In this episode we are talking about the past. We use the past to determine our future and I'm going to teach you how to use your future to determine your future. If we keep looking to the past in life we will just keep re-creating the past.
In this episode we are talking about the past. We use the past to determine our future and I'm going to teach you how to use your future to determine your future. If we keep looking to the past in life we will just keep re-creating the past.
You are listening to the modern Mormon, Episode 23. Hey there, I'm kami Satterlee. And I'm the modern Mormon. I'm an Advanced Certified Life coach who's dropped the all or nothing approach to life. And religion. I can't wait to show you how. I've got you, girl. Let's go Hello, beautiful souls, how we doing? Are you guys sick, I am so sick. My whole family's been sick. I swear, everyone and their dog has COVID this week, it's insane. We are slowly recovering. But if my voice happens to crack, you know why, okay, so today's podcast is let it go all about the past we're going to talk about and this is such an important topic, one of the most important topics I would say, within coaching and just life in general. Because when anytime that we are talking about trying to better ourselves or become somebody, our mind typically goes to our past to determine what our future is what we're capable of being. And so this is what I coach most of my clients on is how they view their past. So the other day, I was having a conversation with my husband, Steve, and we were talking about being present in a current moment. And I told him, there's really no such thing. Like, you really can't be present within a moment. Because even if you are physically present in that moment, by the time you have a thought about that moment, it's already the past, technically, and so him and I kind of went back and forth. And he had a hard time wrapping his brain around this for some reason. And it was kind of funny, because we talked about how we are always striving to be in the present moment. Usually, that means make sure that our thoughts are focused around whatever it is that we're doing so that we can be present. But when we're actually talking about a present moment that really doesn't exist. And I actually think this is really good news. To me, this gives us the option to always be changing, always be evolving, that we are never standing still, and we are never stuck in a current moment, we always have the opportunity to learn and to try harder, and be different than even five minutes ago. A lot of times when I'm coaching with clients, I can begin to see patterns of behavior and, and ways of thinking. And when I asked about it, it takes my clients to their past, right, sometimes they know exactly where they got that thought from the beginning, or why they act the way they do. Sometimes they can even take me to a specific circumstance that changed it all for them. But we usually don't spend a lot of time in the past or in coaching. And that tends to be the biggest difference between coaching and therapy. In my experience with therapy, it was a lot of past talk, there's a place for this for sure, especially when you're dealing with traumas, or really needing to go to that place to uncover some heavy emotional feelings that you never really experienced or had the time to process. I think sharing our stories about the past is also really powerful. But not if we are telling and retelling those stories as a victim. I love the idea that the past is not hurting us today, it's our thoughts about the past that are, which means we have the ability to view our past in a way that can serve us today. So we don't need to change our past, we just need to change the lens in which we are viewing it. So my experience in therapy was when I had an eating disorder, talked about so many times. And I remember sitting with my counselor and sort of telling him my story up until that point. And mind you, I was only a senior in high school. So I could only talk about I mean, Kid things, drama things, whatever. I didn't have like a terrible upbringing. So I just, you know, rattle off whatever I could think of. And after I finished speaking, he told me, he wanted to talk about my boyfriend my freshman year. And he thought that, that my boyfriend at the time had a lot to do with my eating disorder. I remember being so thrown off by that, as I did not see the correlation at all. Looking back on it now. Yeah, maybe there was some type of long lasting mental abuse from being cheated on, and all the typical teenage drama things, but spending the time to try and decode everything to try and figure out the why behind it wasn't as beneficial to me as simply what are you currently thinking? And where do we want to go from here? The problem I was dealing with was my current thoughts about myself. They may have started when I was younger, but it wasn't like I was carrying them around all the time. It was the fact that I was choosing to think them every single day. There really is no such thing as carrying around old thoughts. What's happening is I'm choosing to continue to think a thought that I have maybe been socially conditioned to think I grew up thinking but I'm choosing it every single day. And most likely we're doing it unconsciously. It's on default. Our brain is just