Go Backwards to Move Forwards
Posted on November 20, 2024 by Todd Leonard, One of Thousands of Spirituality Coaches on Noomii.
Often our brains remember life events wrong and tell false stories about us that replay in our unconscious. We have to rewrite them to get healthy.
MY COACHING PROCESS. The other day a potential client asked me to explain my coaching process to them. I said that, usually, we need to take a journey backward in time before we can move forward. The reason? Often, we need to deal with events from our past that our brain has remembered as false stories.
What does that mean? While the actual event—a prolonged childhood illness, a parental divorce, a bullying incident, a romantic rejection—is factual, oftentimes, the way your brain retells the story to you moving forward is skewed or false. Your early illness proves you’re weak; no relationship will last forever since your parents” didn’t; you were beat up and excluded because you’re weird; and you’re not worth someone else’s love because of previous rejection.
While those facts are true, each of those stories are completely false. But so often, we interact with others and make career decisions based on those stories playing on loop in our unconscious.
So we have to go backwards and rewrite our stories, telling ourselves the truth about what happened, and in the process, letting ourselves off the hook or forgiving ourselves or comforting ourselves for what we’ve been through.
Then we can move forward and make plans for action, telling ourselves the right stories about who we are and what we are capable of. And, if we make mistakes or fail along the way, we’ll be able to put those in the proper context, too.
