Written by: Maya Zack, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Are you free to create a new future or recreating past patterns? Our past experiences shape our thinking, behaviour, and emotions in both positive and negative ways. If you find yourself struggling in certain areas of your life or not achieving the success or goals you want, it may be because your past is holding you back. So letting go of the past is crucial if you want to create anything new in your life, whether an internal or external experience.
Here are five ways your past is limiting you and what you can do about them.
1. ‘Failures’ you’re projecting onto future
You’ve probably heard of the ‘growth mindset’ – the belief that your abilities & skills can be developed through learning and experience. This perspective is in contrast to a ‘fixed mindset’, where you believe your abilities are set in stone and can’t be changed.
One area where a growth mindset can make a big difference is in your approach to failure. If you have a fixed mindset, you’re likely to see failures as proof that you’re not good enough and give up easily in the face of setbacks. You (perhaps subconsciously) believe failure is a permanent part of your experience and part of ‘who you are’ and therefore your future.
You may feel like giving up because you think it’s not worth trying if you’re just going to fail again. Or you set yourself up for future failure because your mind creates experiences to ‘match up’ with your beliefs – as it loves being and proving it’s ‘right’.
In contrast, if you have a growth mindset, you’re more likely to see failures as an opportunity to learn and grow. You’ll be more resilient in the face of setbacks and more likely to achieve your long-term goals.
So remind yourself that failure is not only a normal part of life, but it’s also inevitable, unavoidable, and even desirable! Everyone makes mistakes and experiences setbacks. What matters is how you respond to failure, not the fact that you failed in the first place.
Use these setbacks to get valuable insights into what works, what doesn't, or how you could do things better next time around.
Pursuing new experiences without fear of failure, and even more so – with expecting and welcoming them, will hugely increase your chances of success, no matter what your goals are.
2. Conditioned beliefs
We all have a past that has conditioned us to believe certain things about ourselves, others and the world around us. These define who we think we are and how we perceive and experience what life throws at us. These can limit us in many ways.
Whatever you believe is true or possible, excludes whatever you believe is not true or not possible.
These beliefs will never be objective; they’re entirely based on your own personal past experience & conditioning.
Some of these beliefs might be:
You believe you’re not good enough or worthy of success or happiness
You believe you’re not capable of making a difference
You believe the success or goals you want are out of reach
Negative beliefs about other people and the world around you may also be limiting what you think is possible for you. The more beliefs you hold, the narrower your path becomes. So it’s important to identify any limiting beliefs you may have and work on letting go of the past by releasing them. The good news is, that since these were always subjective and never truth, they can drop away ‒ when you use the right tools.
The mind accepts as a belief a perception that has been either
Repeated to it many times
Or that had some kind of very strong emotional charge at the time of experiencing it (such as a traumatic experience).
This is why repetition and bringing up strong positive emotions work for creating new beliefs – such as what you might do with affirmations and visualisations.
But these take time to sink in and become permanent, especially if you’re trying to ‘program’ positive beliefs to replace negative ones that were there first.
The most effective way of working with these is changing them on a subconscious level, which is where they were created.
One quick & effective way to dissolve limiting beliefs is to use the Sedona Method™ which I incorporate into my programs (as well as hypnosis, which creates subconscious change much faster and more easily). You get to effortlessly and emotionally experience (rather than just intellectually understand) the beliefs simply dissolving and no longer making any sense.
Once you’re free of your beliefs, your mind is open to possibilities which previously seemed unavailable to you.
3. Attachment to stories
Sometimes, it feels like no matter what we do, we can’t seem to move forward in life. It’s like we’re stuck in the same place, making the same mistakes and seeing the same patterns over and over again.
Often, the reason why we’re stuck is because we’re attached to certain stories of our past. We might have conscious future goals we want to move towards, but subconsciously we might be holding onto past events, people or experiences we keep looking back to.
This attachment can be a ‘positive’ one – having positive feelings around memories that we’d like to return to or not move on from. Even though the memories are ‘good ones’, this creates pain around the feeling of loss. There might be a limiting belief that your best days are behind you or that you’ll never experience that kind of joy again.
