Recognising Past Achievements

When you spend time in the past, is it a positive experience or do you come away from it feeling really, really bad about yourself?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to continue our conversation around Emotional Intelligence and building our Personal Power by having a conversation to help us to recognise our past achievements.

If you're like me, I used to carry around a list of everything that I did wrong. It was all there, ready to go, ready to come up and remind me. It was fuel for my mini-me, for that inner dialogue. It was a reservoir for it to be able to reach down into and pull up and go, "Hey, remember this? Remember when you got that wrong? Remember when you failed that? Remember when your marriage didn't work? Remember when you didn't get that position, you didn't get that client?"

Whatever it was. It was this big reservoir of all the past experiences that I would nurse and rehearse. And I'm sure you've got those similar things as well.

And as we talked about last week, we want to give a better inner dialogue. We want to have an opportunity to have some good stuff be spoken to us because that'll propel us and empower us to be who we can be. So, what I want to do today is to help you to look at things from a different way.

There's three positions that we can be in. We can be in our past, in our present, or in our future. And I know that you know that it's great to live in the present moment, to have an understanding of where we're going and to learn from where we've been, but to be able to enjoy being in this present moment right here, right now.

And I know that so many people, they miss out on the beauty of the present because they're still beating themselves up about what happened in the past, or they're still feeling uncertain about what's happening in the future.

What I want to do is to help you to feel confident in your own abilities to develop that Personal Power so that you can enjoy being in the moment, knowing that you have everything within you and around you to be able to have the future that you want to have. To do that, we need to recognise our past achievements. We need to look for the same amount of evidence or more that we can do things, that we are good enough, that we are liked and we are loved than we had in that reservoir of things to the contrary.

I remember when I was in first year of high school. They called it first form then. That's how long ago it was. And I remember this was the time I went to high school early. I went when I was 15 and I was the youngest kid in my class and I was short and I had all these issues. That was the time when I found out about my mom abandoned me as a child and I took that meaning on that was the negative one, rather than what it really meant and all those things we've talked about before.

So in that time, I wasn't feeling all that good about myself. And we had our athletics carnival at school and I had an opportunity to go in some races and to jump things and to throw things and all that sort of stuff. And I remember this one event, it was the 800 meters track event. Now, that gun went off and I took off like a startled gazelle and I came across and I led that race from the stagger all the way to the finish by quite some margin. And not only did I complete the race and win, I actually broke a school record.

I remember getting that blue ribbon and I remember pinning that on myself and feeling proud of myself, feeling so good. And in that moment, I could have done anything. I believed in myself. I forgot what was going on. I started listening to my empowering voice. Now, it was a process and it didn't take long for the other voice to go, "Hang on a minute. That's just one race, dude. Let me just remind you of all the other things that you've failed at."

But I tell you that story to give you an example of what I would love you to do. I would love you to go into your past when you were a small child, as you were going into school, as you went into high school, university, became a parent, whatever it was for you, and I want you to find two or three things, more if you can, experiences that happened in your life where in that moment, you felt proud. You felt good about yourself. You experienced an emotion, which you want to experience again.

So, what this is going to give you an opportunity to do is two things: One, it's going to give you an opportunity to practice retraining your mini-me. And as that voice comes up, go, "Hey, hang on a minute." So, acknowledge and then retrain.

So, I want you to go through and find those places in your life and I want you to deeply immerse yourself in that moment. I want you to close your eyes, if you need to, and allow yourself to go back into that moment and feel what you were feeling, see what you were seeing, hear what you were hearing, smell what was around you.

What were you touching? What were you doing? And relive that moment. And I want you to recognise what was going on in your body. I want you to recognise how that made you feel and then I want you to ask yourself a question. Was that feeling one of empowerment or did it disempower you? Did it hold you back or did you feel like you could go forward?

And the reason we do this is we want to give our brain reference points that it can refer to. Points in our past when we succeeded and feelings that we felt that we want to repeat. So therefore, what it's going to do, and our inner dialogue will help us to do this, is move towards more of those experiences so that we can feel that way again.

So today, we've had a conversation that's going to help us to rewire that brain of ours with positive dialogue, with positive frames of reference, to build up our Personal Power, that competency that underpins all the other competencies of Emotional Intelligence by looking into our past and acknowledging those times when we did feel good about ourself, those times when we felt that we did achieve. And the reason we're doing this as well is so that we develop a pattern of looking for the good, of looking for the achievements, of looking for evidence of "I can", rather than listening to the false evidence of "I can't".