Freeing Yourself From the Past

I send out a newsletter every Sunday morning. Each week I write about some big success principle that you can apply to your life, your work, or your sales game. I ask the community of people who subscribe to the newsletter to send me their stories, their thoughts, and their ideas, and a good number of people email me directly each week.

Almost every week I receive an email from a newsletter subscriber explaining to me how the decisions of their past now defines their future. But outside of choosing to focus on some past event and choosing to use those stories to define you, you can’t be trapped in or by the past.

That Was Then

You aren’t trapped in your past. Even if you feel like you are.

It doesn’t matter what decisions you made, and it doesn’t matter which decisions were made for you.

You made poor choices. Your family made poor choices. You caused something bad to happen to someone else. Someone else caused something bad to happen to you.

You did something wrong. You failed to do something and the result was awful.

You made a choice and now you are unhappy. Or you’ve lived with a choice someone else made for you and you’ve come to both realize and regret it.

This Is Here. This Is Now.

At any time, at any point in your life, you can simply call for a do over. In fact, you are responsible to call for that do over. Why? Because this is the only life you have. And you only have the limited time remaining in which to do whatever it is that you were put here to do.

Living in the past means cheating yourself of the life that you want now. Living in the past means cheating the rest of us of the life that you should be living now. It deprives us of the biggest and best version of you, the version we’ve been waiting for.

The past decisions are shackles in which you have locked yourself. You have the power to free yourself from the past any time you choose to. Choose to make that time now. The past is already behind you; stop dragging into the future.