Topics Covered:

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2:17   –  A philosophy to help you let go of regret

4:40 –    3 examples of how letting go of regret can improve your motivation or finances

8:52 –    Why goals sometimes don’t manifest

14:05 – 2 examples of how we pick up subconscious programs keeping us in regret

16:50 – Instructions for how to do the 4 Step ‘Memory Imprint Journal’

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Transcript

Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.

Why is it so important to let go of regrets? Because regrets siphon your life force energy. And many of those regrets are subconscious. You forgot about them, but they’re still back there causing havoc. Unprocessed regrets one of the biggest forms of self-sabotage keeping many of us from being able to transcend our present reality of limitation. That keeps us from re-inventing ourselves individually and collectively into this new Golden Age. Hi, I’m Carla Rieger and you’re listening to the Golden Age Timeline podcast.

This is a popular topic with many clients, so I wanted to share what’s made the biggest difference for a lot of people. In our MindStory Inner Coach book, many clients use the AVARA model to break free of regrets. Plus the Memory Imprint Journal, which I’ll talk about more in a moment. And, if you like to learn through reading a page-turning adventure, this is a big theme in the fantasy novel, Helio Tropez, where the characters cannot transcend their consciousness until they deal with their shadows, their negativity, their regrets. You can check that out all three at Golden Age Timeline dot com, backslash SHOP. So regret is an energetic morass that keeps people stuck in every culture, every race, every strata of society.

If you want to know how big this issue is, just ask someone you know…what is one of your biggest regrets? They’ll be able to answer in seconds. If you ask them to make a list, many people will fill up an entire page. Everything from, I should have stuck with my guitar lessons at 16, to I should never have married so and so.

I want to put forth a philosophy that made a HUGE difference in my life and in the lives of almost every coaching client I’ve worked with. It’s this… what if everything that happened in your past was perfect? It was meant to happen that way. Now, when I first heard that, I thought…no way…there’s no way I can be okay with what happened 20 years ago or 6 years ago. But what if I could? What if YOU could? Pick one regret right now, the one that pops up first…what if that was meant to be? What if it taught you something you need in your life now or coming up in your future? What if the people involved learned something important.

Not to say bad behaviour is okay, but since you cannot change the past, what can be salvaged from the situation? What if you could forgive yourself and others about that and just let it go once and for all? What if that helped you actually learn an important lesson. Often you can’t learn until you face the consequences of unwise actions. Then you say – okay, that’s not a good idea. Noted. Apologize from your heart,  and let it go. If we could look at brain activity when a person truly forgives themselves and others about a past mistake, misdeed, offense, you might actually see stuck energy leave the hippocampus part of the brain where trauma is stored, and move to the neo-cortex where wisdom is stored. Some researchers are even finding a type of brain cell in the heart. What if forgiveness gives you a wiser heart, a more compassionate view of yourself and others?

Why is that so important? Because it frees up all your creative energy from looping in the past, so you can use it in the present to create the life you really want. For example, one coaching client did the 4-step process I’m going to talk about here, and finally decided to let go of beating himself for bullying a neighborhood kid when he was young. He even sought out the man he’d bullied as a child and asked for his forgiveness. The man told him that it was meant to be, that it taught him to stand up for himself. My client was so relieved. He was on cloud 9 for weeks. Right after that he finally got going on the book he’d been meaning to write and got it done in 4 months, and fully attributes letting go of that regret with this surge of creative energy.

Another example.   I made an investment many years ago and ended up losing all my money, and beat myself up with regret for years after that, struggling financially. When I finally let it go using this process, my finances turned around dramatically. Another client regretted her performance during a speaking engagement. She was new to the speaking circuit and everyone else on the agenda was a seasoned pro. As she sat in the audience watching the other speakers, she compared herself, and feared the audience would judge her as lacking. In re-watching the video she saw how nervous and self-conscious she looked compared to other times she’d spoken to groups. It was a self-fulling prophecy. She got bad reviews. It stopped her from promoting herself as a speaker for a year. When she did the 4-step process, she broke free from the regret, forgave herself, and booked four speaking engagements in the next 2 weeks. So, although this process seems simple, it’s effects are huge.

The 4-step process is called the Memory Imprint Journal. The name comes from the fact that you imprint good memories that override bad ones which changes the way you view life, therefore the way you act and the results you get. You can do the 4 steps in a few minutes and many people do it 30 days in a row to really anchor in the good effects. If you’d like to check out this online course just look in the shownotes for a link, or go to Golden Age Timeline dot com backslash SHOP.  You do it for a few minutes each day for 30 days in a row to really change the whole way you view yourself and life. And you can also just listen to this podcast and do it in your head as you listen.  Whatever works for you.

