What if I told you, you can go back in time and change history? Or, you can go into the future and see what will happen? Well, you can.

Bad things happen to good people. Think about a past experience you had. What details come to mind? What do you feel when you think about this memory? What emotions do you have? Do you like this memory? To have a memory of something is nothing but a capsule that you’ve placed in a time machine, a capsule that you can take out and change to your liking.

Let’s test this with the same memory you had above. Play this memory out in your head, but this time, use the perception of someone that has the opposite feelings towards this memory. This person doesn’t have to exist, create someone. Put yourself in that person’s shoes and imagine yourself being this person, thinking back at the same memory. Take a moment and think about what this person is feeling. Whenever you find yourself going back to your own emotions, take your focus back to what is going on in the other person’s head. Why does this person feel this way? What are they experiencing? What do they see? What worth does this memory have to them? What effect do these feelings have on their life now?

Do you see how the same memory can have different meanings?

Assess your focus

There is a famous tale of two twin boys who were raised by their alcoholic father. One grew up to be an alcoholic and when asked why he was an alcoholic he said: “What do you expect, look at my father.” The other grew up and never drank in his life. When he was asked why he wasn’t an alcoholic he said: “What do you expect, look at my father.” Two boys with the same father, but with two very different perspectives.

What you focus on will ultimately determine your life. Which brings me back to your time machine. What believes do you have based on past memories? How do these memories shape your life?

Someone I know very well will refer to painful past events as “facts”. These painful events so often get brought up when new events happen,  “because of his past’s pain”. “Beauce my mother didn’t care…”, “Because they only took from me…” “Because I didn’t get to go to university…” This is a victim mindset. A believe that things happen to you without your control. This belief so often goes with an “I cannot change” mentality. A belief that a person is who he is because of the things that happen to him.

Choose your focus

Right now you have the power to choose what you want from life. More freedom. More choices. More goodness, more peace. Right now you can make a choice to be free of emotional baggage. To live without the past pulling you back.

When I was still in school there was a girl who didn’t have much. In fact, she grew up in a shack without electricity. She had to walk 2 kilometres every day to get clean water for her family. She had to work after school to help support her family and did her homework at night by candlelight. That same girl was number one in her class. She had a big dream for her life and didn’t see her situation as a stumbling block, but instead worked towards achieving her goal. How easily could she have argued that there’s no future for her? That it’s her lot, her destiny. That her past gave her no other choice.

For the one who has, more will be given, until he overflows with abundance. And the one with hardly anything, even what little he has will be taken from him. Matthew 25:29. What do you have? Do you see what you have, or do you see what you lack? Because whatever you see, that will be amplified.

In one of my favourite books, “Personality isn’t Permanent”, Dr Benjamin Hardy writes about how we can choose to be who we want to be by freeing ourselves of personal badges. Your past can define you the way you want it to define you. Whether it be positive or negative. “By facing your emotions and negative experiences, you change them.” Every time you reflect on that past memory you can choose what you see and the emotions you feel towards it. The more you do that, the stronger it becomes.

Change your focus

I remember a time when I felt resentment and pain whenever I thought about my mother. I could recall all the pain she caused me and saw it repeated in present times. That offcourse had an impact on our relationship and the way I saw my future-self as a mother. My past memories were negative, and so also my current and future memories. Until I decided to change it. I decided to get rid of the negative emotions by facing them. I decided to see another perspective, believing in good intentions and changing the memories I held on. It took time, but how refreshing were the new memories! The “facts” I once held onto has now changed to become new “facts”. Instead of seeing my pain in a certain memory, I now see her love and protection. The feelings of “she never heard me” was transformed to “I wish I could hear her more”.

What memories do you need to change? You have the time capsule in your hand. Your life is and will become that what you believe it to be. Sure, there is an ugly worm before the butterfly, but are you going to focus on the worm and the miserable life it had, or on the beautiful butterfly that will bring joy to life? When you focus on beauty, you also attract beauty and become beauty.

If you too see your past as “facts”, things that happened and cannot change, then I want to challenge you to try and change those facts. Dr Stephen Covey said, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.” What “facts” do you see?