Hello and welcome.
Today's word for living your best life is the past.
Do you often replay old mistakes in your mind or do you let past experiences define your future?
Unless you're actively going through your life,
Deciding which parts of your mindset and your belief system you want to hold on to and which you want to let go of,
If you're not doing that,
You're working and you're living on a program that sits in your subconscious that's been put there very long ago in the first few years of your life,
In fact.
But what can happen very easily as we go through life is that we can hold on to certain experiences that really don't help us move forward.
So there are two parts to thinking about the past.
One of them that I really recommend is that we should look at the first years of our life and understand how we became the person we are today so that we can make some conscious decisions moving forward of which voice we want to hold on to in our heads and which voice is no longer serving us.
That's a very,
Very powerful part of living your best life.
But the other part that I would like us to think about today is how many episodes in my past am I holding on to and how many of those are really impeding my present moment,
The beauty of this present moment,
And how many of those am I carrying into my future?
So of course,
It can be very difficult when we've been through any kind of pain experience,
Especially if somebody has broken our trust or when we feel victimized by certain events in life.
It can be very difficult to let go of those,
Partly because when we think of letting go of them,
It's almost as if we've let the other person win.
The problem with holding on to pain and sadness and regret about the past is that we just use up valuable energy and valuable lifetime now into our future.
So our past can really be our greatest teacher,
Or it can be our biggest trap.
I really invite you today to think about how you could turn past events,
No matter how difficult,
Into something positive to catapult your way forward into a new mindset of empowerment and enlightenment.
There are many people in history in the public eye that we know from Nelson Mandela,
Oprah Winfrey,
Winston Churchill.
Many of these individuals went through very difficult periods of their life,
But they turned things around to create something magnificent out of that pain.
They were not willing to sit in victimhood.
They really wanted to create something memorable and powerful and change many people's lives.
Now,
Studies show that people who practice self-compassion about past mistakes and letting go of some of the things that we've done that we think were wrong are much more likely to succeed in the future.
I can only really vouch for that.
I've seen it so often in my coaching practice and in my own life.
Now,
The human brain tends to remember negative experiences more vividly than positive ones.
That's a phenomenon known as negativity bias.
But we can train our brain to really start focusing much more on wonderful things in our life rather than focusing on lack.
If you're somebody that's interested in practices like NLP,
There are some very simple practices that can take negative memories and turn them black and white and replace them by positive memories in full vivid color.
When we understand a bit more about the brain,
We can really take charge of how we can best use the brain to live our best life.
In fact,
There's a nice example from Thomas Edison who was told when he was growing up that he was too stupid to learn.
Had he believed that and held on to that past pain experience,
We would never have the lightbulbs we have today lighting up our life,
Would we?
So,
Three suggestions for today.
Number one,
I'd like you to look back over time and start reframing your mistakes as lessons rather than mistakes.
Ask yourself,
What did that episode teach me?
How can I grow from it?
And from now moving forward,
The minute you make a mistake in your life,
Which of course may well be just a perception just in your head,
But whenever you face a perceived mistake,
Immediately go into the mindset of,
How can I grow from this?
What can I learn from this?
That's it.
Super fast.
Make it quick.
Don't allow yourself too much time to go into the sadness and negative emotions around a mistake.
Quickly go into what can I learn?
What can I learn?
That's a skill set that we can learn to actually be able to do that.
Number two,
Let go of what you can't change.
Release past regrets that you have no power to fix.
The future's built on today,
Not yesterday.
Remember that.
And regret is an energy that will eat up our energy field now that really isn't helping us live our best life.
We are as human beings not expected to be perfect.
We are expected to come here,
I truly believe,
To learn certain experiences.
So making mistakes,
Tripping over,
Picking ourselves up again is part of that journey.
It's not something that we should be punishing ourselves for.
We should be learning from.
Number three,
Forgive yourself and forgive others.
Holding on to past pain only hurts you.
Forgiveness does not excuse actions.
And I've talked about this before when I talked about forgiveness.
It's not about excusing an action.
It's about deciding today that from today,
From now on,
I take charge and I am releasing an episode from my life to set myself free to move forward.
And for anyone listening to this struggling with that area of forgiveness,
Especially self-forgiveness,
I really encourage you to look into the Ho'oponopono method from Hawaii,
Which is an incredibly beautiful and gentle method of forgiveness.
And we're going to end today on a quotation by Buddha,
Do not dwell in the past.
Do not dream of the future.
Concentrate the mind on the present moment.
