Mel Robbins explains how comparing your present to your past keeps you stuck and unhappy. She uses the metaphor of gripping an old door while trying to open a new one, and shares how moving from Boston to Vermont felt miserable until she stopped judging the new place against the old.
Chapters
You can't open a new door if you're gripping the old one.
Yeah.
And you cannot be content where your feet are if you're constantly comparing it to where you've been. You may be comparing your life before something happened, like maybe you lost somebody you loved and you're constantly looking back and it's been years. Maybe you change jobs and you are comparing this to the old. Maybe you're in a new relationship and you're comparing it to an old relationship. When we moved from the Boston area to Vermont, you were on cloud nine. I was on cloud nine.
It was amazing.
I needed professional help.
You did.
I was so unhappy. I hated it here. I hated everything about it. The second my feet hit the state, I was convinced we had made a mistake. And if you're unhappy where you are right now, you have to ask yourself honestly, am I spending a lot of time comparing this to that? Am I spending a lot of time holding something from the past over the present? Because that is a guaranteed way to make you super unhappy now if you're constantly comparing what happened in the past to what is in front of you in the present, because it is so unfair to the new person or the new apartment or the new neighborhood or the new job or the new chapter of your life to hold something from the past over this new thing.
Yeah.
And if you're kind of nodding along that you're really robbing yourself of the opportunity to experience something new because you're so busy comparing it to something that you know, you're the one that is making yourself miserable.
Yeah.
And the judgmental piece comes from the comparison because comparison By its very nature, causes you to judge because you're comparing one thing against the other. And then it becomes this snowball effect where if all you're doing is looking for the reasons that something doesn't measure up, what are you going to see?
Only the things that don't measure up.
Correct. And you miss what?
The great things about the place that you're in.
Yes. Which is why you can't fully open up a new door if you're gripping tightly to the old one.
