There’s one thing robbing you of your future, and it’s your past. It’s the only thing—in terms of you—that can rob you of your future. Even if it was someone else that caused you pain, or put you down, it’s still your hanging on to what happened, or what they said, that keeps you from living the life your heart desires.
There’s no doubt that what happened to you was painful. There’s no denying that its impact was severe enough to shape you into the person you’ve become. The last thing I want to do is minimize your past, but we need to get one thing clear: sympathy will get you nowhere!
You Don’t Need Sympathy
If everyone caters to your pain, they’ll only help you remain in your past. If everyone feels so sorry for you that they never tell you what you need to hear, or offer you challenges that might help, then it’s guaranteed you’ll remain exactly as you are.
You don’t need any more sympathy. It won’t help you. The only thing you need is to get involved in personal development, which is the only way to break the chains of the past off your mind and take back your future.
Self-Help vs Personal Development
I don’t like the term “self-help,” because I feel it limits the real process that’s needed to truly help people get over their past, get out of their ruts, and get their lives back on track. For most people, they need more than “help” to get through a particular problem or bad season. What people need is a commitment to “personal development.”
Personal development is when you realize that you have an obligation to yourself to maximize all that you are, and all that you can do, for a purpose greater than yourself. It’s when you stop “letting life happen” and you start “making life happen” in every area. It’s when you move from fatalism to determination.
Self-help? Sure you need to help yourself, but that term only identifies who’s doing the work. Self-help says nothing about the total transformation of thinking and action you must undergo in order to live the life you were intended to live.
How to Get Over Your Past
The foundation of personal development is that you can’t conquer the future if your ass is in the past. No matter what happened to you growing up; no matter what transpired in your previous relationships, you have to bury the dead and move on. And until you understand how your future is being robbed by the pain of your past, you’ll never make the commitment to personal development.
Personal development is HOW you get over your past, because personal development is when you determine what your future will be like, and what you’ll be like in your future. If your past determines what your future will be like, and what you’ll be like in your future, then there’s nothing left for you to do. Just leave your life on autopilot and go wherever the winds take you.
But be sure to bring plenty of Kleenex with you, because you’ll still be crying over your past until the day you die!