Life! By Design_ 6 Steps to an Extraordinary You - Laura Morton [40]
Speak more life into your vision and the visions of others rather than focusing on your mistakes or drama from the past or present.
ADDICTION
ADDICTION TO THE PAST
Understanding—and letting go of—your past is the key to unlocking your future and your greatest potential. I know you’ve heard this before, and yet—perhaps reading this book now—you can recognize that this attachment to the past is an addiction. Many people suffer from it. Many of us live our lives stuck somewhere “back when,” fixated on days—or people or circumstances—gone by. For some it’s a love lost, a regrettable choice made; for others, perhaps it’s being unable to shake free from a sense of obligation to parents or friends who are holding them back; or the lingering shame or guilt of something that happened in the past. Whatever it is, an addiction to the past is holding you back from living your best life.
When it comes to the past, we all have emotional balloons inside us that we need to let the air out of. We are habitual beings, so most people live their lives in the past because it has become a conditioned routine. Early in my professional career, I suffered from addiction to the past because I was stuck in a conversation with myself about barely finishing high school and not attending college. There used to be a constant dialogue going on in my head about whether I was smart enough to be teaching, educating, reprogramming, and helping others with their lives. Of course, I know that intelligence isn’t about how many diplomas you have on your wall or how many letters follow your last name. I used to think that people would see my lack of degrees as a lack of qualifications to do my job. Of course, today, if I find myself momentarily worrying that Ivy League graduates might attend one of my seminars, men and women who may be smarter than I am, I now know that the main difference is that they got a shot at achieving success faster than I did. If I could make a success out of my life, I figure most anyone can make a success of theirs.
It has taken me twenty years to get here, but when I realized that the past is nothing more than a story we tell ourselves, it helped me understand that continuing to tell that story, verbally or nonverbally, eventually turns it into a reality. What you speak, you breathe life into, which cements those thoughts into your emotions. If something from my past presents itself, I choose not to talk about it. I don’t fantasize about it and let it fester as a thought in my head. I remind myself that it is only a story, and I don’t allow it to impact the moment. I’m an extremely mentally tough guy, but I didn’t get there overnight. Getting there takes time, practice, a willingness to be strong, a vision for where you want your life to be, and then doing whatever it takes to get there, which I discuss at length in Chapter 7.
A client of mine is a twenty-three–year veteran in sales, a peak performer in her industry. She is extremely well respected and a nice person too. She’s been selling for her company so long that she has become satisfied with her annual production, which hasn’t changed much over the years.
By most people’s standards, she’s extraordinary. Of course, when you work with me, I expect more. What was stopping her from improving her results was her twenty-three years of experience. Okay. Let me say that again. Her past experience was actually holding her back from increasing her sales. Why? She knew how hard she’d have to work to up her numbers. She recognized the several more hours a week and all of the sacrifices it would take to kick things up a notch. She worried that she was too old and wasn’t a good enough manager to lead her team to the next level. Why did she think this? She had so many stories built up in her head about her past that she believed she was at her maximum output and would be better off keeping things as they were. If she wanted to increase her productivity,