How many stories do you carry with you?

Those stories that you don’t want to remember…Where you blame yourself or another person..Or where you can’t forgive yourself. Where is it you haven’t shown up as your best self?  Where do you have regrets or shame? What are the stories that leave a bitter taste in your mouth…contract your heart and make your mind swirl in self-criticizing circles day after day.. Or those that you prefer to hide and don’t want anybody to know about.  In general, we call those stories, a MESS.

Everybody has a mess and everybody makes mistakes. I have done so many things of which I’m not proud, or I’ve regretted and for which I couldn’t forgive myself. And eventually, it becomes exhausting, especially if we turn it into self-punishment.

The truth is that we can use our mess as a catalyst for growth.

But usually, our first tendency is to forget about it.  Act like it never happened. In other words, cut this experience off, reject it or throw it away. This is a normal reaction to protect ourselves from the pain of being hurt. The problem is that by rejecting and cutting off those parts of us, we never question what happened in a constructive way so that we can integrate the experience and move on. Instead, we carry these memories about past decisions or choices or what happened to us within our body – repressed, suppressed.. never to be looked at. And the frustration and anger grows underneath, never to be acknowledged, until one day… Everything explodes! Or the pattern gets repeated, we get hurt again and roll back into our shell.

You may wonder how this relates to business? A whole lot!  When you carry this heavy energy load, it pulls you down and doesn’t allow you to be free, authentic and play a bigger game. Within those stories, you are coming from a place of “Victim” which keeps you stuck within your old identity in terms of what you can and cannot achieve in terms of success. And unless those stories are resolved, they will always show up in your relationships with clients in very weird, sneaky ways. So, the solution is to make the completion process conscious and better, and then regularly perform those clean up rituals for yourself.

The first rule for gracious completion is total HONESTY! Nobody is looking at you, you don’t need to prove anything to anybody. So, just take an honest look at what you need to complete from your past. Pull to the surface all your feelings of anger, resentment, shame, blame, guilt, jealousy…See it for what it is. Allow those feelings to exist as they are, as if you would take them on vacation and allow them to put their nice bodies out to enjoy the sun. Those feelings have nothing to do with you, believe it or not. You might even have picked them up from somebody else.  Or they could be a result of taking things too personally.

The second rule is taking RESPONSIBILITY.  Reflect on how you have been the source of those patterns and stories. How have you unconsciously agreed to play that role? This is the only way you can gain access to change these patterns and never repeat them again. Create your personal ritual of letting go of and completing those stories.

Make a new choice to never get into the old patterns that no longer serve you.  Commit yourself to new actions and decisions which are in alignment with your new choice.

What are the stories from your past that keep you stuck where you are?

July 2013 Issue