Hello and welcome to the new mindset hootis podcast. My name is Case Kenney at case.kens.k on

Instagram and this is my weekly podcast where I create short no BS episodes dedicated to helping

you become the person you're meant to be, leave your comfort zone and live a purposeful and

fulfilling life. Let's go.

Thank you. live a purposeful and fulfilling life. Let's go. All right. Welcome to episode 790. Hello, my friend. Welcome to a fresh new episode of New Mindset, Who This, As always, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for supporting me. And today, I want to talk about another powerful word. It's kind of what we do here. We talk about the language of optimism, how to move through life using words to help us do just that. So let's start with one word. And there's a particular tone to this word that carries weight. It sounds responsible. It sounds disciplined. It sounds adult, right? This is the

word that we reach for when we want to fire ourselves up and hold ourselves accountable. That word is

should. You know what? I should work out.

I should get ahead of this. I should be more focused on this. I should I should have figured this out by now.

It's a good word, right? It sounds like the language of someone who is committed to at least trying to do better.

But when psychologists examine motivation closely, they find something kind of counterintuitive

about it.

The very word that we associate with discipline should actually produces the psychological

conditions for avoidance, which is the opposite of motivation.

And this isn't because like people are inherently lazy or they lack ambition or anything like that.

This is because of how the brain interprets certain words and how it interprets pressure.

Researchers in behavioral and motivational psychology take a good hard look at how shifts in language, shape not just how we think,

but how we act. And the difference between two words, should and could, is obviously only a few

letters, but they function psychologically very differently. And this is more important.

And to understand why this matters,

I think it helps to understand a very basic insight from cognitive psychology,

which says that the brain never processes language as neutral.

It's never neutral.

...