If your past doesn’t define you, how does it keep standing in your way? | DFS 348

Jen, welcome to Destin for success. I'm your

host, Jennifer Takagi, and this week, I want to tackle the

topic, if your past doesn't define you, how and why does it

keep standing in your way? Last week's episode with Tammy

Vincent was great. She's amazing. Her story is amazing.

How she shows up in the world. I was fortunate enough to meet her

in person on a business cruise. And yeah, there are such things

as business cruises. We go on a beautiful cruise ship, and we

have meetings the day we're at sea. A lot of meetings, a lot of

training, a lot of interactions. It's fabulous. I love it. And I

got to hang out with Tammy, so that was super fun. I love

meeting people online and then meeting them in person. It just

like, it's like, oh my gosh, this is how you show up in the

world. So it's really fun. And I agree, your past does not have

to define your future. It doesn't. But the question

becomes, how do you make that not be true? How do you keep

your past from defining your future, how you want to show up

in the world and what you want to do. I have a few ideas about

it. So buckle up buttercup and let's, let's, let's take this

path. Years ago, I was in a women's Bible study, and I'm not

sure if the worksheets were out of an actual book, an actual

training, or if the leader created them. I don't remember,

it's been a while, but one of the questions and like, like,

there was a topic, and then it went into multiple questions

about it, digging a little deeper, a little deeper, a

little deeper. And this was, again, a Christian based Bible

study, and it was only women. And one of the questions was,

how was grief handled in your family when you were a kid? So

like question one was, what was the first loss that you

remember, and then how was it handled in your family, your

mom, your dad, your siblings, like, how was it handled? How is

it processed? Then the final piece of this, as you're

journaling all this basically and what happened, and who said

what, and how you felt about it, instead of bashing your parents.

The next piece was, as an adult, looking back, is that how you

would want to do it now, or if you have children, is that the

behavior you would want to model for your children? So in the

end, we were not parent bashing, and you treated me wrong, and I

hate you, and I need to cut all ties with you. Side note, I'm

talking about normal childhood hurts that feel very traumatic.

I'm not talking about the actual physical abuse of beating

children, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, locking kids

up. I'm not talking about the terrible, horrible, horrific

things. And if that was your experience growing up, let me

just say I'm so sorry. I'm sorry that happened. I'm I'm sorry

that parents can do a bad job, and I'm sorry. I truly am. But

that's not where we are today. What we're talking about today

are are much less on the T trauma scale, I guess I'll say

I've heard it say capital T for trauma or lowercase t. So these

are probably a little more lowercase t. However, those

interactions as a kid set the path on how you're gonna act as

an adult. So my experience was, I had a lot of cats. I always

have a cat. I prefer only having one. Occasion. I've had two.

Once I had three. That was way too many, but my parents passed

away, and I got there too, and I already had one. So I had three

for a number of years. I don't recommend three. It was just too

much for me. But I had this cat. I had gone through a slew like I

had my cat. I don't know anyway, he was gone. That's another

story for another day. Is that what they say? But he was gone.

I was very sad about it, and a friend of. Family gave us a cat,

and she ended up being pregnant, so we had kittens. How fun. So I

have this little kitten, and he's beautiful, and I love him,

and he's so wonderful, and then he got run over by a car, and I

was sad, and I was bawling, and I was devastated, and I lost

several cats, but now I'm a little bit older. I'm probably

seven, maybe eight, and I'm sad like I wake up in the morning

and my parents tell me that in the night, our neighbor ran over

our cat and or my kitten, and my dad had buried it, and I ran to

my bedroom, and I threw myself under my bed, and I started

crying because I was heartbroken my cat had died, and like I was

the kid who put a kitten in its baby buggy and went up and down

the street with it, like I loved my cats. I still do, by the way,

and I was heartbroken, and I'm laying on the bed crying, and I

bet five minutes didn't pass. We'll give the benefit of the

doubt and say it was 10, I don't know. It wasn't very long, and

my dad came upstairs, and he had my softball glove in his hand

and the ball in the other and he said, Jennifer, I'm sorry that

your cat died, but you can't lay in bed and cry all day. Let's go

outside. It's a sunny, beautiful day, and let's play catch. You

can't tell your Dad No. So I get my act together, I wipe my

tears, I go down and I play catch with my dad. And in the

end, I got another cat very soon after that I had for like, I

don't know, 17 years when he died. That was traumatic with a

capital T, but when you look at what happened as an adult, a

childhood experience through adult eyes, my parents loved me,

and they didn't want me hurt. My dad did not want me to get

caught up in the grief long term of losing my pet, beloved cat

that it was he didn't want me to get caught up in that. He didn't

want me to stay there. So one piece of the story is my parents

loved me, and they wanted to help me move past the event

itself. Now the flip side of that is I internalized that that

you can only grieve for 10 minutes, like like like, you can

grieve, but you gotta move on. My mom used to always love to

say, This too shall pass. And I can remember one day looking at

her, and I said, it will pass, mom, but not today. And if

you've been following me for a while, you know that I worked in

the Alfred P murrah building here in Oklahoma City, and I was

assigned to that building on the day of the Oklahoma City

bombing, April 19, 1995 and I was sick, and I had literally a

voice a message from God, stay home and take care of yourself.

