Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, is known for saying: Always make your future bigger than your past. Specifically, Sullivan said, “We remain young to the degree that our ambitions are greater than our memories.”
You make your future bigger than your past by:
- Surrounding yourself with people who remind you more of your future than your past
- Letting go of past failures
- Letting go of past successes
- Freeing yourself from attachments and relationships that only exist for fear of loss — relationships that once made sense but are now “codependent” and unhealthy
- Accepting your current situation for what it is
- Believing your best work is ahead of you
Don’t Look To Your Past While Creating Your Future
“I’m looking forward to the future, and feeling grateful for the past.” — Mike Rowe
Learn from your past. But don’t look to it when creating your vision for your ideal future.
Your past shouldn’t dictate your future. Yet, when most people create goals or plans, they immediately turn to their past and examine previous results or experiences.
Patterns need not persist.
Let the past be what it was.
Accept the present for what it is.
Then decide where you’ll go and what you’ll become. That’s far more fascinating and interesting. And your future absolutely should be something entirely different from what’s happened in the past. Human beings can expand and evolve to the degree that detach from their past.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
If you’ve been successful in the past, that success can be a suppressant to future success. In Essentialism, Greg McKeown says “Success can be a catalyst for failure.”
What got you here, won’t get you there. The things that brought you where you are often the very things stopping you from reaching your next level.
Your attachment to your prior success (or failure) and identity is keeping you stuck.
Take the momentum and lessons from the past, sure. But don’t live there. And certainly don’t remain attached to THAT identity.
Read the full article HERE.
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