Aren’t we often reminded to look forward and not to dwell on the past?
After-all, the past can’t be changed and we should be moving forward into our future with high hopes and expectations.
That’s where our future is!
This thinking is flawed.
It’s not where you look that counts, it’s how you look at it.
Why look back?
There are 2 approaches you can take when looking back on the past.
One is what we most often do, and leads to the advice that we shouldn’t dwell on what’s happened, but look forward to making things better in the future. We tend to look back on specific past events with remorse, regrets, and sadness perhaps for what has been “lost”.
But to really empower yourself, to lift your spirits and your hopes, looking back to see how far you’ve come is a real game changer.
Sure, your past isn’t perfect, and in contrary to all the positively-weighted social media bullshit you see, the past (or present) hasn’t been perfect for everyone else either.
You’ve made mistakes. You’re not unique in that.
You perhaps wonder if you could have done things better than you did. But what would the knock-on effect of that be on your life today – aren’t there lessons in there you’ve learned that helped with situations you’ve encountered since?
The real power that comes from looking back lies in seeing where you were and realising the huge leaps in progress you’ve achieved, to arrive to this point today.
Your struggles and challenges have been yours. And you owned them.
Has it been hard sometimes? Shit yes!
But did you make it through? Well you wouldn’t be reading this if you hadn’t…
Taking just a few minutes to appreciate this is “scientifically proven” to make you feel better than chocolate.
Sometimes looking forward is hard.
When looking forward, if you can do so from a place of high hope, that’s great!
But if you’re not careful, it’s easy to get caught up in how far you have yet to travel.
The path can look hard, it might be a steep climb to reach your next goal, and that, unfortunately, can be demotivating.
For most people, at any point in their lives, they’re going through at least one significant struggle. That is the way of it, and there’s no escape.
As you work through these challenges, you need to look ahead regularly to see what’s coming, and re-evaluate how you can approach the situation better, if at all.
But remember to take look back. Take in how far you’ve come and the progress you’ve made. Otherwise, it’s just one great big slog with no sense of achievement and no end in sight.
How can you see the end is in sight if you look back? All you can do is best-guess and extrapolate that if you’ve made progress to this point, surely all things being equal you’ll make the same progress and you keep moving forward – the end is in sight!
Do it now!
Think of an ongoing struggle you have and look at how far you’ve come through it. Remember the stages to get here, and solutions you’ve put in place and the work you’ve done. You did all that!
If you need motivation…
I got the idea to write about this after watching the following video, and something that Kyle said struck a chord with me.
If sometimes you feel it’s all a bit too tough, draw strength and motivation from this guy. I honestly don’t know how he does it…
Here it is:
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