Stop Living In Your Past
Episode 24
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Sometimes we let our past hold us back.
Ever wish you could go back in time and change it?
I’m here to tell you that you don’t need a time machine to change your past.
It’s 100% possible to re-write the story of your past so you can move on with no regrets and create the life you want.
This is so so important when it comes to creating and breaking habits.
If you find yourself think or saying out loud things such as:
That’s just who I am
That never works for me, I’ve tried.
I’ve always struggled with (fill in the blank).
It runs in my family.
That’s just how I’ve always been.
I’m not like others, I can’t do that.
I wish I could get back to my prebaby weight or my high school weight
You are living in your past.
Have you ever seen the movie Napoleon Dynamite? In the movie Uncle Ricco pretty much thinks his glory days are over and he wastes a lot of time dreaming and looking for ways to go back in time so he can relive his glory days.
If you find yourself wishing you had a time machine so you could go back and either change your past, or go back to being who you were you are what is called past focused.
I love what Eckhart Tolle has to say about the this. He says, “The past has no power over the present moment.”
The past is over!
It’s only power is the power we give it by having a thought about it and creating meaning from that thought.
Our past goes in the circumstance line. It’s completely neutral. The only thing that gives it meaning is the thought we have about it.
This is the best news ever because it means we get to decide what we make our past mean good or bad.
We can either choose to beat ourselves up. Which a lot of us do.
We live with regret and we use our past to beat ourselves up thinking that somehow this will push us into taking action.
Somehow, being sad about our past, choosing to see ourselves as a victim, and or using our past as evidence against us will motivate us into creating a better life for ourselves.
This never happens! Because you cannot beat yourself into change or happiness.
If you’re defining yourself by your past, you’re just creating more of your past. This is how is works.
Your thoughts about your past are recycled.
And if we go back to what we’ve talked about on this podcast, our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings drive our actions, and our actions create our results.
If you’re thinking the same things from our past, you’re going to have the same feelings, which drives the same action, which creates the same results. It’s a never ending loop!
If you want to create a different result, you have to think a thought you’ve never thought before.
So let’s say your recycled thought is “I’ve never been able to lose the weight.”
Every time you start trying to lose weight, you’re still thinking this thought.
For me, this thought creates a feeling of hopelessness. And when I feel hopeless, I don’t take action because why should I? It won’t work.
And not taking action just creates a result of it not working.
We’ll get into how to change this, but first I want to share one more example with you.
After graduating from high school, I got married, and started having kids. I never went to college or University.
The story I told myself about this was one of shame. I lived with so much regret. I was ashamed of my decision to not pursue my education. I felt a lot of shame around it because I thought not having a degree made me less than others who did.
And because I felt shame, I played small. I thought of myself as not worthy of having a grand life because I needed to punish myself for my choices.
5-6 years ago, I decided I’d had enough. I read in a book by life coach Kim Giles that taught how we choose to see our past and the story we tell about it matters.
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR PAST
You can either keep identifying as a victim, believing you were dealt a bad hand, or you made a terrible mistake and aren’t worthy of anything but punishment, or you can choose to see your past as good and perfect.
This is the beauty of thoughts.
We get to choose them.
The story we tell about our past is just our thoughts about the past.
You get to think about your life and your past however you want to.
What Kim teaches in her book, Choosing Clarity is that life is a classroom. Every single experience we have is set up by God to teach us something and to help us grow.
So when I tell the story of me getting married and starting a family right out of high school and not continuing my education, the story I tell now is that it was perfect.
I was supposed to get married at 18, bring my precious children into the world, and spend the next 23 years as a SAHM.
How do I know? Because God does not make mistakes, and everything is orchestrated in my favor. I
t was 100% without a doubt supposed to happen that way because it did, and if I did find a magic wand and I could wish me back in time, the same thing would happen again because that’s exactly the way God needed it to.
Dan Sullivan teaches that you get to take from your past what you want and you get to leave the rest.
It’s YOUR past.
And the only way the past exists is in your mind.
You have complete control over your mind. You get to decide how you tell the story.
You get to decide what you’re going to make it mean, whether it was a God-given amazing experience that taught you so much and was part of your destiny or whether something was a mistake and ruined your life.
Notice how each of these stories makes you feel. For me, my first story made me feel shame. Lots of shame. But when I changed it to being something I was destined for, I feel love. Love that God would trust me, a to be the wife of someone so amazing and to mother and care for six of his precious spirits.
Love feels so much better than shame.
If you’re stuck believing something about your past, write down your story, decide how it makes you feel and if you like it.
If you don’t, decide what you do want to think about it.
Write yourself a new story.
Leave out anything about your past you don’t like. It’s over.
It has no power over you.
You can release it forever and move on!
You get to change the story!
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