Are you one of those people who hang onto past experiences and let it define who you are? Did you know that when you hang on to the past you let it determine your future? You may believe you will never experience it again because you have learnt from it, but what you are really doing when you relive the past is put all the pieces in place to repeat history.
An experience gone badly that you rewind and play again and again in your mind is reliving the experience, emotions and all. Every time you replay what happened and wish you could have done it differently, your imagination runs wild and will try to create different outcomes. Each outcome you imagine, although not real, will send a jolt of emotions throughout your body. You will believe it is real, because the emotions are real.
The process of rethinking negative experiences and creating a number of different outcomes will only condition your brain into believing what is not true. Unfortunately, your brain does not know the difference between true and untrue it only knows what you tell it to believe. When you experience a jolt of emotions because your imagination ran wild, you essentially condition your brain into believing the experience is true.
Thinking in this way will have the following consequences to your future:
1. When the environment becomes familiar and you recognize similar feelings, you will approach it with caution if you approach it at all. If you do approach it you will try to minimize the impact by controlling the situation, and if you don’t approach it for fear of repeating history, you miss out on a potential opportunity.
2. You fool yourself into believing what is not really happening. You draw upon your past experiences, including the untrue ones, as you try to avoid repeating history. You will be adamant that something is happening that in reality is not really happening and you risk losing what you do have. You self sabotage for fear of history repeating itself.
In both cases you miss out on the real opportunity and history is repeating itself and will continue until you break the cycle.
You learn from past experiences you don’t take it with you into the future. You learn why you got burnt: I allowed someone to take advantage of me because I craved his or her attention. You learn why you are afraid: I was unprepared for the event so the feedback was negative.
The problem is never them, you’re the problem. History will repeat itself until you learn from your past rather than taking it with you. Flip the experience upside down and look at yourself. Ask yourself, “Why did I allow that to happen?” If you start by saying he or she and are looking for someone to blame other than yourself, start over again.