Here’s how it works. Most of us loop on regrets for years, so our brains are efficient at that. The brain doesn’t change so easily from something it’s grown efficient at. So you need a practice to retrain your brain to loop on more empowering ways of seeing yourself and life to get more positive effects in life. The Memory Imprint Journal only takes about 10 minutes to complete each time you do the four steps and it’ll ensure the weeds don’t grow back in – in terms of old, negative habits of mind.

The idea behind it is something called Building Resources in your unconscious mind. It creates fertile ground for planting the seeds of your goals, dreams and visions. If you’ve ever tried to manifest a goal and it keeps not happening, it’s probably because you don’t have enough resources. A lack of inner resources is like infertile soil in your garden…a garden full of weeds, toxic pesticides, rocks,  or one that is depleted of nutrients or too acidic. If you’ve ever tried to grow something in that kind of soil, you know what I’m talking about. Your seeds just won’t sprout.

Hundreds of people that we’ve worked with at MindStory Academy have reported that just after 30 days of doing the Memory Imprint Journal, they notice things like their sleep improves. They feel happier, moodiness has decreased. Others find them more enjoyable to be around. They have increased motivation to face challenges and to just get going. People report even physical pain in the body decreasing and finances increasing. Each time you write in the journal, you’re strengthening the neural pathways until these positive habits become default and you don’t even necessarily need the journal anymore.

Let’s get back to the infertile soil metaphor. A big reason people can’t achieve goals in life is because their unconscious is a mass of negative memories that are constantly being reinforced. That way they never get to move on and learn. They revisit the regretful time and get retraumatized over and over again.

And, what many don’t realize is that negative focus in one area of life, tends to have a negative impact in other areas of life too. For example, if you have a habit of complaining about your work, many recent studies show that it can negatively impact your energy levels, health, relationships, resourcefulness, happiness and life satisfaction. Does that mean you pretend like there’s no problems at work? No. It means you take action on the things you can change and find a way to accept the things you can’t change. Even though many people are aware of this phenomenon, they still let themselves get caught up in negative thinking. Why? Brain research has proven that if you think a thought often enough, it becomes a program like a software program only in your own subconscious mind. Those programs can run on autopilot the rest of your life until you change them.

Your subconscious mind is full of good and useful programs and bad and destructive programs and everything in between. For example, knowing how to ride a bike or how to read a book, are examples of good programs, it’s an efficiency of the mind. If you didn’t have that function, then you’d have to relearn riding a bike and reading each time you wanted to do it again. The bad news is that sometimes you’ll store a program that undermines your effectiveness, happiness, or success in life. For example, a client of mine as a child was asked to read a book report in school at the front of the room and he was very nervous and messed up the process. Of course, the first time you do anything, you tend to make more mistakes because you lack experience. He hadn’t been given any training in public speaking and so it was justifiably unskilled.

That said, he made a decision at the time which went something like, I’m bad at public speaking. That created a program that went into his unconscious mind and he forgot about it. Then as an adult, he was asked to speak at a sales rally for the franchise he belonged to, because he won an award. He turned down the whole experience because of that unconscious program. He missed out on a chance to build this business and his reputation. If only he’d realized, at the time, that he could get over that self-image through this process and get some basic training in public speaking. Eventually he did that through our training and now he speaks all over the world to thousands of people and loves it. Many of us make decisions for good or for bad when we’re young and our minds are very open and absorbent to programs and we probably forgot we made those decisions.

Sometimes it comes from just watching your parents over time and how they respond to life, or listening to the radio or watching TV. How do advertisers say you should live your life? How do your favorite TV show or movie characters make decisions? Sometimes those examples aren’t constructive yet we pick them up and live our lives that way. For example, have you ever noticed that when a character on TV or in a movie is upset, they reach for alcohol? Is that the best way to solve an emotional issue? Not usually. Usually it makes it worse. Do you see them work with a skilled coach or counsellor or friend? Rarely. Maybe if it’s a comedy you’ll see them try to talk to someone who is unskilled and makes it worse. So, there aren’t a lot of examples of people resolving the inevitable emotional upsets of life in a skilled way. That’s why coaching is such a booming industry and why coaching tools like the Memory Imprint Journal are becoming more and more popular. They usually work, and don’t leave you with a hangover and regrets from your behavior the night before.

