Life! By Design_ 6 Steps to an Extraordinary You - Laura Morton [43]
When I asked my client Jim to face his mother about his little brother’s death, it was about helping Jim come to terms with what happened so he could let it go and move on. I had him visit his brother’s grave site, where he could let out all of his bottled-up emotion. I wanted him to say his peace to his brother, acknowledging out loud what really happened, how much he loved him and wished they were together today. These two actions were a huge breakthrough for Jim because he had shut his parents out at such a young age and now, because of that, he struggled with connecting with his own children on the deepest level. Once he cleaned up the past with his mother and the death of his brother, he could resolve the issues he faced at home with his own family.
If you want to be free from your past, let all of the people you name in the exercise below know how you feel. More times than not, you may be surprised that they have no idea what you’re talking about. What made an indelible impression on you turned out to be meaningless or of little concern to other people. They simply had no clue you’d been holding on to all of that negative emotion, which ultimately weighed you down with self-created images of something that may or may not have happened.
EXERCISE
Write down a list of every person you feel you’ve wronged.
Write down a list of every person you owe an apology to.
Make a list of everyone you feel has wronged you.
Write down a list of every person you feel you deserve an apology from.
I have a client named Lana whose business had hit a plateau. No matter what she did to improve her performance, she couldn’t get her earnings to a new threshold. As we worked together, I asked her to talk about events from her past that were related to her outlook toward money. It didn’t take long before she revealed this telling detail. When she was a little girl, her parents had made an enormous amount of money, and then unexpectedly lost it—not once but twice. These losses were traumatic in ways she wasn’t aware of until, after two painfully hard and emotional coaching sessions, we discovered that her fear of becoming too successful and then losing it all, just as her parents had done, was inhibiting her. Subconsciously she had convinced herself she was better off just getting by than she would be if she grew her business to its potential.
Lana’s situation is something many people struggle with: As long as we place a negative label or story around success, it will always elude us.
Lana and I worked together to create a new association around the meaning of success. More important, I helped Lana accept that what happened to her parents was just that—something that happened to her parents. Their circumstance did not need to dictate her own. And the happy ending to this story? After exploring and letting go of her associations from the past, Lana more than doubled her income over the next twelve months.
The people who are really suffering and held up by their addiction to the past are those who cannot or choose not to see things for what they are. They see only their breakdowns, mediocrity, and failures and relate them to those in the past. Sometimes they get so caught up in prior choices that they risk everything to try to change the outcome.
A client came to me with a business idea that I believed would not work. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make the business a success; there were just too many conditions in the market that could cause failure. The risks simply weren’t worth taking. Despite my advice, he was sure he could create a successful company, make it profitable over the course of three years, and then sell it, move on, and create something new. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in his vision. I couldn’t support his vision because of what I knew about the market. As his business coach, I told him I thought he was setting himself up for disaster. He fired me on the spot.
A year or so later, he came back to me asking for help with his business because