A Should Is a Rule With No Author

Listen to your own sentences today and count how many of them contain the word should. Picture a hypothetical engineer, and I am marking it as one, who thinks I should answer every message within the hour. The sentence sounds like a fact about the world and carries no name, no date and no reason. It never gets questioned, so it quietly runs the afternoon. That is the subject of this week's Mid-Week Mojo, and the tool comes from the meta-model in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming).

The idea in plain language

The meta-model is a set of questions that Richard Bandler and John Grinder, who founded NLP, described in their 1975 book The Structure of Magic. The premise is that everyday language leaves a great deal out, and that a few well-aimed questions can recover what was left behind. One category covers modal operators of necessity, the technical name for words like should, must and have to. These words present a rule as though it were a law of nature.

Here is a mechanical way to think about it. A should is a rule in your operating system with the author field left blank. The system runs it faithfully every day, yet nobody can say who wrote it or what it was meant to protect. The meta-model gives you two queries to run against that rule. The first is what would happen if I did not, and the second is who says I must.

Both questions can come back with a real answer. Sometimes the rule traces to an actual expectation, such as a client who needs a reply by end of day or a regulator who needs a form by Friday, and then it is a requirement you can plan around. Other times the trail leads to an assumption from an old job, an old boss or an old version of you, and nobody currently holds it. In that case the should was only ever a habit wearing a rule's clothing.

What the research does and does not support

We should be careful here, because NLP carries more confidence than the research supports and I will not borrow the authority of science for it. I have not seen a citable body of evidence that the meta-model questions improve outcomes on their own, and a 2010 review by Tomasz Witkowski in the Polish Psychological Bulletin found little empirical support for NLP's central claims. So the meta-model belongs in the category of a language habit to test, and it is not an established technique.

A neighboring idea has better footing. In self-determination theory, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci distinguished motivation that feels like pressure from motivation that feels chosen, and their 2000 review in American Psychologist linked the chosen kind with better wellbeing and persistence. Much of that evidence is correlational, so it shows an association and does not prove that rewording a thought changes how you feel. It also leaves a practical limit in place: questioning a should will not shrink a workload that is genuinely too large, because a real expectation is still real after you have examined it.

For Leaders

Your team hears your shoulds as policy. A must you say aloud once, such as answering messages after hours, tends to become a standing rule in the room. People keep following it long after you have forgotten saying it. Before you let one go out, ask yourself the same two questions: what would happen if nobody did this, and is it a requirement or a preference. Then say which it is. Giving the reason behind a rule, or naming it plainly as a preference, costs you one sentence and spares everyone from guessing.

For Individual Contributors

When you catch a should in your own thinking about your work, run the two queries on it directly. Ask what would happen if you skipped it, then check whether someone actually asked for it or whether it is a leftover habit. If the request is real, confirm where it ranks against the rest of your plate and plan for it. If it is a habit, you have just found something you can set down. Either answer is useful, because you are no longer obeying a rule you cannot name.

The rep

This week, write down three shoulds from your workday and put both questions to each of them. Mark each one as a requirement, a preference or a rule with no author, then notice which column fills up fastest.

This is a practice, not treatment. If the pressure you feel is constant and heavy, or you have been anxious or low on most days, a doctor or counselor is a better next step than any language technique. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour.

Live your life uncensored.

Reference: Bandler, R., & Grinder, J. (1975). The Structure of Magic I: A Book About Language and Therapy. Science and Behavior Books.

Reference: Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

Reference: Witkowski, T. (2010). Thirty-five years of research on Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP research data base. State of the art or pseudoscientific decoration? Polish Psychological Bulletin, 41(2), 58-66.