So it’s very important to become aware of what programs you’ve taken on and to be able to override the ones you don’t want and strengthen or add the ones you do want. There’s basically four steps to create those supportive programs in your unconscious. So 1) is appreciations about yourself. 2) is appreciations about life circumstances. 3) is evidence of supportive core beliefs in action and 4) is the memory imprint. So you’ll see examples and then a sample page that’s been filled in if you go to the memory imprint journal 5 day free trial page at MindStoryAcademy.com/free.

It’s like a gratitude journal on steroids. You may have heard that the emotional frequency of gratitude improves your mental, emotional and physical health better and faster than almost any other emotional state. That said, many of us aren’t naturally grateful. The human mind has a negativity bias, and will look for what to complain about. But when you think about it, for every 1 thing that isn’t working well in your life, aren’t there usually about 1000 things going well? Even on your worst day there’s still lots to be grateful for. The focus of gratitude changes the way your brain processes experiences and literally dials up on all your mental, emotional, relationship and even physical capacities.

The reason to separate appreciations about yourself from appreciations about life circumstances, is that in our research of people doing gratitude journals, most people just listed external circumstances and never listed appreciations about themselves. This process makes you do that. The biggest reason people stay stuck in life is because of self criticism. Remember that negativity bias I just talked about? Most of us focus exclusively on what we don’t appreciate about ourselves in all aspects of life. It’s a default program. So, don’t make the mistake of beating yourself up about beating yourself up. The majority of people do it, because it’s a strong program in our society, to be highly self critical. I even find it within highly successful people, who would label themselves as having high self esteem. They dress well, they achieve great things, they act in admirable ways, but if you really get to know them, they are merciless with themselves. So make sure you list at least one good thing about yourself – and not just something you accomplished – but a quality of being, too, like patient with my son, or allowed myself to rest on Sunday. This is also a place to help forgive yourself, by noting where you learned from a mistake, when you offered an apology, when you forgave someone else. Those kinds of actions help release regret more than anything. Then, you’d list at least one external circumstance like, I have a roof over my head, laughing with family over dinner, and if you want to stretch  yourself it a big and express an appreciation for someone who you still resent to start the learning and forgiveness process. For example, appreciating my neighbor who likes to complain about our dog because I get to practice patience, boundaries and compassion.

Then, the third part is evidence of supportive core beliefs in action. This is a bit more advanced if you’re just starting out in the arena of personal development. If you’re familiar with the notion of core beliefs, most of us have many unsupportive core beliefs that take time to override. They’re often a self criticism or a pessimistic view of life, for example, I’m bad with money, or I’m unworthy of forgiveness, or life doesn’t support me. So you’d write down the opposite of three core beliefs in this way…I’m good with money, I’m worthy of forgiveness, life supports me. Then you’d write down evidence of each from today, last week, last month, last year, or anytime in your life will do. For example, I’m good with money, you might write – I saved 30,000 when I worked overseas. Even though it was 15 years ago, that’s ok. What you focus on grows. Next to “I’m worthy of forgiveness” you might write, my mother accepted my apology last Spring. Next to “life supports me”, you might write I got chosen to give the opening speech at the annual TCE convention.

Finally, part 4 is to write out, or speak out loud a short story. This is an example of good moment in time, or a positive perspective on a moment in life. It can be from yesterday, last week, last year, or 25 years ago, it doesn’t matter. It’s about 5 sentences and usually starts in the first person, present tense stating age or time and place. Then you take a mental snapshot of the moment by explaining what you saw, what you heard, what you felt physically, what you felt emotionally, and maybe even smells and tastes. Using the 5 senses helps your subconscious mind bring the memory front of mind. Imagine that your memory banks are like those old rolodexes or like filing cabinets with one memory per file. Most of remember the bad memories. Those are at the front of the filing cabinet, easy to get to. The good memories are way at the back and hard to get to. This process re-files the memory to the front. Why is that important? Because let’s say you want to reinvent your career in the face of this pandemic and lockdown. You want to find a way to work online, from home. You want to increase your income doing something you love. But all you remember are times you failed or had a hard time making a career change. Those memories are at the front of the filing cabinet. But now with this exercise you decide to write out memories of times you made a success career change, times you were successful – because chances are there are 1000’s of examples you just forgot about. Now it’s more balanced. Now it’s much easier to find the courage and motivation to make the change because you remember all your successes. Make sense?

So, as I said, you can the Memory Imprint Journal if you go to GoldenAgeTimeline.com/shop. This is a 30 challenge where you just spend a few minutes daily clearing out regrets from the past, so you can transform present day limitations and find freedom again.  You can also see how to get the book MindStory Inner Coach and Helio Tropez there, too.

So that’s it for today…please like, share and subscribe. It makes a big difference to helping others find out about it.

I hope that was helpful. Until next time, thanks for listening.