Dealing with your past

 

Whether it was a successful one or a failure. Whether you are proud of it or not, your past is the past.

I have come to the conclusion that we are all nostalgic about the days gone by. Why is it that we can’t seem to disentangle completely from the past? Is it even necessary to break with the past? What benefits lie in having a clean break with your past? In this article we will tell you why holding on to your past is a burden too heavy to bear and what you should do about your past. 

Everyone has a past that is as unique as they themselves. There are great and memorable moments in your past just the same way you have some not so pleasant experiences you can go on and on about. You cannot run away from the past that you have. What you can do is celebrate it, learn from it or put it in the back burner of your mind. 

Some of your gratitude must be informed by what has happened in your past. You have many pleasant memories of what the past was like. For such memories there is need for you to reflect with gratitude because they represent the good times of your life. They must never be diminished in your sight irrespective of what is happening presently. They should be used to put perspective into your thinking. They must remind you-even if things are very thick presently -that one time they looked good. Your great experiences of the past can help you stay hopeful in the face of adversity when you remember that you had victories to savor. They can give you confidence as you look to the future when you remind yourself that there was victory for you in the past and there is therefore an opportunity for future victory.  Your past victories are a shot in the arm. They can keep you optimistic and motivated. David is one man in the Bible who used this kind of thinking for ongoing victory. In remembering how God had helped him deal with the lions and the bears which had attacked his flock in the wilderness, he knew and believed it was possible to conquer Goliath. He faced Goliath with a confidence born out of his past victories. We too must think like David in our response to the challenges we are facing currently. We must look to the past for inspiration and reassurance that we’ve got this.

Your unpleasant memories serve the role of reminding you where you do not want to go back to. They can remind you of the wrong choices you made in your past. They will keep you grounded and help you take a more measured approach to issues in the future. Once beaten, twice shy. The questions you should be asking yourself from your unpleasant experiences are: what lessons can I learn from what I went through? Where did I go wrong? What happens when I face a similar situation in the future? Those who fail to learn from their past mistakes are bound to make them over and over again and suffer compounded losses as a result. You must develop the habit of milking all your experiences for what they are worth. Do not allow any experience of yours go to waste just because it was negative. You owe it to yourself to distill the valuable lessons embedded in your bad experiences. This guarantees you growth, progress and a better future.

At other times the best reaction to your past is to leave it in the past. After you have extracted the lessons and expressed gratitude for your past, it is best to leave it where it belongs. If not it has the potential to become a massive weight on your shoulders.  This can take two broad forms.

First it can make you complacent because you choose to revel endlessly on how great the past was. There are people who still talk about how great they were 20 years ago but have nothing to write home about today. Whereas it is not bad to look at the past with nostalgia, if that makes you absent from the present then it is robbing you of your life. You can be grateful for the past as you work to create many more pleasant memories. Celebrating the past should not be a hindrance to building something good today. Imagine what would happen if the world got stuck in the industrial revolution. How much progress would we have made today? When you remain stuck in your past accomplishments, you rob yourself of the chance to do something better, something more. There is much more land to be conquered, much more territory to be taken. Celebrate but be quick to go on to the next one because therein lies progress. 

The past can also be a burden when you choose to wallow in its lowest moments. Just because you messed up at some point does not mean your whole life is defined by that one moment. There is a huge danger when we allow our traumatic experiences of the past to become the defining moments of our lives. If it takes professional counsel to help you break free from your trauma, failure, loss or whatever is holding you back, by all means go ahead and get it because your life will remain static for as long as you don’t deal with those aspects of your past. Many people have short circuited their lives and rendered themselves ineffective because they refused or couldn’t find the help needed to break from their past. 

Do any of these scenarios define you? Are you stuck because of an over the top experience and wondering where else to go from here?  Let’s talk managing success. Are you finding it hard to move forward from a particularly taxing experience? Is that something you would want to talk about? Let me find you the right help by commenting on this post or sending me a DM on +254725832477.