Some have heard the expression “The past is history, the future is a mystery, and that is why today is the present”. Quite a few people I coach have some event from the past that was so painful that it continues to disempower them today, causing pain and ruining the present, and likely to do the same in the future. Just yesterday in fact a friend was saying how he could not forgive his father.
Now it is true you cannot change the past, but we coaches know that we can assign a different meaning to these events, allowing an empowering present and future. My friend’s focus was on the unfair, unjust, and generally unemotional treatment by his father, running it over and over in his mind like a broken instant replay machine, ruining his biochemistry and emotional state every time he thought about these events. I asked him if he would like to be free of these feelings, to which he said I don’t know that it is possible. I just smiled and said that it is. And then I said goodbye and left him with that possibility, planting a seed of doubt about what he believed to be true.