And I did, and the building sheared off about three feet

south of my desk, and I got back a crumpled name plate and a few

family photos that were also crumpled, and that was it. So

had I been there, I would have been killed. And at one point

going to all the funerals 35 from my office were killed. My

mom said, This too shall pass, meaning the grief will pass, the

horror will pass. You'll create a new normal. She didn't call it

that at the time, but that's, you know, that's really what she

was intending. And I said, Yeah, but not today, like today is a

day of grief, and I need to feel that. So some things, it works

really well to say this too shall pass. Let's go throw a

softball outside. It's a sunny, pretty day. Let's shake that

off. Shake it off. In many situations, we need to do that a

little bit more. We get caught up in the little mundane

frustrations of the day, and we want to go lay in bed and cry

all day when it was really kind of a minor thing in the grand

scheme of things. But other times, there are things that

need to be grieved and acknowledged a little bit

longer, a little bit deeper. So what I learned going through

this Bible study, and I don't even think I have the book or my

notes or anything left for it from it, but it was look at what

happened in the past. Often we're looking at childhood

experience, right? How? How was it handled,

and do you like that? Do you like that? And is that how you

want to handle things moving forward? How was that handled?

Did you like it? Did it serve you? And is that how you want to

continue moving forward, and I'm going to say right here, right

now, that lesson has served me very well in my life. It has

kept me from getting caught up and wallowing. I love that word,

wallering. Wallering in the negativity, I can have a totally

explosive moment over being frustrated that some tech thing

didn't work, right, but I also can let it go and move on very

quickly. So it served me well. So when you're looking at your

past, when you're looking at things that happened, you might

have considered them horrible and terrible your whole life.

You may not have even thought of them at all, but when you look

at it, is what happened, is how it was handled serving you, or

do you want to do it differently? In leadership

trainings, people will say, Oh, I didn't have a good role model.

I don't really know how to be a good boss. Okay, great. You

don't know how to be a good boss. You don't know how to be a

good parent. You don't know how to be a good role model. Okay,

let's look at this. Explain to me, describe to me an experience

that happened that you think was handled horribly. You feel like

you were treated very wrongly. What is that? What was that

event? How did it make you feel great? Now I want you to write

down what you would have liked to have seen happen. How would

you have liked for that to have been handled differently,

better, where you were more empowered, like write the

opposite. If it made you feel crappy, what would have made you

feel good in that situation? That's how you rewrite your past

so that you don't repeat it in the future. So the next piece of

this is sometimes we have trapped emotions. We can't even

identify. We don't know what they are, but we know we sense,

we feel our bodies, our physical, emotional and

spiritual bodies. It's brilliant. It feels things. It

knows things. And you're like, there's something holding me

back. I didn't apply for that promotion. I don't know why I

really wanted it, though. I didn't send that email. It just

seemed too hard. I didn't do it. Why didn't you do it? Chances

are it's a trapped emotion from a past event that you may not

even remember, and it's holding you back. Using the Emotion

Code, the book is called the Emotion Code by Dr Bradley

Nelson, you can learn how to start identifying and releasing

these trapped emotions yourself, or if you want to work with

somebody, because that sounds like too much trouble, too much

work. I'm a certified practitioner in emotion, code,

body, code, belief, code, and we can quickly and easily identify

the trapped emotion that's holding you back, that's keeping

you in that cycle of the past. It's quick, it's easy. We clear

it out. That's it. You don't have to dig, you don't have to

remember, you don't have to tell me the whole backstory of what

happened when we have a session together. My questions start

with, if one thing in your life were substantially better, what

would that be, or if something in your life were greatly

diminished, what would that be? And then we can get to, oh, it's

imposter syndrome. Oh, it's fear of success. Oh, it's um, I

really want to be the best person ever, but there's

something kind of holding me back. Great. Let's find out

what's holding you back from being your best and brightest,

most amazing, successful self, and we identify it quickly and

easily and release what is no longer for you. It might have

served you well in the past, but it's not serving you now. If you

want to talk a little bit more about how I can help you

personally, specifically in your life, click the link. Book a

call. It's your success. Call.com and you can get on my

calendar and we can talk about it. I'm Jennifer Takagi, and I

do look forward to connecting with you soon.