Using Your Past to Build Your Future

When was the last time you had a worry-free day?  What if you could reframe the way you think about worry and even where that worry comes from? 

I recently sat down with author, speaker, and coach Darryll Stinson, to tip some self-help heavy hitters on their sides. Our conversation took us through a new concept of focusing on the past -pain, and joy - to understand the emotions and effects of our experiences. 

Winning Over Worry

Self-help tells us to forget the past, we aren’t going there… quotes on coffee mugs and motivational posters tell us to only look forward and imagine what we want. But what if the things that have happened in the past, that we’ve never given thought or focus to, are the reason we don’t have what we want in life now? What if ignoring those emotions, or punishing ourselves for them, is the reason we can’t look ahead? If we think about it like this, it’s easy to see how we might be overlooking a very valuable resource (our past experiences!), and Daryll and I spent a lot of time talking about leaning into these emotions and this conditioning to win over our worry. 

“There are no losses. There are only lessons. A loss is only a loss if you put a period where you should be putting a comma or where you try to close a chapter. I do a lot of work with addiction recovery because of my story and things like that. People come in with trauma, childhood pain and I tell them this, “You mean to tell me that you’re going to go through sexual molestation as a child, being introduced to drugs, no father in the home, abuse, and not take something from that experience?” You better take wisdom, lessons, power, strength, grit, tenacity, and resilience from those pain experiences because that is what makes the struggle worth the result. Nobody works out and goes through physical pain without expecting a physical result. Why go through emotional pain and not expect emotional results?”

This is the ultimate reframe. We expect physical results when we participate in physical activity. Emotionally, we don’t think about the toll we’ve paid emotionally and that there are emotional fruits on that tree. If you’re looking and you can see them, then you can benefit from them, but you don’t recognize them. 

Think about this: What if people who experienced the most pain and rejection are in a position to make the most impact? What if it’s not the smartest person? What if it’s not the studious person? What if it’s not all A-student? Ask Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and Michael Jordan. These are people who experienced extreme rejection and went on to change the world in their own ways. 

Leaving Doors Open

So what if, instead of shutting the door, we leave the door open to the past? What if we learned to use that to our advantage, to understand how strong we are, and to remember in our moments of weakness- how strong we truly are. 

“Typically, when a person looks in their past, they look at all the mistakes they made. They look at all the failures and what they should have done right.  I’m suggesting that we look at the past to see and remember how, at some point, we felt the same way that we feel currently. I’ve never met a person going through a tough time who’s never been through a tough time. We forget that we felt overwhelmed or that we thought that season was going to last forever. We felt like we were never going to make it like we were going to die. We thought this embarrassment or this failure was going to be the end of our career or future or family, and it wasn’t. You live to fight another day. If you could remember that you’ve been through worse, that helps you develop the grit and perseverance needed now to keep moving forward.” -Daryll Stinson

Overcoming Rejection

Darryll is a rapper, a TEDx speaker, and a pastor, and his theory, and part of his TEDx talk, Overcoming Rejection, is all about how the thing people rejected him for as a child is a thing that makes him successful as an adult. He learned to be an asset, not a liability. His decision to build resilience, by moving forward when nothing in you feels like doing it, has been key in Daryll building an incredibly successful business and joy-FULL life.

We’ve all experienced rejection in life. It’s the coworkers that didn’t invite you to the after-hours get-together, it's the friend group that booked a trip without you, it's the spouse that asked for a divorce, it's the boss that gave your promotion to someone else… that rejection traps us in mistruths about who we are and how good we are. We have to be willing to forgive that rejection, to forgive anyone involved, and to forgive ourselves for carrying it around. Remember - no losses, only lessons. This is how we look to the past to guide us, so we make better decisions in the future, and so we learn how to love ourselves in the process. 

If you love this counterintuitive talk as much as Daryll and I do, hop over to the podcast and drop in on this episode. And don’t forget to let us know how you’re leaning into the past to leap into the future!