4 Strategies to Stop Living in the Past and Catapult into Your Boundless Future

0:28So, hey, guys, are you frustrated with where you're at right now?

0:33This is The Ed Myron Show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I'm so grateful to be with all of you today. And I think today could be one of these quantum type leaps for so many of you in the way that you view your life. And so what we're going to discuss today is the filter or prism in which the point of view of which you view your life. And there's really two ways that we look at our lives, the filter we see it through. and I wrote about this in The Power of One More in my book. There are a certain percentage of people, a very small percentage of people, who operate out of their vision and imagination, their dreams.

1:08That's their frame of reference. They're almost like a child in their, they dream in their life. They operate out of vision and imagination. They allow it to be the dominant filter and prism in which they see life. The vast majority of people don't do that, however. Most people operate out of history and memory And they wonder why they keep repeating the same life over and over again with a different set of people and maybe a different set of circumstances, but the same results, the same emotions. And so the first thing to ask yourself today is which one are you? And it's okay if you're the one that you wouldn't prefer to be.

1:40But do you, for the most part, operate out of your history and your memory and you think a lot about those things? That's what most people do. Or are you one of the rare few people who operate out of imagination? Because if you can operate out of imagination, See, kids teach such a great lesson. Why do most kids operate of imagination? They're going to be an astronaut or Superman. They pretend. They play games. They have joy. That's what imagination gives us. That's what vision gives us. Memory doesn't do that for us. And so why do kids have that? Because they have no history. They have no memory.

2:14So they're forced almost to operate of it. At some age, the crime of life, the tragedy, is that we begin to operate out of a history and a memory. And oftentimes, that history and memory are the things that we least want to repeat. They're some of the most emotional or scarring times in our life. And so most human beings involuntarily go through their entire life operating out of this point of view, out of this filter, unknowingly, unconsciously. They just don't know they're operating this way. And so I want to challenge you today, and I'm going to give you some keys to start to operate out of your imagination and your dreams and your vision.

2:52See, because that point of view allows you to be present. There's really three points of reference, isn't there? There's the past, there's the present, and there's the future. And I think the happiest people are present an awful lot of the time, and the rest of the time, or most of that time, they operate out of their vision and their imagination and their dreams. I'm not suggesting that evaluating your past can't teach you lessons. You can't heal some of it. But spending most of your time there is not something that's productive. Deepak Chopra has this great quote where he says, I use memories, but I don't allow my memories to use me.

3:30And too many people are operating out of their memories or using them. It's okay to look back and to heal and to evaluate and to gain wisdom from our past. But that should be a small percentage of our time. We should be fully present and focusing on the future at the same time. And so how do you do that? We're going to talk about it today a little bit. I think I can give you some keys. First thing is this. There's a term that I want you to understand called cognitive immobility. And what that means is when you're really mentally trapped in a place from your past, most people have some form of cognitive immobility where they just can't move out of it.

4:05And what happens is everything they see currently, they reference to the past. You know, our minds work this way. Even reading. There's a lot of research that says the way that we actually read is our mind actually sees the beginning of letters and it references the past where we've read it and it tells us that's what the word means. That's why you can read very, very quickly. So your mind wants to take something it sees now and reference it to something else. That's really what thinking is. So that's why this takes work. If you're left to your own devices, most of the time what you're going to see will be referenced somewhere in the past.

4:35And so that's cognitive immobility. People that I think are happy, that create things, that take a life that's one way and make a new one, have cognitive mobility. They're able to move forward. They're mobile in their thinking. So a really good example of being fully present but focusing on the future is actually physical training, is working out. I think it's one of the reasons why working out is so powerful because when you're lifting weights or working out, it forces you to be completely present on the task right in front of you because you're lifting heavy things. You have to focus on the present moment.

5:09There's actually a threat to you. You could get injured. You could get hurt. So that's why I think so many people say, well, the reason, man, when I work out, I've got all these endorphins flowing and my neurobiochemistry is changing. And yeah, that's true. But one of the other reasons is it's a metaphor. It's an example of how to live our lives, which we're fully present in the moment. But one of the reasons we're training is not the pain in the moment. It's the future payoff. So physical training working out is one of the great models in life. It forces you to be present You can't be lifting something heavy or bench pressing or squatting or running and not be present Because you'll trip and fall you'll drop the weight There's a threat physically to you to be fully present and focused, but you really aren't doing it for that moment You're doing it because there's a payoff your heart will be stronger.

5:54Your cardio will be stronger. Your body will look stronger or better And so physical training is a great example of how to be fully present but focused on imagination and vision and dream as opposed to history and memory. When you're working out, you're physical. You're not thinking about your past. It's almost impossible, right? So that's a great metaphor.

