Are you on the road to success but constantly sidelined by flat tires? Does it seem like you can’t get going or that every time you get going and get momentum, something comes along and pops your tire again?
If you feel like your pursuit of success leads to the same place—nowhere, no progress—then there may be more going on.
The Sum Of All Parts
There’s a beautiful sentiment about embracing life and all its ups-and-downs, and it goes, “We are all the sum of our past experiences.” Everything we’ve done or all we’ve been through shapes the person we are today.
However, it’s not so beautiful when there is an underlying issue of the past that’s holding you back. Sometimes, your past experience adversely affects the way you think and behave today. In this case, you may need to re-construct your reactions to that time of your life so that you can get back on the road and cruise along.
For example, if you’re always getting calls for jobs but then never a repeat customer, or you just know that the new client is going to disappear like all the rest, then something more is going on. When circumstances repeat, then it’s time to look closer. You may be stuck in a pattern.
Picking Out The Pattern
Patterns of behavior develop when you hold onto emotions from a negative experience. At the time, you managed to cope, but you still internalized the feelings without the time (or safety) to process and resolve them.
If you experienced trauma or a slew of negative life events without time to recover, those emotions linger, running in the background of your brain and directing your behavior. They are easy to trigger when you feel stress because they originated in response to stressors; they become your go-to behaviors, your default setting.
So, when things “just don’t go my way,” pay attention. You may have repressed emotions that hold you back.
Now it’s time for the good news: recognizing that patterns exist is the first step. Now, you can work to overcome these emotions, break the pattern, and construct new behaviors that will get you on the road to success.
No More Head Banging
When you function in life holding onto the past and repressing emotions, you bind yourself to the negativity and doom yourself to repeat actions that come from a place of past motivations, not a present-day purpose.
You’ll bang your head against the wall, and still, the wall will not move.
Instead, release yourself from the past. Overcoming past trauma or negativity starts by facing it. At some time in your past, something happened. Something caused you to feel badly. Now it’s time to identify, re-construct your reaction, and renew your approach to stressors.
Journaling The Journey
The journey back in time to confront repressed emotions happens when you reflect on that time period and take the time to think through it now that you’re in a safer space.
The best tool to get you started reflecting is writing. Writing down your thoughts connects you to them and allows you to think about them. The act of writing gives you a way to delve into the past so that you can confront trauma or negativity safely.
That was the inspiration for The Best Journal Ever, a place to not only help you work through past experience and repressed emotions, but also to provide exercises that allow you to place them into a healthy context so that you can move on. The Best Journal ever is designed to be a repository for the emotions and a recovery tool.
After working with The Best Journal Ever, you won’t just patch up your tires so you can get on the road to success but get a full replacement set to last the whole ride.
xo
Jennifer