Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Let me introduce you to the Oulda Triplets. They are pretty darn famous in their own right. It seems that everyone knows them. And boy can they cause you some major problems if you get hung up on them. Let me give you a few examples.
- I shoulda bought that when I had the chance, now everyone has one and I wish I did.
- I woulda done that to, but the stars did not line up for me.
- I coulda done that.
They all seem pretty harmless when you look at them this way. They all sound pretty harmless when say them. But they are keeping you from having what you want in like. They are stealing you dreams they are stealing your confidence, they are stealing your ability to create what you want in life.
I know when I was younger and newly married my husband got me this Jeff Foxworthy tape. (Yeah I am dating myself a little, but who cares.) You know the guy that makes all the redneck jokes. My husband still does not know what he was thinking but he married a hick and these jokes crack me up, because most of these jokes apply to my family in some way.
Jeff had this joke on there about redneck words, one of them was ustacould. Meaning basically that I used to be able to do that. And it had a cousin mightacould. As in “if you give me a minute, I mightacould again”.
Like I said I grew up in a redneck household and environment. Hello I spent most of my life in the country and in Texas. It was unavoidable. Now I am not really picking on rednecks, but rather the mindset that goes along with being a redneck. And it includes a lot of this vocabulary.
It is something I was raised in and I did not know that it was harming me in anyway. Until I started to really study the people I wanted to be more like. Those that were able to create success and make it doing something that they loved. They did not use the dreaded triplets. I could not find it anywhere in their vocabularies, especially when they were discussing how they talked to themselves. And how they taught others to think.
See the entire Oulda family is nothing more than limiting. They limit how you think, the limit what you think you are capable of doing. They basically keep you from success and give you a reason to create excuses.
So let me share with you some replacements for these limiters. So instead of using ol’ shoulda , it is better to say when, woulda can be replaced with will, and to round out the experience replace coulda with did.
- When I buy that it is going to be so awesome because I really want that.
- It will be so awesome that I did that.
- I did do that.
It might all seem a little silly and you might still think of them as just words. But as you already know and I have been talking about here often is that self talk is super duper important. Mindset is one of the biggest keys to success, just ask anyone that got there from where you are now. It happens every day and anyone can do it.
Happiness, Health, Wealth, and Freedom!
Gen
“The Mindset Master”
P.S. I made a decision to live my life after watching a cheesy video. You can too, just decide to get in now!