how to develop a positive orientation towards your past

The past has gone, stop dwelling on it. Most people seem to let their past hold them back. People are still talking about things that happened ten years ago, especially because it hurt them. If you are so focused on the negatives from your past, you hinder yourself with anger and depression and cannot act in the present. You must also be careful to dwell too much in the present, not thinking about the future at all. But if we focus more on the past now, the question is how to switch your orientation towards your past from negative to positive, especially to see all the positive things that happened to you, not only the negatives.

Here are a few things that can help you have a more positive orientation towards your past;

• Accepting your starting point

If you had a good starting point in life, accepting your starting point is the easy thing to do. The most important part of your starting point is how much sense of emotional security you have and how much love and affection you received, especially from your mother from when you were born to up to five years of age or so. Then we have upbringing. There’s a strong correlation between how much energy your parents invested into your upbringing and your potential for success. The more they read to you, took you to art shows, sports games and the more they encouraged your hobbies and confidence, the more talents you could develop and the better picture you got of how the world works and all the possibilities.

Your starting point may be great or it may be average. You can’t change your past, the only thing that you can do is accept it. The good news is that in your adult life, you have the power to change many things. Your starting point may somehow limit your potential, but only to a certain extent. If you take full responsibility for your thoughts, words, emotions, attitude and actions, you can achieve a lot in life, no matter how tough your starting point was. The first step to accepting your starting point is to focus on the positives. You cannot change what happened, only how you view it. Your past cannot be changed and it may never be forgotten, but it can always be used. No matter how bad your starting point was, there must be positive things you got, be it on the physical, emotional or intellectual level. You should be focused on the thing you did get, not only on what you didn’t.

You have three missions in this life. One is to enjoy life, the second one to create value and the third to personally grow, to become the best possible version of yourself. Personal growth is nothing but diminishing the gap between your starting point and who you want to become, that is your ideal self. You also have to know that accepting your past is not a one-time event, it’s a process. It’s a process of ups and downs; the harder the past, the longer the process with all its highs and lows. But it can be done.

• List of your personal strengths

Your past is the reason behind who you are, with all your strengths and weaknesses. You may not like certain parts of your character, but you should definitely be proud of your strengths. Good times are only producing soft people. So your strengths more or less developed from the tough times in your past. The stronger you are, the more difficult situations you probably had to encounter. Therefore you should definitely list all your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats; you should see all the strengths you acquired as the aftermath of the battles you fought in the past. Strength are not only muscles and power and being better than others at something. The strengths also mean admitting all the limitations you have, being humble and knowing also how to be interdependent relationships, and being loving and caring towards others. Love and tenderness are the biggest strengths you can have in life. To act out of love is not the same as being soft and naïve.

• List of your past accomplishments

All your achievements, moments of success and victories are not that special because they are not life-threatening and you feel there’s no need for remembering them. You tend to quickly forget about all your past victories, especially in the long run. In the short term, victories encourage you to achieve even more and boost your self-esteem, but when the first failure comes, you can quickly forget about all the past victories you achieved and see only your past failures.

Have a list of your past accomplishments. When your self-esteem goes down or you feel bad after a failure, you should look at the list, just to remind yourself that you are a winner and that you have many past accomplishments. Every single person on the planet has bigger or smaller accomplishments in their lives that they can list and that can definitely help them see the past in a more positive way.

• Gratitude list

The last technique that can help you to see your past more positively is a gratitude list. Many times, you simply forget how much you already have and all the things that you can be grateful for. Gratitude shifts your focus from what your life lacks to the abundance that’s already present. If you don’t know what to be grateful for, here are some ideas. You can be grateful for your health, spouse, family, friends, the employment or business you have, the value you are able to create, your genes, looks, food and shelter, and so on. By practicing everyday gratitude, you will put your life into a more positive perspective, you’ll realize how much you already really have and you will definitely accept your past more easily. With your personal gratitude list, you will constantly be aware of the wonderful things in your life.

The more gratitude you have in your life, the more you open yourself up for abundance, meaning getting even more excited about your future.