Clean Up Your Past so You can Crush Your Future - Episode: 022
Ever wonder how the stories and experiences from your past might be slowing you down in your current journey? Can you imagine lightening that load, not by forgetting or altering the facts, but by shifting how you perceive and narrate those events?
This episode will teach you the power of reframing your past and shedding unnecessary weight that impedes your progress.
Discover how the narratives we build around our past can heavily influence our emotions and actions today, and learn how changing those narratives can make your performance lighter and more effective
This episode is all about empowering you to change your narrative, to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones, and to face your future unburdened by the weight of your past. So, strap on your headphones, lighten your load, and let's start this journey together!
Speaker 1
This is the Durable Dad podcast.
Speaker 1
I'm your host, tommy Geary. This show is going to give you the skills and tools you need to be a rock solid man for your work, your community and, most importantly, your family. Alright, what's up guys? Episode number 22. I hope you're having an awesome day and feeling excited and powerful with whatever you have ahead of you. I am looking forward to talking about this topic.
Speaker 1
Today's concept, the mindset we're working on, is about shifting how we're thinking about our past, and we want to have stories about our past that work for us rather than against us. What I mean by this is what we're telling ourselves about our past. We are telling ourselves about our past makes us feel a certain way right now and, based on how we feel right now, it's going to determine the actions that we take and what we create in the future. So if we're telling ourselves negative stories about our past and we're creating a hurt and a pain and a weight right now, it's going to slow us down. It's going to impact how we work right now. So a lot of the times, we'll think that our past is just the way it was. There's nothing we can do about it, and that's not true, we can't change the circumstances of what happened in the past, but we can change what we're telling ourselves about it, the story. We have a choice in how we want to feel about our past. I'm going to give you an example and before I dive into this example, our past is anything that has happened before this moment. So this could be all the way back to when you were two years old, or it could be a minute ago, and the example that I want to give happened to me yesterday.
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So I woke up at 7 am yesterday and I'm going to tell myself a story about waking up at 7 am. And there's a bunch of different, infinite number of stories I could tell myself, but these are going to be two examples. The first story I could tell myself is I slept in. I hit the snooze too many times. I'm lazy, I'm already behind for the day. I need to catch up. I missed my morning routine. I missed that early morning best part of my day. That's the first story. The second story I can tell myself is I got some much needed sleep. I woke up and I wasn't feeling groggy and I'll probably have more energy throughout the day. I'll be feeling better at three o'clock. The extra sleep is going to set me up to be more productive and get more things done today. Those are two stories.
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The first story that I slept in I'm lazy, I'm already behind is going to create an emotion right now for me, and probably an emotion of scattered, maybe a little guilt or disappointment. Those emotions weigh you down. Those emotions create actions of not prioritizing your day and not getting after it. The second story I got some much needed sleep. The extra sleep is going to be beneficial for the rest of my day. That story is going to feel a lot lighter. It won't be weighing me down. In both stories the facts didn't change. I woke up at 7 am. That's when I got out of bed and I get to decide what I want to tell myself about the past. How we think about our past and how our story about our past affects our journey through life is very similar to backpacking. When we lived in Colorado, brenda, my wife and I, our sport in the summertime was backpacking.
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When you're backpacking, you are going to venture out into the wilderness for a couple nights. The only thing that you're bringing with is what's on your back and in your backpack or wearing on your body. The goal is to make your pack as light as possible. That means bringing only the amount of clothes that you are going to wear, which, if you're going to be gone for four nights, it's not bringing four t-shirts and four pairs of pants and four pairs of socks. You bring two pairs of socks. When your one pair gets dirty, you rinse it off in a river and you have it dry out while you're wearing your second pair. Your shirts are going to get super stinky and you're not going to bring some bulky sleeping bag. People will spend a lot of money on buying lightweight sleeping bags, lightweight sleeping mats. Some people won't even bring tents when they're backpacking. They'll just bring a tarp and a piece of rope that they can tie up to a couple trees and figure out a way to make just a little shelter so they have as least amount of weight as possible.
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Because the journey is going to be tough. The journey is going to be hard to hike for 10, 20 miles a day going up and down the mountain. You want to make it as easy on yourself as possible by not bringing extra weight. If we translate this over to our past and our journey through life, our past is our backpack. When we're telling a story that our past was wrong or that we messed up or that we failed, our backpack is going to get a lot heavier. We're going to be carrying extra gear, more water than we need or more food than we actually need. We're going to be making the journey harder on ourselves than it needs to be. So this is why we want to address what we're telling ourselves about our past, why we want to clean up the stories about our past that are creating extra weight right now, creating extra disappointment, sadness, shame just those emotions that weigh us down, that feel like pressure, and we want to dump those out of our backpack. Dump that extra gear out so we can move through life a little lighter and more quickly and get to our desires, our goals, faster. So these are three ways that I see guys carrying around more weight than they need from their past.
