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Driving While Focused on the Rear View Mirror

Is your past a good predictor of your future?
I mean, if you have always been a certain way or you have never been good at something, does that mean your future will be the same?
Consider some of the following thoughts.
• I have never been good at meeting people because we moved a lot growing up.
• I’m not good at staying organized because my life has always been too chaotic.
• I don’t like to take risks because my parents always struggled with money.
How likely would a person with the above beliefs be at meeting people or keeping a schedule or taking risks in their current or future life?
How about you? When you come up against something where you feel resistance, do you have a reason from your past that justifies the way you feel?
Seriously, we could all come up with a stack of reasons why we can’t do or achieve something, but is it a useful and productive way to think? Does any energy spent in the realm of the ‘why-we-can’t-do-it’ serve us?
If you are in search of a loving relationship, does the idea that you ‘hate dating’ serve you?
If you want to grow your business, does believing ‘it is hard to grow a business’ allow you to be more creative?
If you want to change your body in any way, will your critical thoughts of what has not worked in the past help your cause?
The beliefs you have about your past are merely thoughts you have chosen to think again and again (and again). They are not written in stone and they only have power over your current life if you chose to give it away.
Being able to separate who you are from your past can be life changing. I think of the many beliefs I had about who I was based on the meaning I had given to some of my past life events. When I gave myself the permission to be wrong about how I had evaluated those things, my life started to shift.
One of my clients told me about an event she had been torturing herself about for years. It didn’t take much to poke some holes in her beliefs. Together we questioned some of her ‘facts’ and she saw how she had been creating a narrative of certainty around something she had never even actually witnessed. But she had never really questioned it before.
If you believe the events of your past are merely facts, just for fun, take a couple of them out and try to poke some holes in your narrative. And what the heck – be willing to be wrong. Just for the fun of it.
Driving while focused only on the rear-view mirror is just not recommended.
Possibility exists everywhere you chose to see it.
❤️