After nearly a decade of wrestling with the shoulds, I have spent the last 6 months writing SHOULD HAPPENS.

This is a human parable.

If you’re like most people, you live in the ‘should’s. You are constantly chained by ideas of how your life should be, of what you should accomplish, of what you should be better at. You may feel anxiety about not meeting your shoulds each and every day.

What if you could escape that anxiety.

In this book, we’ll follow Tom Should – a person very much like me, and perhaps you.

He’s paralyzed on a daily basis by his shoulds – the larger-than-life ideals imposed upon him. They make it impossible for him to relax and enjoy the life he has, because he’s constantly comparing himself to others, and imagining the life he thinks he should have.

We’ll follow Tom on his journey from a should life to a good life – from resenting his life for all the ways it doesn’t meet his expectations, to embracing, enjoying, and treasuring the life he does have each and every day.

Letting loose of our shoulds is not easy. To many of us, it might feel like accepting the unacceptable, becoming less, giving up on our ideals, or thwarting our ambition. For that reason, we might never surrender our shoulds – until we see the power of doing so in action, through stories like Tom’s.

In this leadership parable, we’ll see how it’s possible to live our best lives in ways we never dreamed of. We just have to let go of many of our ‘shoulds.’

Tom’s story appears religious at first. And in a way, it is. He suffers from the shoulds that many religious people experience – the shoulds of trying to live a perfect life.

But the process Tom goes through as he learns to love himself and his life is a process all of us go through, religious or not. This is a human parable. The shoulds are blind to age, ethnicity, income and gender and they represent a pressure that all people face. It’s a process of learning firsthand what is truly important – and seeing what you miss when you live in the shoulds.

I hope that this book will help everyone who reads it. I know writing it helped me.

SHOULD HAPPENS will be available on the weekend of September 7th / 8th. I will be at Parkview Christian Church in Chicagoland launching this SHOULD HAPPENS book and teaching series.