How to Let Go of the Past:Tools to Be Positive in any Situation
In this motivational talk, the speaker argues that all life events are fundamentally neutral; the meanings we assign to them shape our emotional responses. By consciously choosing positive interpretations, we can transform past hardships into sources of growth and improve present circumstances. He illustrates this with his own childhood—divorced parents, a strict stepmother, long hours of labor, and limited freedom—showing how reframing those experiences led to academic excellence, a passion for debate, an appreciation of freedom, and a deeper self‑awareness. He then provides a concrete example of helping a friend who was fired, encouraging the friend to view the loss as a sign toward a more fulfilling job, which reportedly resulted in a positive outcome. The speaker concludes with a call to action: regularly label days and events as positive, thereby restructuring past narratives and cultivating a more empowered mindset.
Chapters
I see you there watching this video. Um, this video, what I want to talk about is the idea of being able to take any situation and being able to see it from a positive point of view, understanding that we give the meanings as to what things mean in our life and that ultimately we have the power to choose what things mean and that because of that we can then exist in a place where we give the power to where we want it to go. Now, the reason I want to talk about this is because it's something that I see all the time when it comes to mindset, it comes to how people think, even how I think the things and the way that I think about things that happen to me. If I give them positive meanings, I get a positive result out of it. I believe that everything that happens in our life is fundamentally neutral, that anything that happens is neutral, and that we give it meaning, and based upon the meaning we give it, that is the effect we get out of it. Now let me give you a very simple example. The most fundamental example is the idea of a rainy day. The idea is that it rains outside and you weren't expecting it. Now if you give it a positive positive meaning, then you will feel positive emotion because of it, because you've given it that meaning. You could also give it no meaning, which means it doesn't make a difference one way or the other. The other thing you could do is give it a negative meaning, meaning you don't prefer it and it doesn't make you feel positive emotion. You might even feel negative emotion when you see it's raining outside because of the meaning we give it. Now let me ask you a question. Is it a positive thing or a negative thing when it's raining outside? The idea of what your answer is will depend upon how you define a rainy day to be. What that means to you. Now, in the same way, I think that's something very powerful that we can do is be able to switch the trigger in our mind as to what things mean in order for us to get a positive effect out of it. Now, another thing we can do is we can look into our past to see things from a new point of view, to kind of heal in a way some things that may have happened. And I'm going to use me as a guinea pig in this case, and I want to explain a little bit of how I grew up just so you can kind of understand a situation of something that I went through for a majority of my growing up years, and then how I can look back at that and see it from a positive point of view, encouraging you to maybe do something similar. Because I think all of us have been through shit in our lives where things happen when we were growing up, and it's something that could have either scarred us or we could either have become stronger because of it. Now let me give you a little bit of precursor. My— me and my brother grew up with my dad and my mom being divorced up, you know, by the time we were like— I was 4 or 5. I'm 3 years older than my brother. And you know, this is nothing new. I think most people's parents are divorced. And what happened was, is up until the age of about 8 or 9, we would go back and forth between my mom and my dad's house. When my dad met my ex-stepmom— so this is up until I was about 8 or 9 years old when he met her. We had freedom to do, you know, kind of what every other kid was doing. We could play Nintendo, we could hang out with friends. There was, you know, kind of freedom there as to what we could do. When my dad met my ex-stepmom, uh, when I was about 8 or 9, my brother was like 5 or 6. Um, she had a very different philosophy in life. Now I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just saying that this is what it is, but she was very much more strict. She was brought up with a very strict upbringing and that because of that she didn't necessarily agree with the fact that we had TVs in our room, that we could live a certain way that we did. Basically to make a Long story short, over the course of a year or two, we went from being able to have all that to then all of a sudden, uh, we were working outside for maybe like 8 or 9 hours a day. We weren't allowed inside sometimes. Um, we weren't allowed to really hang out with friends. We weren't allowed to watch TV. It went from one polar side of it to the exact opposite. Up and from the age of about 9 all the way to about the age of 15 when my dad divorced her, uh, me and my brother, and you know, my brother's a couple of years younger, but we went through a period of to where we had no freedom pretty much whatsoever. Now the reason I'm explaining I'm saying this to you ultimately is just because I want to show you that one way I could have looked at that as a very negative thing. I could have really given it like a deep scar into me as like, why did I go through all that? You know, we had pigs and goats and chickens grow. I grew up in Vegas and we had all those animals and we got up every day and our, you know, we were just meant to be working all the time. Um, socially it was like when I turned 15, all of a sudden I was allowed to have friends. I was allowed to actually like you know, uh, develop a personality, really become who I was. So I kind of like bloomed later in life, I guess you could say, with all that. And it was something that I could have given a positive meaning to, or I could have given a negative meaning to it. Now what I want to say is for a while, first off, I was just excited when I turned, you know, when this happened around the age of 15, all of a sudden I was able to hang out with friends, started making really close relationships with friends that I'm still friends with today. Um, I really began to learn more about myself. Um, I went through a phase to where Maybe I went into more of the negative side of it, but then what happened is, um, I had kind of positive things that started to come out of it because I started to see it from a different point of view. And ultimately it led me to meditation. It led me to digging into myself to find out more about who I am. And ultimately I believe that it led to me really knowing more about who I am and the way things work because I really began to give it a positive point of view. Now let me show you some of the positives of it. Some of the positives are when I went through this period, because we weren't allowed to go