Feeling this way makes it hard to open to new experiences. Constantly looking back prevents you from focusing on creating the future you want. The attachment can also be a negative one – so you might have feelings of anger & resentment, pain, grief or regret around past stories.
If you’re holding onto these (feeling them is OK and healthy, it’s the holding on that becomes a problem), not only are you perpetuating your own suffering, but you’ll be carrying over these feelings into your present state, affecting and shaping your mindset, your actions and therefore the future you’re inevitably heading towards.
So whether positive or negative stories, holding onto them fills your experience and your mind to the point where there’s no ‘space’ for new stories to come in. Your attention, whether consciously or not, is ‘occupied’ with the past and you’re unable to direct it most effectively toward your goals.
It’s important then to focus on letting go of the past and of these attachments. Only then are you truly free to create the new, future stories you want.
4. Traumatic experiences
If you’ve experienced trauma or rejection in the past, it can be difficult to feel secure and confident in yourself and your abilities. This can lead to self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness and a lack of self-love, which can prevent you from taking risks or going after what you want.
Another way trauma holds you back is if you’ve been through a tough experience, it can be easy to lower your standards and settle for less than what makes you happy or what you truly deserve.
And going back to an attachment to stories, if you’re still carrying around pain from past hurtful experiences, it‘ll be difficult to move on and create a healthy future.
So it’s important to work through all these feelings so that you can let go of the past and start fresh. And remember that you deserve happiness and success regardless of what’s happened in your past.
5. Identifying with the past version of you
Often, we identify with the past version of ourselves to such an extent that it limit's our ability to create a new and improved future self.
All those attachments and beliefs might have you think that you’re ‘fixed’. That your personality is set and unchangeable. That it’s ‘just who I am’.
The truth is, you are not fixed at all. Your character is in a constant state of shifting, learning and developing. But this process only happens when uninterrupted and not blocked by your sense of identification with the past.
The only thing preventing you from changing and improving is the belief you cannot.
Here’s a question for you – if you were to lose your memory, who would you be? What would be stopping you from being or doing anything you want?
Nothing.
So of course, I’m not saying you should lose your memory, but you can drop your identification with it.
When you work on letting go of the past while taking responsibility for who you are, you are free to create your future self. Nothing would be stopping you.
So if any of these sound familiar, don't worry ‒ you're not alone. We all have moments where we let our past dictate our future. The important thing is to catch yourself when you're doing it and make a conscious decision and effort to move forwards.
Personally, I’ve come from a traumatic upbringing and I was in a state of anger, self-hate and insecurity until my 30’s. Today, I teach and coach others how to be their most confident self. This was possible for me because I believed that freedom was available to me, and that was always my end goal.
I always knew (though took time to learn to practice this on a daily basis) that in this present moment, unless I recreate my past stories and so called ‘personality’ in my mind, I’m free to do and be whatever I want.
So know that it’s never too late to make a change. Letting go of the past is possible at any given moment.
Just because something has been holding you back in the past doesn’t mean it has to continue doing so in the future.
Focus on NOW and onwards, no matter what was. Let go of what's holding you back. Be open to new experiences and opportunities.
You have the power to choose how your story will end—so choose consciously and align subconsciously!
If you need help with that, feel free to reach out or check out my 6-week life-changing Sedona Releasing program.
Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Maya!
Maya Zack, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Maya Zack is an award-winning personal development & mindset coach, peak performance specialist and hypnotherapist.
Based in the UK, she works internationally, mainly with women entrepreneurs as well as with businesses to create high-performance teams that aim to make a positive impact on people’s lives.
She helps business owners, leaders and teams free themselves from mental & emotional habits or blocks that prevent them from experiencing more success or slow it down. She has developed her unique signature 8-week step-by-step mindset makeover programs for aspiring as well as already established entrepreneurs that change thinking & feeling patterns on the deepest, subconscious level, reprogramming their minds for success so that new habits & behaviours quickly become automatic and effortless.
She believes it’s so important to our lives, joy and fulfilment to be doing what we love and daring to go for it regardless of the outcome. So many are held back by fear and she wants to change that. She believes success happens from the inside out alongside mindset mastery, and that as humans with imagination, we have the incredible capacity to become free, powerful creators of ourselves and our lives.
