Sod the Shoulds: Embracing Authenticity in Business

Welcome to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. My name is Angela Mondor, also known as the Geeky Girl. In this podcast, we're going to be talking about some amazing things to help you get over overgiving. Hi and welcome to this episode of the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. This topic is near and dear to my heart for lots of different reasons, and I'd like to call it sod the shoulds. And if you're not familiar with this concept, you know how we should all over ourselves? I should be doing this. I should be doing that. I want you to stop shoulding all over yourself. So when we are shoulding all over ourselves, we really are putting a lot of stress on ourselves. There's enough coming from all different kinds of places. Lots of people are shoulding all over you. So let's talk about what that looks like for you and how you can actually let go and really unleash some of your brilliance just simply because You're letting go of some of those shoulds, right? So number one thing, shoulds can be overwhelming. I should be doing this. I should be doing that. One of the things that I learned— well, it was early in the business, even though it took me a while to get there to learn it— was that when I was working, I always felt like I should have been with my children. And when I was with my children, I always felt like I should be working on my business. Notice how that goes in there. Once I was able to get past the shoulds and really be focused on the now, the here and now, the present, to be able to say, I am working in my business and therefore I'm going to give my business 100% focus on what I'm doing. And then when I was with my children, I was giving them 100% focus, my family, those kinds of things. I'm focused 100% on what I'm doing. The shoulds fell away a little bit in that because now I wasn't saying I should be doing this. I wasn't splitting my focus between multiple things. When I was with them in my, my family, I was spending time with them and I was being present with them and I wasn't thinking about business so that when I was working in the business, I wasn't also thinking about how I should be doing other things over there. By giving everything its own space and time and giving it its joy its own space, that gave me the ability to really lean into those moments. And then the shoulds fell away. Also, some other things that fell away was some of the stress about having to split my time between things. So shoulds come up in all kinds of different ways, not just that we present them to ourselves, but there's also societal shoulds that come. And so some of those things can come because we've heard them and we've embodied them and we believe in them. You know, it is a massive impact in your mental health by taking on a lot of these shoulds. You will also spend your time, you will be overgiving all the time because you're constantly shoulding about trying to make things better. So there is definitely an an impact in your mental health, your well-being, also in how you show up in your business and how you show up in your personal life as well. When you are embracing your true brilliance or when you are embracing your own joy in the moment, right, spending time in, you know, where you should be— here I go, should, Anya— but spending time in what you're doing and making that choice and being present to be part of that brilliance, what's really cool is that you have this new self-discovery, you begin to actually recognize these innate talents that you have, and you can now spend time in these moments reflecting and really spending time on those things. When we let go of the societal shoulds, we can now start to be who we really are. You can live in your own personal— whether you call it crazy like I do, or whether you call it Weird. There's lots of different ways that you can look at who you are as a human being and be able to be strong and true and self-confident in who you are by sodding those shoulds, not listening to the way that you should behave, not listening to the way you should be doing your business. There was years ago when I come on video, most of the time people would say, you should wear makeup, you should be doing this, you should be doing that, you should be doing this. It was difficult for me to get past those shoulds. I've never been somebody who enjoyed wearing makeup. It was never part of my identity or who I was or how I presented myself to the world. And yet people continued to should all over me about it. I'm past it. I'm over it. Obviously, I've made it this far and still haven't fell into that fantastic place. I, in my own personal weirdness, my own personal crazy, here's how I show up. Like it or don't, that's up to you. I'm not here for you to necessarily, you know, follow it. You know, you should Should. Here we go. Shoulding. It comes up a lot in our language, to be honest. I'm not here because of how I look. I'm here because of the information that I want to share with you. I want you to live in your brilliance, and I want you to sod the shoulds. I want you to have an amazing life, a brilliant existence, so that you can impact amazing people as well. So when you are thinking about your natural abilities and how you want to show up in the world, whether you love wearing makeup or whether you love wearing dresses, or whether you love to have your hair tied back in a ponytail and you don't care if you're wearing sweatpants, whatever the case may be, whoever you are and however you want to show up, I'm encouraging you to let go of some of those shoulds because those shoulds are going to hold you back. By having other people tell me how I should behave or how I should show up in the universe, it held me back from sharing my own gifts with other people. It held me back from being able to say, hey, I'm loud and proud and here I am. So it's important to be able to say no to people. Part of slotting the shoulds is the nos. No is a sentence after all. Being able to create those boundaries so that you can protect yourself. My boundary in terms of makeup was pretty solid. In fact, it wasn't that I ever decided, oh, I should go that way. But it was just, it hurt to have those people say those things. But people will say things about us and it's important for us to understand what those boundaries are. You put them in place and then it's your job to Reinforce them. You can put any kind of boundary you like around you and people will bash against them, whether they're doing it because they're trying to be mean or whether they're trying to be helpful or because they're just trying to see what your boundaries are. It is still our job to reinforce those boundaries. Nobody knows what boundaries you have until you alert them to those, and then it's important for you to reinforce them. When we are coming up against those things, when we're coming up against people who are testing our boundaries or who are shitting all over us, It is important for us to be able to look at these situations and really look at them from a bit