choosing to think the same thoughts because it's believed them. It's turned into a belief because we thought them so many times that now it's just kind of what we think. So this is why it is so important to be the watcher of your brain. If you're right Mind is conditioned to think a certain way, and on default choose the same thoughts again and again, without ever being questioned, then you will end up with the exact same results. So I coach women in the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I talked about how so many of us struggle with perfectionism, people pleasing thoughts that they were unworthy, a lot of times we take action from fear or obligation versus like a true knowing and a desire, I do feel there is a place to talk about the past, in order to kind of understand, especially for me, as a coach, understand somebody's background, and what they're dealing with, I wouldn't expect everyone to understand the struggles, the women I coach have if they did not fully grasp what it's like to grow up as a member of the church. And I'm not saying it's not possible to coach someone, I'm not saying someone has to have the same experience in the exact same, you know, type of circumstances in order to coach somebody. But I do believe there is a level of understanding needed to know why we are sometimes holding on to these past thoughts, with like a death grip, why a thought like follow the profit can feel like a like almost like a death when your mind is truly being pulled in a different direction. So the past is good to explore as long as the future is the main focus. So when Steve and I did some couples retreats, they had us do similar work on this on the past, and I brought up the same fights that we had always had. And in an effort to get rid of, you know, those thoughts, I would bring up the past kind of to defend my emotions that I was currently having. So I became like, such a needy wife. And these moments, she's such a victim, I had a thought that Steve didn't love me. And so in order for me to feel his love, Steve needed to act and perform towards me in whatever my love language was, I think it's like, you know, quality time and touch or something like that. So, during the sessions, I would bring up the past and give examples to prove why he didn't love me. And then of course, he would argue and defend that he did. And he has no idea what I'm talking about. And then we would go back and forth. And we'd go rounds on this. And the counselor would then say this is kameez love language, and this is what kami needs. So Steve would do his best to schedule time for me make me his number one priority, but it would always kind of fizzle out. Because that's not who Steve is. And it's not authentic, because he's trying to people, please, right. And I would always be left angry. And we would always be left having the exact same fights. And I would continue to look to the past to determine whether our relationship would work out or not. And because I was so past focused, I would repeat the past with my thoughts, which then would equal repeating the exact same fights again and again, right? How many of you do this? What's interesting is I never thought to question the thought that he doesn't love me. Sometimes I would think, Oh, see, he does love me, we'd have a great time. But then it would always creep back in like it was such a thought that was on default, right? It was never something that I was intentionally deciding I wasn't going to think anymore. So my brain saw as a fact, no counselor, ever talked to me about my current thought about my relationship, they always just kind of focused on the actions from the past, trying to fix and change them. So whatever Steve did in the past was completely irrelevant to what I was experiencing now. The counselor was believing that Steve's actions were causing my emotions. So in order for me to feel better, and in order for our relationship to work, Steve was the one who needed to change he needed to meet my needs. It never occurred to me that I could meet my own. What I now know through coaching is that I was making all of his actions mean, my current thought that he didn't love me. So even if he did do everything perfectly, I still would believe he didn't love me, because of that current thought, because my brain would constantly find evidence for that. It had nothing to do with our past. And more importantly, it had nothing to do with Steve. This is the beauty of our thoughts. They hold all the power. It is not the circumstance, it is not what happened in your past that determines your future. It is your thought about it. Are you viewing your past in a way that propels you forward and creates unstoppable action towards your dreams? Or are you just using your past to think about yourself and what you've been through what you're capable of and what you deserve, in a way to kind of keep you stuck? The past events are irrelevant to what you're creating for yourself. If you want to become an empower, empowered and motivated person who isn't afraid to go after their dreams and nothing can hold them back. You simply need to rewrite the story. You're telling yourself about who you are, and your past. If we're constantly beating ourselves up for our past mistakes, and we're wishing we would have done things differently or wishing we were stronger