A short motivational talk by Stephen Scoggins (YouTube) about letting go of the past and using one’s origin story as fuel for growth. Scoggins outlines three levels—acceptance, finding meaning, and forgiveness—illustrated with personal anecdote and pop-culture metaphors, and finishes with a practical exercise (write lessons down, discard the negative baggage) to symbolically release the past.
Nothing will hold you back more than letting your past not stay in your past. Here's how to move forward.
Hey, guys, it's Steven Scoggins again with the Journey principles. And if you're new to the channel, our channel is all about helping you go from stuck to unstoppable in any area of your life. And we call that life mastery. Doesn't matter if it's your relationships, your finances, or your fitness. We're here to help you win.
One of the things that helps keep us stuck more than anything else is living our past and not seeing what our life really could be. It was something I had to conquer myself for the longest time. But when I did, things really started to get moving. So remember this. Every single hero, both in the movies, in the world, and in real life, all have one thing in common. They have what's known as the origin story. Your origin story plays a part in who you are now and for some of you, like me, who you want to become in the future, something more, something different than how you grew up. And for the longest time, I was actually embarrassed of even sharing my early upbringing because of my family's challenges with poverty and some other things. That was until I realized that my origin story had the power to do a lot more good in the world due to the positive. Less that I was actually able to take away from the negative side of the things that I experienced. Some of that value can always be taken from anything, even the most difficult situations. For instance, Wolverine wouldn't have become the heartfelt warrior he is or known in the comic book as. Without a fierce passion for helping others. Without his abandonment as a child, Bilbo Baggins would have never defeated Smaug the Dragon without the ability to squeeze in and out of tight spaces with his size. Their adversity is what gave them the great ability to help others in the ways that they specifically could in their own unique way. The first thing you have to do with your past is see it for what it is and not see it worse than it is or better than it is. It doesn't matter if you made some mistakes or someone else did. At the end of the day, this can all be used to make you the hero of your own story. All suffering, all. All pain and challenges can be turned into true redemption and purpose if you only know how to position it. So what can every superhero teach us about beating our past? Here are three levels of creating your own superhero. Like identity. Level one. I call this phase acceptance. One of the reasons so many of us take so long to break free from our past is because deep down, we don't want to accept that things that happened to us, around us, through us, or any kind of the mistakes that we had or the less favorable choices we made. We mistakenly believe that if we acknowledge our past, then somehow we're saying it's okay and that's not a reality. And in truth, we're not saying that at all. What we are saying is this was part of our origin story, and the miracle one day will actually be seeing how far we've actually come. This is acceptance. The first thing I encourage you to do is to take the time to actually accept your past for what it is. Realize that somehow, some way, there might have been a lot of bad decisions, a lot of broken people, and a lot of things that hurt you that really kept you hurt. Right? Because hurt people, hurt people, broken people, break people, heal people, heal people. Which person do you want to become? Level two Finding the meaning. Some origin stories can only hit their stride when they actually see that the darkness that happened actually laid groundwork for for the light that becomes part of the positive changes in your life. We all know that some origin stories can actually start in a little darker place than others. But it's the meaning that we give that origin story or the darkness that actually makes the most difference. Do we let it own us? Or do we see it as a tool to help empathize with other people in need that maybe have already suffered with similar circumstances that we've gone through? Anything that you have, when you find the right meaning, can actually be helpful. Consider that there are others out there who are exactly where you used to be. And because of your origin story, you are now best set to help them specifically with their need. Who else, I mean, seriously, who else would actually know their particular challenge and their particular style of suffering other than someone who's already been there? But in order to use it for good, you must have faced it on your own and moved on to the third level. The third level is the forgiveness phase. It took me far too long to get this myself, but forgiveness is the only way to actually move forward, forgiving yourself and forgiving the people that maybe injured you along the way. In fact, most of the time, the person we actually need to forgive the most is the one staring back at us in the mirror. And when you can stop looking at that person as a failure and see them as for someone who can actually do something good with what they've learned, who simply didn't know what they didn't know you can actually experience the grace and the healing that comes with it all by yourself. There were, of course, areas in my life where I was wronged at a deep level by others. And for the longest time I thought if I forgave them, that I was somehow saying it was okay and that it was okay for them to harm me. Not at all. I realized I was my biggest hurdle here because I was holding onto the grenade with the pin pulled, expecting the other person to blow up. How ludicrous is that? When you choose to intentionally forgive someone who truly didn't deserve it, you regain your superpower. It's possible to forgive without forgetting. Here are the steps that I used to move past my step I forgave myself for not knowing what I didn't know and the mistakes that came with it. I forgave others who injured me along the way to free my own mind and replace that suffering with meaning and redemption, with hope that others would learn by the fact that I was able to move forward. Take what you've learned. Trash the rest. One thing I do is I write down everything about an experience in my past and I look at the things that I can learn and I set that to the side with a piece of paper. I then take all this garbage that can't be used that I don't need to carry with me, all the negative baggage, and I put that joker in an envelope and I set that booger on fire. Sometimes letting go of things is a physical act where you're taking your memory and you're applying it to something that you can actually tangibly put your fingers on. So that's how you break free from your past. That's how you get to move forward, and that's how you become unstoppable. I'll see you again in the next video.
That's about all the time we have for today's video, and hopefully we gave you something that you actually needed to start the process of letting go of your past. If you enjoyed today's video and you want to learn more about how your origin story actually affects you and how to leverage it for your good, I highly recommend you also check out our whiteboard lesson where we teach you this whole concept of the origin story in greater detail.