6:18Actually, at one time in history, nostalgia was considered a mental health condition. So that's how detrimental, to some extent, focusing on the past can be. Can you imagine that? They actually called nostalgia a mental health challenge. Now it's sort of celebrated. We're always looking back. We're always reminiscing. With these phones we have, the past is sitting in there all the time, isn't it? Called photos. We're constantly looking at yesterday, the day before, a year ago, five years ago. Your phone will remind you, memory of a photo two years ago. Social media will give you a reminder of the past.

6:53So nostalgia has become such a part of our culture, and then we wonder why we're not so mentally healthy. Because when you're in the past, you're not present. I have to tell you, many of you know that I've been taking a break from social media. I've taken a complete step back. I've taken a break from a lot of my travel and my speaking. A lot of the things in business that I can't functionally do right now because I'm working on my physical health, I'm still running my businesses and I'm still doing coaching and the Arte Syndicate and speaking to some extent. but I've paired a lot of it back. And one of the things that's happened is I've paired a lot of it back.

7:26I found I've really uncovered how not present I was all the time. I was never present. And so I'm learning, you know, nostalgia is fun, but it's, it can actually become a mental health issue. There's this physician back all the way to the 1600s. Johannes Hofer was the guy's name. And he actually talked about nostalgia as an actual disease. It described anxiety and homesickness and insomnia and other symptoms experienced by these Swiss mercenaries that come back from fighting battle. So, you know, this is something to really evaluate. John F. Kennedy, the great president, said, this is in my book, The Power of One More.

8:06I use this quote. He said, history is a relentless master. It has no present. Only the past rushing into the future Trying to hold fast is to be swept aside And so what i'm saying to you is that if you're focused on your past your future is swept aside Your life will be swept aside your destiny will be swept aside And so a couple more things about this that are important to know There's some different studies I want to tell you about and i'll give you a couple keys just three or four keys to Breaking this pattern so you can shift from being someone who's in the past to someone who's at least in the present and has using imagination as leverage.

8:42There's a research that a guy named Dr. Fred Luskin did at Stanford. And he says that basically in his study, a human being has about 60 ,000 thoughts per day. Are you ready for this? 90 % of them are repetitive thoughts. I talk about this in both my books. Imagine this, that 90 % of your day-to-day is exactly the same as the day before internally. 90 % of your thoughts are the same every single day. So you have a 10 % variability. And by the way, that 10 % can be as simple as what direction to take, what to order off of a menu. So the actual way to change your life, if 90 % of your thoughts are the same, isn't very easy, unless you're intentional about it.

9:23Left to our own devices, we're going to repeat the same life over and over again. We're going to have nostalgia. We're going to have the same 60 ,000 thoughts. 54 ,000 of them are the same every single day. And we don't have any variability. There's another study researched by the National Science Foundation that said 80 % of your thoughts are negative. Can you imagine this? So 90 % of your thoughts are the same every single day, and 80 % of those are negative thoughts. And imagine why human beings are wired for pain, wired for failure, not wired for growth and expansion, not wired for bliss. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80 % are negative.

9:59and in that study they say 95 % of your thoughts are exactly the same as the day before. So I have to tell you, this is so important to be intentional about every single day. Depending on the study, somewhere between 90 % and 95 % of your thoughts are your same and everything tells us 80 % of them are negative and most of them are nostalgic or pointing a reference to the past in some way. So the first thing is this. What do we got to be able to do? What are some of the things that you could do to change it? First off is to be intentional that I'm going to begin to operate out of my imagination.

10:32Okay, just operate out of it. Now I'm going to give you four steps before we conclude things today that I think that can help you change these patterns. Number one, you've got to decide that you're going to be present and focus on the future. And I want to teach you a tool called possibility projection. It's something that I did not create. I learned it many years ago back in business. But when I had my sales team, I would draw up what I called possibility projections. If I wrote five sales this month that did this and so-and-so wrote three and Dave wrote two and I would possibility project the next month of what it would look like, what the possibilities were, and then I'd project them into the month.

11:10And then I would project what it would mean to me from a financial standpoint or from a growth of my business. And then I started doing that in other areas. I would possibility project my physical training. If I work out this many days a week do this many reps on this I can write up the possibilities that I would do and then project what it would mean to me in a month in six months and in a year Same thing in your family same thing with your money And so i've become i'm addicted to it I do it on airplanes all the time where i'm writing and be like, what are you writing? I'm a possibility projecting What my finances will look like this month i'm possibility projecting my podcast if I could just get so-and-so as a guest and we record it and I possibility project.

11:49If we do that, man, this is what the downloads look like. This is what the rankings look. These are the amount of people we could help. This is what the vision, and what I'm doing is I'm casting a vision consciously. You can do that with your family. Over the next three or four months, the spring breaks here, and we're going to go to this resort, or we're going to go to this beach, or maybe you can't afford to go anywhere, but we're going to do this activity as a family, and you start building towards this. Hey, kids, on spring break, we're going to do these games, or we're going to do this prayer work, or whatever it might be.