in moments or we are regretting our life choices and hopes that it will change our direction for our future, then not only are we wasting our time, but we're using all of our energy that can be used for learning and growth and we're using it to punch ourselves in the face in hopes that it will drive us towards positive action. It never does. I have never beat myself into success, I have never beat myself happier. No relationship has ever been healed by pointing your finger at yourself or somebody else. And if you are someone that has been doing this, now is not the time to beat yourself up for doing this. That's the habit that we're trying to stop. So where you can start is, with one of the most powerful questions I love to ask every one of my coaching clients when we begin our sessions, and that is who are you? Now if you ask yourself this question, your brain will typically go to your past to determine who you are. This is why when you look at your own life, sometimes or even other people's lives, it almost seems kind of predictable, you know what's going to happen next, because it's always the same thing that continues to happen with you or them. If we're using our past to determine who we are, we're just going to continue to create more of the past, more of what we did yesterday. If we're not rewriting our story about our traumas and our mistakes, and we're living in them daily, and using them as our guides to what we deserve, and what we're worth, we're always going to end up with the same results. So when I asked this question, Who are you, for women, especially what I noticed is we love to define who we are by our roles in life. I am a mother, I am a wife, I own a business, I'm a church leader, etc. But I want you to take it a little deeper and not tell me what you are, but more so who you are, we are not what we do. We are not the choices we make. We're not our mistakes, we are not our past. It's not who we are. We're not even our roles, when we can separate that from ourselves that allows so much more space and freedom for new thoughts. So if we have been looking to our past and using recycled thoughts again, and again, in order to break that habit, we need to start thinking thoughts that we have never thought before new thoughts created not from thinking about the past, but from what we want to create for our future. So this can be really tricky for your brain at first because it is so used to reflection. And it's used to finding the negative, it's used to going to the past. And in an effort to keep you safe and avoid danger. It doesn't want to give you a thought of something that you've never done. It wants to say, see, you tried this that one time and you weren't very good at it. So don't try it again. Or you tried to do something new, remember, and it failed. So let's not do that. Your brain might come up and tell you, you know, you're a liar. You're being delusional. But if you think about it, there really is no such thing. If you're the only one that feels your thoughts, then being delusional isn't something that affects anyone but you. And if it affects you in a positive way that has you feeling motivated to take action to better your life, then who cares? So President Uchtdorf, who's an apostle of the LDS church, he said, much of the confusion we experience in this life comes from simply not understanding who we are. I love this so much. I see this in coaching all the time. If we truly understood our worth, if we didn't tie that to our past choices and made it mean something about who we are today, then I truly think we would be unstoppable in our desire to seek knowledge, growth and hit our goals. So who is this ideal woman? Not what her actions are. But who is she inside? So I like to answer this question. For me personally, I love to say, I am a daughter of a perfect God, who makes no mistakes. Thank you, Lady Gaga. I'm confident I'm motivated. I'm capable of creating anything I want in life. I'm not afraid of taking risks. I know I can handle any emotion that comes up. I'm not afraid to fail. I am successful. Always trying new things, never quitting. I'm teachable. And every day I open up to new wisdom and opportunities for improvement and growth. I'm so full of love and forgiveness for myself and for others. I don't carry grudges. I see the good in everyone I meet. I don't strive for perfection, I strive for progress. I stick to my commitments and promises that I make to myself and others. Think about that, like how empowering are these thoughts? What kind of actions do you think that I will take in thinking these thoughts everyday about myself? Now, are these thoughts arrogant? Or are they confident? I would say they're confident they leave room for failure. And none of these thoughts mean I am better than anyone else. And I actually don't have to 100% Believe and fully understand these thoughts. I'm choosing to think them every single day so that they will become beliefs. These are the thoughts that will have me getting the results in life that I truly dream of. And not from a delusional mind, but a mind of somebody who knows her worth, that it's not tied to anything she does, or will do. Thoughts like these will have be showing up as the person and the mom and the wife, the coach I want to be the actions I take from this spot and this type of mindset will