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Number one identifying yourself based on the past. So identifying your skills, your ability, your potential based on what you've achieved in the past. So you can think of thoughts like I'm not the type of guy who, if you start a sentence with I've never been good at or I've always done things this way. Those are indicators that you're using your past to limit where you're going moving forward. And, for example, I see this a lot when guys are going after health goals, if they're trying to lose weight, they'll have stories about their past. Like I always snack at night it's just how I chill out. I'm not able to stop eating late at night that story is gonna feel heavy. Maybe we feel disappointed in ourselves or discouraged right now. In that moment, those emotions are like extra gear that we're carrying and we don't need. You can see us defining our abilities based on the past in time management. If we're trying to manage our calendars better and actually prioritize and say no to things that aren't priorities, guys will look at their past to determine their ability for the future. They'll say things like I'm not good at planning or I'm not good at saying no, or I've never used my calendar. And again, those thoughts, that story about our past, is going to weigh us down and it's gonna make the journey of starting to prioritize our time, value our time, harder than it has to be. So that's the first area we identify ourselves based on our past, when really anything's possible in our future. We can create any new skill we want. We have the potential to do so much more. So we wanna drop the extra gear, the old stories, so we can unlock our full potential and get after it All right.
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Number two regret and guilt. So these are the areas where something in our past we wish that we had handled it differently and we continue to think about it and replay it right now, in the present moment. And this could be a decision that you made in the past or a way that you behaved, something you did, something you said that you're beating yourself up about. For me. For a while I carried this regret and guilt about how I performed in high school and college. I had a story that I didn't try hard enough, that I didn't make the most out of the opportunities that were there for me, and that regret weighed me down. That regret was slowing me down from making decisions in my career to take a chance, because I thought, if I went and took a chance, that I wouldn't try hard enough in that. And I changed that story right. I looked at my past and I said but I did succeed, I graduated, I did well, I had a B plus average, I worked hard enough and I could do that again if I wanted to. And when I changed the story, cleaned up my story about my past, it was like I unloaded the extra water, like I was able to see I had an extra pep in my step and was motivated to move forward.
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And I see a lot of guys carrying regret about their careers, that they took the wrong career path, and regret is only blocking us from seeing the opportunities in front of us. Guys will regret investments that they made or that they should have made, or a house you should have bought but you didn't buy. All of that is weighing us down and the more we think about how we messed up, the heavier the backpack is going to get and you can just feel that when we're weighted down, it's harder to walk forward, it's harder to take the next investment, it's harder to try for the next career. Alright, so that's number two regret and guilt, not helpful emotions, indicators that we are looking at our past as wrong and a place that we need to clean up our thinking about it. Number three areas of your past where you're thinking that you were wronged, that you think the world should have been different, and this comes up with how a boss treated you or when you were in sports, how a coach treated you Comes up a lot with our parents.
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Like a guy will say that my dad didn't support me or my dad didn't believe in me enough. That story about our past gives us a really heavy load. It brings up anger, it brings up sadness and that weighs on us and when we try to create and work and make more money with that heavy backpack of anger and sadness, we're like pushing harder than we need to. And I see guys doing this a lot that we're trying to prove something to our parents, that we take this anger and this sadness and we're trying to almost like run away from it. But it's stuck to us, it's hanging on our back and in order to lighten the load, we got to stop and we got to Go into our backpack and we got to look at the anger, we got to look at the sadness, pick it out, let it go, drop it and then put the backpack back on and carry forward and it's gonna be an easier journey not a easy journey, but easier than carrying the heavy load.
Speaker 1
So those are three areas that we need to clean up. Number one is we're identifying Ourself based on the past. Number two is Regret and guilt, where we're weighing ourselves down for telling ourselves that we messed up, and number three is believing that we were wronged. So if you Want to get after things in life, if you want to go on a huge vacation or buy a beach house, if you want to free up more time to hang with your wife and to hang with your kids and enjoy life more, invest in a new hobby or find a new career, if you just want to feel better, less stressed, less anxious, less pressure, then we need to start questioning our past.
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We want to notice where we're carrying the extra weight and what is that story? What is the fiction and what is the fact? And is the fiction helpful or do you want to change it? When we bring awareness here and we lighten the backpack, lighten the burden that we're carrying, then we can turn to our future and Move towards it. Move towards those things that we want to create and that's what we're gonna talk about next week is Getting future focused and the power of creating emotions like excitement or motivation or appreciation, and how those emotions Don't just lighten the load but propel us forward. Alright, that is what I got for you guys today, if you haven't already follow the podcast. Subscribe on Apple, follow on Spotify. Give us a five-star rating, leave a review. It is much appreciated and it helps more people find the podcast. Have an awesome week and I'll catch you later.
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