out what is it that you need and how do you get that in that situation. But also sometimes it’s recognizing certain things, like not everything is a fightable offense. Do you know what I mean?

If somebody doesn’t agree with me about something oh there are so many different topics that are polarizing these days. Right now, should TikTok be banned? Maybe I think yes, and somebody else thinks no. And I’m like, they should remove TikTok from their phone. It’s not safe for the country. Like there’s all of this rhetoric, right? And these types of things really divide people. But it doesn’t really affect me, actually, if you have TikTok on your phone. I don’t really care that much. And so that’s what I mean when I say not everything is a fightable offense.

[20:53] Amanda Hess: Oh, I totally agree. And I do think, if you’re the kind of person that is listening to this and you notice you have lots of shoulds, it’s worthwhile investigating how you’re taking care of yourself emotionally. I always coach on an emotional scale, like we feel that emotion from a one to a 10. So if somebody says they have TikTok on their phone and you think TikTok is awful and that nobody should have it and that it’s not good for the world, you might feel that at, I probably feel that at a two out of 10. But some people are feeling that at a 10 out of 10. And so then they’re so dysregulated by that emotion that this is why they go into a fight response and they start arguing and all of those things.

And so it’s really noticing, how come I’m so dysregulated by this, right? Like, why is this creating this much dysregulation? Typically it doesn’t have anything to do with what the other person’s doing. It has to do with maybe you believing that you get to have an opinion. And that you’re allowed to stand in that opinion, even if somebody disagrees with you. It could be that maybe you’ve had an experience where somebody has been bullied, or maybe you were bullied online, and so this is creating this, dysregulation for you. It is always, I think, an emotional thing when we want to lean into you should be different and then when they’re not, we get very upset. It just tells a story.

[22:16] Damianne President: I hope TikTok is a frivolous example for most people, but that they get the point of what we’re trying to say. Do you have any examples from somebody that you’ve worked with or from yourself of the transformation that you experienced from breaking free from shoulds?

[22:32] Amanda Hess: I’m going to give you an example of a client and I think it’s a really good example because we had been working together for quite a while. Actually I had her as a guest on my podcast and she, first of all, she came to me because she felt there was an addiction issue. And so she was working through that. And then we were working through coaching and it turned out that she’d had a lot of trauma that had gone on previously with what had gone on in her life. So we were really working on unwinding that and building her self esteem and building her self confidence and finding ways to get her to feel more regulated within herself without using Other things to make her feel regulated, or to numb out. And then what ended up coming up was that she had a certain way that she was eating and it was very much regimented. She viewed it as being a problem and that it was I forget the word she used, but basically pathologizing it. She would come to calls with it. And I said to her on the call, what if it’s not a problem? What if you shouldn’t have to eat anyways? What does it matter? The way you eat, how does it matter? She was really able to see that she was putting so much personal judgment on it, how you should eat normal.

And I do think that’s a very common thing, especially at this time of year, the way we should be eating, right? And that it’s disordered if you do this, or it’s wrong if you do that, or you should never eat this thing. And it’s so ingrained in us. We did a one coaching session on it and she worked through it, she thought it through and it’s, you plant a seed and that seed, if you water it, it will start to grow in that this isn’t a problem. I can be okay. I don’t need to worry about this. And it disappeared on its own.

She just stopped eating that way. Really she stopped eating that way because we took the sheds away. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. There’s just the way that you’re going to do it that’s going to work for you.

And so I know that’s not a relationship example, but it is one that really sticks out for me because I do see this in people a lot and that they think they should even for yourself, I should be a certain way. I should be able to maintain a calendar like this. I should be able to go to the gym at five in the morning. I love just being the devil’s advocate, even with myself and being like, what if that’s not true?

[24:44] Damianne President: I think that’s an excellent question when you catch yourself in a disagreement with somebody over something, or even with yourself, where it’s like, what if that’s not true? Or what if everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be right now?

And those can even be really fun just to play with, right? And I think that when you can play with these ideas, it really opens up the opportunity for you to try something different.

[25:13] Amanda Hess: I agree. I think that one of the benefits for me, because I am a coach and you’re a coach as well. So being a coach, I find that we’re so lucky because we think about this all the time. When are we not thinking about this? We’re either coaching somebody and we’re thinking about it or we’re creating content and we’re thinking about it.

We’re always thinking

[25:33] Damianne President: Oh, we’re working on ourselves

[25:34] Amanda Hess: And then we’re putting it inside of us, but it starts to become this muscle that we grow. What if that isn’t true? What if they could be right too? What if there’s duality here? What if you can be right and I can be right? What if that’s true?

