The Curse of “You should know better”

First I have to say that this is on my Top 5 Most Hated Phrases list, so I”m not going to pull any punches about it.

It’s one of those phrases that we hear as children and by the time our parents have stopped saying it, we’ve usually internalized it and we take over saying it to ourselves.

I heard this phrase a lot growing up and, in hindsight, it created a dynamic in my life where
there was NO such thing as an enjoyable learning curve.

So, this is a phrase I try NEVER to use on myself or anyone else.

I had a major insight about this pattern a few years back when I was planning an event and feeling a little out of my depth with it.

All of a sudden it hit me that I didn’t feel any permission to use the event as a way to learn. I realized that I was expecting myself to fully know how to do it already!

But why should I already know it?

I looked at how crazy it was to be expecting myself to already know how to do something I had never done before.

I started hunting for where this pattern of expectation came from and it wasn’t long before I heard this phrase ringing in my ears -
“you should know better”.

Now, in all fairness, I know my parents didn’t use this phrase with the intention of creating all this expectation in me.

It’s usually used when a child is displaying a behaviour that they’ve already been told is not approved of.

But we hardly ever take something in fully the first time  – it usually takes repetition to really get it down pat. And the phrase is usually just an expression of the parent’s frustration in the moment with the behaviour itself – and not some statement about the child’s inadequate learning.

But what it created in me was a world where there was no such thing as learning something “in the right time”. Everything was always learned too late, because “I should already know better”.

So now that I’ve seen through this pattern in my world and where it came from, I’m really working on allowing myself the freedom and permission to not know things yet and to actually enjoy learning them!

What a concept!

And I’ve stopped using “you should know better” inside my own head as a way to torment myself for not being further along than I am right now.

(And this gets right to the heart of what Garrison Keillor was saying about too high expectations in the last post.)

So if I could send my fully understanding “now-brain” back into the body of my 5 year old self, this is what I would say to “you should know better” :

Actually, I shouldn’t know better. I haven’t totally learned this yet and I’m working on it and that’s OK with me. I’ll know more soon, thank you very much.

I would love to see the look on any parent’s face, hearing that come out of a 5 year old child!

But for now, if this freaked-out-expectation comes upon me while I’m learning something new, I take the opportunity to make it a teaching moment for my 5 year-old self and I let her know all about our new way to learn.

Has this phrase or expectation played out in your life? I’d love to hear about how you took it. And if you never heard this as a child, I would love to hear from you what’s it like to grow up without that!

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