How To Let Go Of Past Mistakes

How do you let go of past mistakes? 

You might be experiencing this suffering of things from the past. 

It could be recent, like: 

Why did I stay in that relationship? 

Why did I be that person in the first place? 

Why did I say that at work? 

Why didn't I do this thing? 

Why did I do that when I was in college or fourth grade or whatever?

Whether it's recent or a long time ago, a shift is needed because there's kind of a default approach to life that you might have learned growing up. 

You make mistakes and you regret them, and that sucks. Then if you regret it enough and criticize yourself enough, you'll learn and you'll do better. 

That's sort of a default programming that doesn't work, that the Earth learning comes from the self-chastising and the ruminating and the attacking. 

The learning comes immediately from the consequence of the experience. 

Let’s say a bad thing happened to you in the past, and one day, you thought you found a great match in someone, so you got into the relationship and didn’t speak up. Something that was worse than the past event happened, and then you entered into behavioral conditioning.

That’s called “punishment.” That means an unpleasant stimulus or something you like is taken away. But in this case, you get a negative consequence of feedback from life, and then you think, I don’t want to do that again. 

When you’re grinding yourself on it for weeks, months or years later, you are not learning. You are engaging in a pattern. 

This is so important. 

I want you to listen to this: when you’re ruminating on a past mistake, you’re not learning. You’re engaging in a pattern of self-attack designed to scrunch you into a safer, less risk-taking position so that you are trying to get through your life without pain. And so it’s chastising you. 

Oh, you should have seen it coming. 

You should have done this. 

It's based upon the illusion that there's this perfect pathway through life where you're not going to feel pain. And if you're just smart enough and you do it right, you won’t feel any pain. 

But that is a crazy delusion. And unless you call it out, we can all fall into. So you got to call it out and say: “That's not how life works.” 

LIFE IS ALL OF IT.

Life is a mixture of pleasure and pain. Good outcomes and bad outcomes. 

The good outcomes are what I call successes or wins. Bad outcomes are mistakes or failures. The more you freak out about those, the less good outcomes you’ll receive because you freaked out about your mistakes. 

So what you need to do is to shift that and say, “Bring it all on. Yeah, I'm here to do all of it. I'm here to grow. I'm here to test things out.”

A key thing is to access power in your body and say “I have permission to make mistakes.” Claim that. 

However, if you hear that voice that tells you you’re no good, you'll be diluting the power of your soul and misperceiving who and what you are, which is a powerful creator who is connected with the creative force. 

As that powerful creator, you can say, “Wait, no, I don't do that anymore. I'm not going to beat myself up and grind myself on this.” 

In the meantime, what I invite you to do is, when you are grinding on mistakes, take ownership and say, “That's not how I learned. That's not what I'm going to do anymore. I'm doing something different. I'm going to be on my side.  I'm more forgiving. I'm doing more loving. I'm doing more forward-thinking.” 

Stay tuned for that until we speak again. 

May we have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you're awesome.