have me showing up as my future self. And then these results today will be my past tomorrow. So think about it. If I was to define myself by my past and I've talked about my past so many times in my podcasts. I talked about the things I've done in my past, but if I use those things to determine who I am and what I should do for my future, it would sound a little something like this. If I can't get my husband to change, because he loves me, then we will never work. I can never love me unless he does. And he obviously doesn't. If I can never lose the weight, I will never be attractive. I can't love my body until it's perfect. I've never been able to lose weight, so I never will be able to success is earned. I'm just a stay at home mom. So I'll never be successful. I can't be both. I believe God forgives everyone, but not me. I should know better. I choose to repeat my mistakes. Therefore, I consider it premeditated. And because of that I'm not worthy. Good moms don't forget their kids at the bus stop. If I wasn't so lazy, I would have my shit together. And that would have never happened. I now know better. Therefore I should be better. You didn't have a traumatic childhood or a terrible life. So you have no room to complain, you should be happy. Because you're not happy. You're ungrateful. This list could go on and on. And these are real thoughts. These are real thoughts that I thought all throughout my life. Are any of these thoughts true? No. They're just thoughts, their ways of viewing my past as a victim, or in an effort to beat myself better. Your past is over, it's done. It's old news, my friends, you cannot change it. You cannot fix it. It is what helped you become the person you are today. So why would you it's time to let it go. Let go of the kids the shoulds and the wishes. Let go of the longing and the regret, you are not that person anymore. And that story, you're not that they are not that person anymore. And that story. Whatever you did, or didn't do, let it go. Whatever they did, or didn't do, let it go. It was always supposed to go like this. This was always supposed to happen. But you get to determine the reason that it happened. You get to determine how the story ends. Your past is not hurting you. It was done a long time ago. It's okay if you want to keep thinking about it. But why not think about it in a way that leaves you proud and empowered, and so glad that it happened. Why not be building your future so much that your past absolutely makes sense. There's no better way that you could get to point A to point C without getting to be that part of your story was important. The day I decided I wanted to stop believing my husband didn't love me. It was such a powerful day. I had worked with the coach for a while now. And I had told her everything I had been a victim I had cried, I complained. I had revisited the past more times and I could count and I was exhausted. When my coach asked me why I was making all of his actions mean, he didn't love me. My brain just didn't get it. When she asked me what if I just decided he does love me. It was such an aha moment. It was hard for my brain to wrap around that. But just her saying it gave it an option in my brain. When I began to rewrite all of the actions that he had taken in the past and not made them mean he didn't love me but made them mean like positive things about him and his personality and kind of actually separated all of his actions for me, like it had nothing to do with me. It was so freeing. The more I lived into these new beliefs, the easier it was to let go. The more I lived into these beliefs, the happier I was, and the better our relationship became. Because we started to connect and we started to get closer. I didn't have all these expectations of him, I was able to just let it go. And let Steve just be Steve and love him for exactly who he was. My thoughts about Steve was causing the disconnect in my marriage. So when I was able to go, you know retell the story in the version I wanted, I was able to experience a deeper love and connection than I had ever felt before. You too can have this exact same experience. No matter what past circumstance you feel is kind of taking over. You are in control of your past. Your past is not in control of you. When seeing things and believing them and making them into a story is an option for you. Like when you understand you can rewrite. And you can view things any way you want to no matter how traumatic they were for you. And you use those things to serve you today. When you see that you can be future focused, it starts to get really fun. The more you can train your brain to be future focused, the more that you understand that you have the ability to think whatever you want, and create any emotion that you want. And suddenly your future is exciting. Suddenly trying new things isn't scary. And you can't wait to see what you create. So if you've been holding on to the past, if you've been holding on to yesterday, 10 years ago, your childhood whatever it is, consider this permission to let it go. Let it go my friends. I can't wait to see what you create next. If you're ready to drop the all or nothing in your life than I would be honored to be your life coach head over to the modern mormon.com To start your journey in becoming the competent authentic and best version of you