of a, a bit of a view above, right? I wouldn't say you have to go as far as 30,000 feet because that's my favorite foot. Apparently I talk about that a lot, but definitely zoom out a little bit. And when you see what's happening, to be able to look at it with a different eye view. So think about if somebody else were saying those things to your friend, or if other— if you saw another creator creating things and people were saying this thing about them, what would that look like to you? And delegating to a supportive team is also really important, especially when we're looking at the shoulds of how we should run our business. If you have things that are coming up and you're saying, oh, I should do this in my business, or I should do that in my business, I encourage you to think about it. Should you? Should you really do those things? Or is somebody else telling you you should do those things? Or are they coming up as shoulds because they're not something that's in your circle of brilliance? That can happen too. Sometimes we're like, oh, I should do that. And it's like, look at my body language. Oh, I should do that. You feel the weight of the situation. Now, maybe it's something that you want to do or something that your business really needs you to do. And maybe you're not able to do it. Maybe it's not in your circle of brilliance. Maybe it's not even something you like doing. Now, you can look at delegating that to a supportive team. Those are some important things to do. Especially if you're out there in the universe creating things and other people are shitting on you. Make sure that you have a good solid foundation of people around you to support you when those things happen. And I don't just mean other keyboard warriors who are willing to stand up for you online, but literally somebody who could listen to you, somebody could hear what you're saying, and they can hear how you feel, and they can help you to move through some of the feelings that can happen when you are being shit on. Okay. There are lots of challenges that come from being part of or trying to change the way things are done. I'll tell you this right now. There's not one way to run a business. There's not one right way to do it. There's many, many ways to do it. And you can choose the one that works best for you. But it's really important for you to understand that as you're choosing new paths, you may have to overcome some challenges. While you're overcoming those challenges, like I said, make sure you have a supportive environment around you that can help you and support you in what you're trying to do. If you're trying to forge a new path that you've never gone down before, find a mentor or somebody that can help you with that path so that you could learn the way that they did it and choose to get help in how to, you know, mold it to what you want. Just because somebody did it one way doesn't mean to say that is the only way to do it. But learning how they did it will give you an insight on how maybe you could change it to work better for you. It might not be exactly the path, but learning the path is important for you to be able to change the bits and pieces that work best for you. Always, always, always celebrate along the way. So when something comes across your desk or your screen or some way comes across and you are able to sod the shoulds, you're able to reinforce your boundaries, I encourage you to celebrate. Find somebody who you can celebrate with and let them know, hey, this happened. You know, last year at this time, if this had happened, it wouldn't have turned out as well, but now it's turning out even better. Make sure that you're celebrating not only just sorting the shoulds or reinforcing your boundaries, but celebrating all of the milestones in your life, in your business, so that you can really find more self-confidence so that it'll help you in sorting those shoulds or getting rid of the people that are shoulding all over you. When you are moving towards this direction of getting rid of all the shoulds in your life, notice— you'll notice it in your language, much like I notice it in my language when I say things like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm shoulding all over you. When you hear it in your language, that's when things start to change for you. When you get to start to hear that coming out of your own mouth and you can identify it when you're saying it to yourself as well. Becoming authentic, authentically you, being your own brand of crazy, your own brand of weird, being that human being that you want to be or know that you can be. There's going to be some rough roads through the process. It's going to be bashing up against maybe some of the things you thought you should be doing. Some of the things that you have been taught through childhood to see the world one particular way. I encourage you to, you know, weather those rough seas with friends, with mentors, with supportive groups of people that can help you as you're going through them. Because ultimately, doing it alone is just no fun. You can do it on your own, but it's much more fun or much more entertaining sometimes. Maybe it's even much more supportive to have some people around you who can support you through this. And you can invite some feedback and some, you know, have some questions and find out what other people around you are doing that might look a little different than what maybe has been presented to you in the past. So I encourage you to take a look at what's happening in your life, in your business. Start to recognize those shoulds. They're not just coming from yourself. Certainly we put our own shoulds all over ourselves, but we hear it from other places on the, you know, people speaking to us, or we've heard it in, you know, the way that people have tried to teach us in the past or whatever. There's lots of different shoulds that come into our worlds. But to actually start to listen, to hear the words and to embrace them and say, oh, I recognize that for what it is. That's not where I need to be right now. I don't need to be shoulding all over myself. But I do know that there's a lesson there. I'm going to take it so that I can embrace it. I can learn from it. And then I can turn it into my own personal brand of crazy or weird or whatever kind of thing that you can possibly think of so that you can be authentically you. Living in your authentic self and sodding the shoulds is definitely a way that you can bring more joy to the world. The more joy we bring into the world, the better our world will be. That's just my humble opinion. I hope you have a fantastic week, and I look forward to talking to you next week. Thank you so much for listening to the Overgivers Anonymous podcast. Your support means the world to me. You can find show notes for this episode and other goodies at overgiversanonymous.ca. And if you enjoyed this episode or you enjoy the podcast Just in general, why not join us in the Overgivers Anonymous Facebook group where you can connect with overgivers from all over the world? Head on over to geekygirl.ca/group.