12:16We're going to have this and you possibility project. Have you ever had like a Monday morning and you got a grind of a week ahead, but somehow you got something cool you're going to do on the weekend. We've all had that before. Like there's going to be a concert you're going to or a party or a get together at a park or whatever. And somehow, don't you agree that thing coming on Friday or Saturday gets you through the week, right? Or even sometimes the morning, you know, you got a really rough morning, but you know, that night there's a game you want to watch on TV or your favorite TV shows coming up.

12:48Just knowing that's coming helps you be more present and go through what you need to go through in the day, in the week. What you've really done is you've possibility projected the TV show that you possibility projected the party that weekend. You possibility project in your life. This forces you into imagination, vision, and dreams. So you already do this from time to time. What if you made possibility projecting, future focusing, part of your routine regularly, family, money, business, life, entertainment, physical, whatever it might be, possibility projected. Maybe you're going to train in the gym because you know in six months you're going to do an Ironman.

13:29Or you're going to do one of these mud runs. Or you're going to be able to weigh at 180. Or you're going to do a bodybuilding contest. Or you're going to do something, right? So you possibility project. Maybe you're going to pick up a sport once you're in different shape. So one of the healthy ways you just change your focus is you create a strategy like the one I'm describing. So I want you to challenge you to become a possibility projector all the time. By the way, it'll be awkward at first and then in three months, five months, six months, you won't remember your life without doing it. You could possibly project your day.

14:01You could possibly project your week. You could possibly project your year in every single area. And this focuses you on the future. But what it does is it causes you to do something in the present. Okay. Huge strategy and tactic to switch from history and memory to imagination and dreams. Okay. Number two, go on what I call a phone fast. And this is what I've been doing recently that I'm taking this step back. A phone fast means this, exactly what it sounds like. You put your phone away for periods of time. Now, I want to challenge you. A great phone fast would be for an entire day. You turn your phone off and you put it away for a day.

14:47I think you'll find that the world will be okay without you and that 99.9 % of the things that are on that phone you don't have to get to. When you start getting away from your phone, I really love social media. It's made becoming wealthy much easier. It's made building a brand easier. It's allowed average everyday people like you and me to build extraordinary wealth, the potential of businesses, the access to information and people in an unprecedented way. It's a wonderful part of it. but I actually have begun to believe that social media has more negatives than positives and the addiction to grabbing the phone, the responding in a timely manner, taking you off of focus, taking you oftentimes to a reference of the past, the distraction of it, the stress of it, the algorithm in our brain that is now wired to be in here, the feeding of the negatives and the toxicity, the comparison.

15:48And so many of us, it's like an unhealthy diet we eat all day, every single day. Imagine if you ate like that, you poured that into your body with never fasting, never cleansing. Strategy number two to become more present in your life and focus on the future is getting off the thing that keeps pulling you into the past. You go, no, I'm actually getting updated on what's going on in the world today. You're referencing it to the past. That's how your brain works. It's stress. It's toxic. It's comparison. It's mainly unnecessary and unhealthy, isn't it? So take a phone fast. If you could do it for a day, do it.

16:25If you could do it for a week, do it. Could you at least do it for three hours? Could you do it for six hours? Could you do it on Sundays? I think if you build in a phone fast, you'll find yourself much healthier, much more present. Trust me, much more present. and have a much more compelling future. You'll be much less nostalgic. Your phone's feeding you nostalgic thoughts like what you agree with politically, things that you want to follow, things you've seen before, repetitive messaging just said a different way. Take a phone fast, step two. Step three, practice small box focus. What does that mean?

17:02Actually train yourself to begin to focus on small specific things. This changes your brain in the way that it works. And so I've gotten actually pretty good at this. So I will take something very small and put all of my attention on it. That may seem silly, but literally, oftentimes, I'll take a pen like this and I will put all my focus on the top of the pen or on the point of the pen. And I'll just direct my focus right to that spot. There's a tree right here in my studio. I'll go outside and I won't focus on the entire tree. I will zoom my focus in on one of the leaves and I will break down that leaf.

17:40I'll look at its character. I'll look at the wrinkles on it. I'll look at how it's different from the other ones, and I will focus in on a very small spot. I'll do it with my little doggies. I'll just focus in, not just with them being with me and how grateful I am that they're there, but I will focus in my attention on just their precious eyes, or I'll hold one of them close to me. Small box focus. What that does is it trains your brain to eliminate all the big stuff and narrow in on the full present moment. You can do this by going outside and picking one cloud in the sky. You can do it in your office by picking one picture to put your focus into.

