Attitudinally, we can only be in one of these three emotional timelines at any given moment:
- The Past
- The Present
- The Future
Let’s take a brief look at living in the past.
Living in the past becomes living in a state of guilt when your present moments are being immobilized by your past behaviors. With guilt, you focus on a past event – something you said or didn’t say or did or didn’t do – and you absorb your present moments reliving that occurrence and the feelings associated with it. This process of reliving the past is not just a concern but an immobilization of the present moment. Immobilization hinders our ability to learn from past experiences.
We can’t learn from a past episode if we are feeling guilty.
Guilt is an effective avoidance technique. It allows you to shift the focus of working on yourself today to what or where you were in the past. It is easier to fester about the past than it is to take the courageous journey of changing yourself today. Most of us have been brought up to confuse caring with guilt. We heard things like, “If you cared you would feel guilty.” Guilt or reliving the past to the point of being immobilized in the present moment is the worst of the futile emotional states.
If it has already happened, there is nothing that can be done but to learn from it. Learn from it and then let it go. Reliving the past is like having a vampire attached to you in the present moment. No forward progress is made, you’re just stuck.
Begin to view the past as something that can’t be altered, regardless of how you may feel about it. It is only a place in time from which you can gain knowledge and experience. Guilt has the most negative impact of all emotional states.
By definition, a futile emotional state is when you feel immobilized in the present moment over something that has already occurred.
Now, let’s take a look at the future. Worry is being immobilized in the present moment because of things that are going to or not going to happen to you in the future. We must not confuse planning with worry. If your present moment activity or behavior is contributing to a more effective future, that is considered planning and not worry. Worry only occurs when you are, on any level, immobilized in the present moment because of the future.
As with guilt, we have been taught that if we cared then we should worry. Worrying has never changed a thing. Just like guilt, worry is an avoidance technique. We choose to worry about the possible outcome in the future without doing anything in the present moment to change it. It’s actually a very ironic weakness – we don’t do anything in the present moment to change what we are worrying about. And since we don’t do anything to change, what we worry about comes to fruition. The worst part is that some of us have an internal script that says, “See, I told myself.” It becomes a vicious cycle. The key to break the worry cycle is action. Take action in the present moment. If you have control of the present moment, you will have the ability to impact and influence your future.
Learn to live in the now and not be immobilized by thoughts or actions of the past or future. The keys to living in the now are: 1) Learn from the past and let it go. 2) Take action in the present moment to impact the fears of the future.
Written by Glenn Mattson, President of Sandler Training, Mattson Enterprise, Inc.,
a sales and leadership consulting firm. Glenn specializes in helping agency leaders and
top-performing agents successfully overcome the roadblocks that hinder their ability to
achieve significant increases in their results.
If you liked this article, please visit go.sandler.com/Mattson/ for more information or call (631)-SANDLER to take your business to the next level.