Those kinds of thinking patterns, when you grow them, they make you experience a lot more happiness and joy. They just do because you don’t feel as attached. Because if you feel really attached to whatever story you have about the way that your marriage should look or the way that working should look or the way your mother should be with you or your kids should be as adults, there’s no elasticity in that thinking. And so therefore when things go sideways, then you experience a lot of emotional pain. I had a coach that I worked with years ago and she had a concept of clean pain and dirty pain and you experienced a lot of dirty pain because it’s the pain you’re causing yourself by being so attached to only one story.

[26:31] Invitation/Challenge

[26:31] Damianne President: Amanda, do you have an invitation or a challenge for listeners of something they can do today to have more joy in their life around the topic of breaking free from shoulds.

[26:45] Amanda Hess: I think what we just talked about would be the most poignant, most effective fun way to approach it when you notice yourself thinking that he he should, she should, I should, it should, just asking yourself the question, what if that’s not true, then what?

[27:07] Lighting Round

[27:07] Damianne President: We’re going to end with a lightning round. I only have three questions. How does joy feel to you?

[27:13] Amanda Hess: I feel joy in my chest. It feels big. It feels light. It’s like kind of sparkly. It feels grounded. That’s how joy feels to me.

[27:26] Damianne President: What is something bringing you joy right now, today?

[27:31] Amanda Hess: So many things. Right now, it’s the tea that I made myself before this podcast. In all honesty, I don’t want another cup of coffee. It’s going to make me feel gross, but I want to drink something warm on this podcast. So I made myself this cup of tea with a little honey and a little milk and it’s in my sparkly pink mug . You all can’t see it, but it makes me very happy.

[27:52] Damianne President: Lovely. And the last one, do you have a book recommendation for listeners? It can be anything. It doesn’t have to be specific to the topics we’ve talked about.

[28:01] Amanda Hess: Can I give two?

[28:03] Damianne President: Yes, absolutely.

[28:05] Amanda Hess: So there’s two. The first is not a book per se because I can’t think of the book titles. I’ve read several, but Byron Katie, if you’re struggling with shoulds, Byron Katie has books where literally her whole work is about letting life be the way life is supposed to and it is a beautiful thing.

I find her, the things she writes, to be very good for this type of thinking and shifting it. The second one is Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. I’ve been recommending that to my clients. I read it years ago. I think both will help you access more joy in your life.

[28:39] Connecting with Amanda

[28:39] Damianne President: Thank you. Now, Amanda, before we end, can you tell people where they can find you and how can they get involved with your work?

[28:49] Amanda Hess: Thank you. Well, there’s many places you can find me. First of all, I also have a podcast called How to Love Yourself No Matter What. I’m also on Instagram The Amanda Hess. So those are the places you can find me. You can come to my website, amandahess. ca. I would love to connect. If you come find me on social, please connect with me, send me a DM. I always like to have a conversation. I’d love to know your thoughts about what we talked about today.

[29:15] Damianne President: And all of those links will be in the show notes as well. Do you have anything that I didn’t ask that you want to make sure people come away from this podcast with.

[29:25] Amanda Hess: The only thing I would say is that it’s creating joy to me is a practice and that means that it’s not a place that you have or you don’t have. It’s something that anyone can grow in any moment. So, if you’re finding yourself feeling like you have no joy right now, it’s one baby step at a time.

I promise you that, what we’re sharing here is the path forward and if you need support, you should reach out to us. We’d be happy to help you.

[29:54] Damianne President: And in terms of your podcast, Amanda, do you have an episode you recommend where people should start?

[30:00] Amanda Hess: That is a great question, but I can’t think of any right now.

[30:04] Damianne President: I did not prep you for that.

[30:06] Amanda Hess: There’s 200 plus episodes there, so, what I would say is, look for episodes in the last couple of months if you want to engage with the newest concepts and thoughts that I’m thinking about. I do actually have an episode on joy, I’m positive

[30:20] Damianne President: You do. I was listening to it earlier. I was just trying to see if I had it in one of my tabs, but not on my fingertips. I will definitely add that to the show notes too.

[30:30] Amanda Hess: Thank you for doing that. I think my most recent episode, I talk about confidence. I think all of these emotions are interrelated. So if you want to feel more joy, creating more confidence is a good way to do it. So you might want to check out that one.

[30:41] Damianne President: Perfect. Thank you very much, Amanda. It’s been lovely chatting with you.

[30:45] Amanda Hess: Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate you letting me share with your audience.

[30:50] Damianne President: My pleasure.

[30:51] Free Webinar

[30:51] Damianne President: I’d like to invite you to a special free webinar on February 5th, 2015 at 12 noon new York time. That is Eastern standard time at 12 noon. And this workshop I’ll help you unlock sherds. So that you won’t give up on your new year’s resolutions. Did you know that over 80% of people do. Join this free webinars so that you’re not one of them. Go to Changes Big and Small dot com forward slash webinar. To register for free. Until next time, remember that change begins. With one small step. Half a great week