Turn Pain Into Power

Chapter 5 - The Secret

Treaures

Before I share with you my secret we should discuss what Treasures are.

Treasures are the insights and lessons that you will discover with Look In & Learn. They are the good things anyone can find in every bad experience in life. There is always something good you can pull out.

If you put effort into Look In & Learn, you should have a few 'ah-ha' moments. I mentioned how I discovered that I grew up with a lack of self-confidence and self-esteem. It took a while to make this discovery but once I did, I decided I was going to build my self-confidence the way I should have done as a child – by following my own ideas.

When you find a Treasure, it doesn't mean you've changed. It means that you have successfully separated the good from the bad of an experience. The process is like squeezing the juice out of an orange with your bare hands. It's messy and hard work to get all the juice out. The juice (i.e. the Treasure) is the distilled wisdom you take away from an experience. The elements of the experience that aren't valuable to keep (all the negatives) are like the husk and should be thrown away.

Simple, right? Keep the good stuff, throw away the bad stuff. Look In & Learn captures that whole process of squeezing and separating your past experiences.

You Don't Have to Change the Past to Get Better from Here

Some of my Past Problems are like permanent scars. They've damaged my reputation, my relationships with others, and my view of myself. For the longest time I wished I could have changed the things I did. Like if I just wished hard enough, maybe the pain would go away. But it never did. Actually, it got worse.

The act of wishing itself caused me tremendous pain. Wishing I could change the past, knowing deep down I never would, only served to amplify the pain by reminding me that what had happened was real. That I had failed. The fault was mine because I was responsible.

I was like this for years. I kept looking for a solution to change the past until I finally had an amazing realization -- I don't have to. I don't have to first change my past to make my future better.

Where I was in life was because of my actions in the past. That's reality. The same is true for you. Where you are in your life is because of actions and choices you made in your past. And it is a hard thing to look at yourself in the mirror and say, 'This is not the life that I wanted'. But recognize that, wherever you are in your life, you put yourself there.

And that's the secret. If the choices you made brought you to this place in life, won't making different choices take you somewhere else? In fact, with enough choices, can't you take yourself wherever you want to go?

Fear is the absence of power. Your power lies in your ability to make choices. And no one can take that power from you. You might not have the choices you want. But you can start making different choices today.

Do you know what wishing to change the past is about? It's about wishing you could change the present. That you could change today. It's an admission that you don't like where you are in life. Well, you have two basic choices:

1. Keep wishing to change the past

or

2. Make things better from here

I tried to change my past. Didn't work. Didn't work for me. Won't work for you. Never worked for anybody. So I made a decision. A choice. I decided to stop trying to change the past and to just start doing better. I decided to make better choices than the ones that landed me where I was. And the first good choice that I came up with was to not let my Past Problems go to waste. Rather than change my Past Problems, I was going to learn from them. That way, I would at least know what not to do.

I created Look In & Learn to mine my Past Problems for value. Is it hard? Sure it is. But it is worth it. If you want to find the really big Treasures in life, you're going to have to dig. Every day.

I chose to make my future better. You can too. Use Look In & Learn, mine your Past Problems, and find the lessons you can. You already paid for your Treasures with pain and suffering. Time for you to collect. 

My Hope for You

There are four things I hope you do after you read this:

1. Do the Look In & Learn exercise 10 times.

2. Write out the Treasures you've collected from #1.

3. Share this book with one other person you think it helps.

4. E-mail me at catwise23(at)gmail.com and let me know how it turned out :)

This exercise is like medicine for the mind. It only works if you take it. Luckily, you don't have to spend more than 15 mins doing this exercise to make progress. If you invest just 15 minutes a day, you will learn so much about yourself and will be able to resolve many of your Past Problems.