How To Be In Control Of Your Future (Even After A Past Riddled With Failure)

Darren Webb

7 years ago

You’re reading How To Be In Control Of Your Future (Even After A Past Riddled With Failure), originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Sometimes you encounter situations that make you question your luck. You could be the desperate single lady, or the sterile man with no kids, or the college graduate with a shitty job and less pay. You could have an ill mannered housemate or a wife who isn’t fully committed to your marriage. At that point, you begin to desire and wish you had someone else’s life. But do you know that your situation is not entirely a coincidence, things can be made to happen and it’s not always by chance. Many people live by a rather phlegmatic code; instead of taking life by the horn and creating what they want, they would rather wallow and accept whatever toxic situation comes along. Many of these people believe the saying that goes in the line of; “What’s done is done” or “if it happened to me then it was meant to be” or “everything happens for a reason” or more luckily “if it works out then it was meant to be”. But this is one line of thinking that can make you really comfortable in failure.

The problem

This is an adopted character and it is not coming from your true personality; it is not your authentic expression. It is you giving up without even trying. These thoughts are generated and nurtured by two kinds of fears (a) Either by a fear of rejection or failure
(b) By a subtle fear of having what you truly want and desire. A cold feeling of unworthiness. Allow me to dwell on the latter for the rest of this article. This fear also comes with an unconscious belief that you are not good enough to have the things you want, that some things are not meant for you. This belief is usually created in your earliest years as a consolation mechanism in your subconscious to protect you from heartaches of disappointment. It is a protective mechanism, a kind of self defense strategy. This system is lying quietly in your subconscious and it is shaping your behaviors and actions The problem now is that it will continue controlling your behaviors and thoughts. It will lead you to accepting unfulfilling situations and toxic relationships. It will leave you asking questions like “how did I get here” or “why is this happening to me”

How this consolation mechanism works

Picture an individual, let’s call him John. John is coming toward success in his career path. But if he subconsciously feels unworthy of such an opportunity, he will start to avoid and sabotage him progress with his own actions. He will begin to create a barrage of meaningless internalized rationalizations and create excuses as to why that positive life enhancing opportunity isn’t going to work out for him. Instead of grabbing the opportunity, he’ll refer the job to others who he feels are better than himself. He is scared of succeeding but he doesn’t know it. This, unfortunately causes John to mindlessly opt for negative choices in life. He will make bad relationship and career choices along the way. This will lead to a reduction in his self-esteem and confidence and over time. The overall final effect is depression. So what is the solution, how do you break yourself loose from this? How can you stop your fear from making these important decisions being made unconsciously on your behalf? How can you remove negative unconscious behaviors? The solution is to challenge the negativity, not to replace it, but to remove it along with all mental trigger systems in which this belief is hooked into. The common dogmatic idea is to “believe” that your past failures have merged with your being and are inseparable from your personality. Some believe that if something happens to you over time, it fundamentally represents who you are. Examples; (a) Mary has stage fright and she froze every time she was asked to speak in public. The common idea is that she has got low self-confidence and thus she is not a natural leader. (b) Andriy apologizes first even when he is clearly not at fault. The common belief is that he has got low self-worth and thus will be a push over, forever. But this is not true. Both of them are not defined by the implications of their flaws. However they are experiencing a fear of expressing their real self. This fear will continue to sink deep within the person and lie like a trap. It can be triggered by external forces like daily social events that reanimate past situations. This dynamic will make them vulnerable and push them into making poor life choices. Because of this, the individual’s choices are focused on escape routes and efforts to avoid such triggers. Hence this activates the fear of that states “I am not worthy of having what I truly want and desire” As a result, this poses a serious challenge to the individuals character growth. It provides an artificial blockade to the individual’s personal expression and in turn influencing the course of their lives. A lot of victims attempt boycott these inner negative feelings by turning to mind numbing sedatives such as narcotics or alcohol. Even though some people perceive those as a temporary solution that allows them to endure otherwise untenable situations. I hold that the sedative approach only serves to enslave them to a life of addiction. This gives further evidence that such an individual has been enslaved, and has accepted to live in an unfavorable situation.

What to do about it

Lets look at it this way, much like working with an old computer software that has got limited a purpose; it only makes sense to scrap it and get updated with a newer and more efficient version. The past has got to go, its time to begin afresh with an entirely new script. In this case we are referring to the human hard drive which is your mind, and it needs new information about your strengths. It will deal with the memories of the so-called evil past and allow for an entirely new and more positive and expansive script to run you. As a result you will believe more in yourself and make positive life changing decisions. Your choices will no longer be influenced by fear because you now know what you’re capable of. You will choose and create from free will; not from the fear of rejection or loss. In order to do this one must first bring into question the limiting belief that “the past will control the future”. How is this possible? Your future is not affected by your past unless you let it. Whether under or beyond your power, every situation in life is result of a decision or a series of decisions. All you must now do it to influence what you can change and relentlessly chase what is within your reach. You need to understand that your life is like a book and the next page has not been written. The more interesting fact is that you alone have the power to write the next line. In the field of logic and arithmetic, statisticians write complex formulas that help them guess the probable outcomes of future events; they do this by merely studying previous patterns. But your life is not a figure or a statistic, our human nature is too random and spontaneous and this allows us to be anything or anyone we want. In fact we are only confined to patterns if we truly want to. You are not cursed, and most people don’t care about your past failures. They probably have a couple of things to be ashamed of too. What matters more to anyone is what you do now, right from this moment on.

Adoga Godwin loves to motivate others and help them become better. He writes at http://hiphophead.com.ng

You’ve read How To Be In Control Of Your Future (Even After A Past Riddled With Failure), originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.