Let Struggles You Overcame in the Past Lead Your Way

Being stuck in the past is one of the most common issues I address in Life Coaching for ladies. Women cannot be their best self when their brain is preoccupied with prior mistakes, past hurts, and that nagging feeling of regret.

Depending upon the situation, you might want to let overcome past struggles lead the way and permit yourself to move forward.

What does it mean to allow the past struggles you overcame to lead the way?

Think about your past struggles. Perhaps you dealt with something emotionally challenging, like losing a close friend or family member. Maybe you experienced a professional battle and had to wrestle with problems at work. Sometimes your struggles are familial, such as contention or disagreement between family members.

You can use struggles this way because they often serve as essential teachers: Even the grimmest and most challenging struggles teach you some valuable wisdom as you experience them.

Regardless of your struggles or how challenging they were, they served a significant purpose in your life. You can allow your past struggles you overcame to lead the way into a much better and brighter future. When you let your past struggles you overcame lead the way, you use that knowledge to make more informed decisions in the future.

Although you did have to address those past struggles, your suffering was not in vain – that knowledge you gained is yours to keep and use as you move forward into a better future.

Before you can let your past struggles you overcame lead the way, you must learn to make peace with your past efforts. When you feel at ease and have accepted your past struggles, you no longer ruminate over what went wrong or fret about the past. Instead, you let that knowledge you learned guide you into the future

Because you have experienced your unique set of struggles firsthand, you likely learned some wisdom about those particular challenges, including how to handle (and even avoid) them in the future.

Struggles are numerous and can be in every area of life. Some fights are much bigger and more challenging to overcome than others. But, a life coach can help you recognize where you are stuck and help you discover precisely what needs to transform when you cannot recognize it yourself. 

What are the benefits of overcoming and making peace with your past struggles?

Whether you cannot stop rehashing arguments that recently happened, or you are constantly beating yourself up for a blunder you made years ago, dwelling on the past can keep you stuck in your head and in that similar place of discomfort.

Learning how to make peace with those past struggles includes a variety of benefits:

 1. You do not waste tons of time worrying about events that have already passed.

Making peace with your past struggles means you can pull away the valuable lessons learned from them and then leave them in the past. Instead of wasting precious current time worrying about old struggles, you can keep moving forward with your life.

 2. You become a more knowledgeable person because of your past experiences.

Letting go of your past struggles involves getting to understand them well. After you have accepted your past struggles, pulled the valuable lessons away from them, and then let yourself move on from what happened, you take that information with you. Because you lived those struggles, you can move onward from them a little wiser.

3. You avoid a lot of excessive emotional anguish.

Overcoming your past struggles requires some serious emotional work. However, doing that critical work at the moment – and allowing yourself to process those challenging emotions as you’re experiencing them during your struggle – means you will avoid a lot of lingering emotional strife afterward.

What happens if a person views their past struggles negatively?

Many women struggle to see their past struggles as anything but negative. It is understandable – no one enjoys reflecting on a time when they messed up or experienced a severe hardship. However, maintaining this negative image of your past struggles can lead to significant issues.

1. You can develop low self-esteem.

Viewing past struggles negatively leads to a lot of rumination about what you did wrong or should have done another way in the past. As you continue to see those past struggles negatively, it is easy to feel bad about yourself. As you focus on these struggles (and any mistakes you made during them), you lose focus in the present and develop lower self-esteem.

2. You lose confidence in your capacity to make good choices in the future.

When you view your past struggles negatively, you create an unhelpful image of yourself in your mind. By reflecting on all the negatives of your past struggles, it is easy to see yourself as someone who will always struggle and experience those same hardships the same way if they happen again.

3. You do not take away the one good thing from struggle: Knowledge.

If you continue to view your past struggles negatively, you will never get the one positive benefit from experiencing those struggles. The knowledge you learn from any battle allows you to avoid those struggles (or at least handle them more efficiently) in the future. If you continue to view your past struggles negatively, you will likely have difficulty gleaning that valuable knowledge from experience.

How can you let the past struggles you overcame lead the way?

Learning how to let the past struggles you overcame lead the way can be challenging. After getting over the initial hurdle of overcoming those struggles, learning how to take those experiences and use them in a productive, positive way takes some practice and patience to perfect.

It is essential to permit yourself to “let go.”

After you identify the key lessons learned from those experiences, it is time to let the actual struggle and difficulty disperse from your mind and body. Once the battle ends and the lesson is learned, you can shed the weight of that worry and anxiety and allow yourself to move forward.

As you prepare to move forward, keep that knowledge you learned tucked away in your mind. You can feel comforted knowing that your experiences taught you valuable information to build a better tomorrow for yourself.

Adopting a positive mindset is essential for letting the past struggles you overcame lead the way.

Your positive mindset should be future-focused. Keeping your mind set on all the good things to come (and the security of knowing that you have those lessons learned from your past struggles to serve as a guide) will help you maintain a positive pathway as you move forward. Your life coach will assist you in creating proactive steps to live your best life.