18:20I'm blessed that I live near the ocean. I will not just look at the vast entire ocean. I'll pick one wave and watch it come on all the way in. I'll pick small things. You can literally be in a room. There's a chair right here in front of me and with a bunch of squares on it. I'll focus in on one of the squares and just direct my attention to it and see what I can notice about it, see the distinctions in it. And when I do that, I've narrowed my focus down and I begin to build a muscle of what I call small box focus. You can pick anything. You can do it repetitively. Even if you're reading a book, you can focus in on one word.

18:57Just focus your gaze in on that one word. What you're doing is you're training your brain to be fully present. Believe it or not, even when you're taking in beauty in the world, when it's the big picture, the big gaze, oftentimes your brain will now gravitate back to the past, back to nostalgia, back to your emotional home. But when you pick something small and specific, it forces you to be present. You can't look at something small and not be present in it. And then what you can do is the contrast. Go from the small gaze to the big gaze. So this one wave coming in to the entire ocean, back to the small wave, the one square on the chair, back to the entire studio, back to the small square, back to the entire studio, back to the small square.

19:42This may seem kind of crazy, but what it's doing is it's training your brain to be fully present in the moment. What you're going to find over time is that this is a muscle you build and you can hold small box focus longer, much longer. and it's training you to be present and there'll become peace in it. And you'll find you don't need the ocean or some beautiful sunset necessarily to find peace, to empty your mind. It's just being able to get focused in on small things. I know it's probably something you've never heard before, but it's a strategy that I've used very regularly and it's helped me a great deal, especially in this time that I've been taking to my health.

20:19The next thing and the last thing is name the dummy. Name the dummy. So you know that person who starts thinking all those negative thoughts and starts stacking them and you're running that pattern in your head? Name her. Name him. For me, he's Eddie Spaghetti. So every time Eddie Spaghetti pops up, he's thinking negative. He's worrying about stuff. He's stacking negative thoughts. He's going to the past. He's comparing. He's beating himself up. He's getting tired. That guy, I've named him. That d***h's name is Eddie Spaghetti. And I go, Eddie Spaghetti's showing back up. You can make that name a whole lot more aggressive than that, by the way, for you.

20:54But when you name the dummy, it changes your state. It immediately shifts you out of because you realize you are not your thoughts. You don't have to believe everything you think. In fact, most of the stuff you think isn't true. And happy people, successful people realize they think a lot of stupid things. I'm 53 years old next month, and I can tell you, I've thought a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't true in my life. I have convinced myself of a whole bunch of things that weren't true. I've thought a bunch of stupid things in my life, and I cannot trust my own thoughts because the thoughts aren't mine.

21:26They're from the past, and the past eye vision isn't even real. It's my version of the past based on some emotional situation that I've replayed over and over again, and it's probably not even an accurate depiction of what the past is. And so I have stopped doing that, and I've named him. When he shows up, Eddie Spaghetti, and I call him some worse names than that that I won't say right here on a podcast. but when you name the dummy, the dummy loses power over you. And it may not work at first, but if you do it over and over again, by the way, it can be anybody. You can go, there's Slap Nuts, right?

22:00There's Sammy, there's Sparky, there's D***. Whoever it is, you name it whatever you want. For me, because I got to say this out loud sometimes, it's Eddie Spaghetti. And the reason it's Eddie Spaghetti is when I was a little kid, Instead, I got teased with that name, and I don't like that guy at all. I don't ever want to be that dude again. So I have literally named it this version of me that I can't stand and that I don't like and that I know isn't really me. And so when he starts showing up, Eddie Spaghetti, your meatballs are ready, right? That was a whole thing that I used to say when I was a kid that I don't ever want to go back to.

22:37And so when he shows up i've named the dummy and that dummy and he is a dummy and she is or he is a dummy That's feeding you these negative nostalgic weak thoughts You call them out by name and over time you actually get a chuckle eventually And it loses a lot of its power over you So we have the two points of reference we have to do the four key things i'm just giving you today And top of a whole bunch of other stuff. I name in my books is make sure you have possibility projections Number one. Number two, take a phone fast. Number three, practice small box focus. Focusing in on small things will make you fully present.

23:16On the beach, pick a grain of sand in the beach and focus in on that one grain of sand. On the golf course, don't take in the whole golf course. Focus in right on the golf ball. And then if you can focus in on the T in Titleist on that golf ball, you've really got small box focus down. It'll also help you play better. And then lastly, fourth, name the dummy. Those are four strategies to move you from nostalgia, the past, history, memory, into the present moment focused on your vision, your imagination, and your dreams. All right, everybody. I hope this helps you today. I hope it gave you at least food for thought.

23:52Present future focus, phone fast, small box focus, name the dummy, get into your imagination, live your dreams, and be all the more happy. Let your memories not use you. You use your memories. God bless you. Max out your life. This is the Ed Mylon Show.