and hang out with friends, we were, you know, just working outside all the time. The one outlet that we did have was going to school. So it caused me to do really well in school. In high school, I had a really good GPA, had an honors diploma. It really allowed me to focus in that aspect, but it also gave me the passion for doing what is called forensics debate. So forensics debate was something where we went to like tournaments and stuff like that. There were certain topics and I decided I wanted to do it because I really just thought at the time at the time that I wanted to be a lawyer, this like freshman, sophomore year of high school. But what happened was, is when I began to go through it, I began to develop this like passion for speaking. I began to understand that this was something that I really enjoyed doing. And you may even get to tell right now that when I speak, sometimes there's like a lot of passion when I'm speaking about things. Now that's because it's actually something that I love to do. Now maybe I wouldn't have found what that is if it wasn't for the fact that I channeled so much energy towards me doing and putting energy into these extracurricular activities because it was the only outlets that I had. And I believe that really it led me towards deeply wanting to know more about it and really to apply myself in a positive way because of it. Now there's other positives of it too. The other positives are that I was really able to understand what it's like to be completely controlled, to not really be allowed to do anything else. It really made me appreciate the idea of freedom now. Like the idea now is I can kind of do whatever I want. And I'm so appreciative of that because I know what it's like to not be able to do what you want. I know what it's like to live in a very strict, you know, strict kind of household. And because of that, I think that it gives me an ability towards really understanding also how to not live within a really strict, rigid system in our own mind, how to not think that way. And it's like sometimes even though like I'm talking about being like, you know, not as free in my personal life between those ages of my life, I think that people still do that today. At an unconscious level because we put these limitations in our mind and that we put these ways that we think we need to be in our mind. And it's almost like it's a symbol for me because I want to help people break through those to understand that they don't have to be a victim of circumstance. They don't have to be a victim of what things mean in their life. Now, with all that being said, I believe that ultimately this situation in my life led me towards being more aware of who I am because it eventually triggered the idea of me wanting to know more about meditation, curing my own ADHD, you know, like things like that. And I believe that I wouldn't have been the person that I am today if it weren't for the fact that I went through those years of my life of being completely controlled, of not being able to hang out with friends, of working outside for 8 hours a day, um, and really having to then focus on school. So the reason I'm telling you this is because I believe that we can restructure our past by going into it, seeing things from a positive point of view. So what I want to encourage you to do is to look into your past right now. If there's anything that appears to be negative, what I want to encourage you to do is to understand that you can look at it from a positive point of point of view, and the moment that you begin to do that, you then begin to restructure the meaning as to what that is, and you begin to build yourself up to actually becoming a more powerful and positive person in that, in that point of view. Now imagine also that in this present moment, I want to give you another story of something that, of a way that we can reidentify certain things in our life towards getting a positive effect out of it. So I had a friend, for example, at work that got fired like 2 weeks ago, and I texted him after you know, a week of not talking to him and asked him how he was doing. And he told me that he was kind of low and that he was, you know, just now starting to pick himself up towards look for another job again. And then I could tell that he was kind of low, so I kind of— I could tell he was looking for some type of encouragement. So basically what I explained to him was kind of what I'm telling you right now. What I said was, is if you give this a positive meaning, the fact that you got fired, you will get a positive effect. If you look at it from the point of view that you didn't really even like what you were doing at the job, if you look at the fact that you didn't enjoy most of the people that you worked with, which is true in this situation, if you looked at the fact that you wanted to work somewhere else anyways and that it could have been a sign towards pushing you towards finding out what you really love, then what— then you can get a positive effect because that can encourage you towards finding something that you actually love. So you can use it almost as a sign towards finding out what that is. Now on the converse side of that, If you give it a negative meaning and you say that you're going to have to settle or find something worse, or there's something that doesn't pay, you know, pay more than where you were, then the idea is that that's what you're fine. So what I told him to do is to simply give it a positive meaning and then he would get a positive effect out of it. Now I talked to him a couple of days ago and I'm not saying that, you know, me telling him this is the reason this happened, but I was happy to hear that he found something 2 or 3 days ago where he started at a job that he absolutely loves, where he's getting paid um, it may be about the same if not more, but he's actually working with people that he loves. He loves the company that he's working for, and I truly believe it's because he made the change inside of himself towards giving it a positive meaning. Not saying that I did that. I'm just saying that I think that if he remained in a negative mindset, he wouldn't have got that job. Now, the reason I'm telling you these things is because I really believe that everything in life is fundamentally neutral, that the idea of a rainy day, depending upon how we define it to be, whether we say that's a great thing that it's a rainy day or we say that it's a negative thing, it's going to be a shitty day because it's a rainy day, determines the effect that we get out of it. So what I want to encourage you to do is to simply understand that you give the means to the things that happen in your life and that you can restructure your past by understanding that you got positive out of it and that from that point of view in the present moment right now, what you can do is identify and label things that happen in your life as positive and that because of that you will get a positive effect out of it. So I hope you guys enjoyed this video today. I hope you guys define yourselves as having a positive day, label yourself as having a positive day. And other than that, I'll see you guys on the next video. Oh yeah, much love.
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