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Recognize The Value Of Your Past For Business Success And A Bigger Future

While the typical entrepreneur might be focused on the future, you simply can’t underestimate the importance of your past. In this episode, business coaches Dan Sullivan and Shannon Waller discuss the best way for entrepreneurs to engage with, and utilize, their past experiences.

Here's some of what you'll learn in this episode:

  • How your past is more than just what happened.
  • The present and future benefits of being creative with your past.
  • How Dan uses his past to create new thinking tools for The Strategic Coach® Program.
  • Why some people get trapped by their pasts.
  • How to easily start appreciating and owning your past.

Show Notes:

In your lifetime, you’ll only ever have direct access to one human being—you.

Events in your past didn’t necessarily happen the way you’ve interpreted them.

Your past is your property, which means you can do anything you want with it.

Even if you were with someone else in a past experience, you were each experiencing your pasts separately.

In the present, you can look back at any past experience, and reconfigure it in your mind.

There’s an unlimited amount of raw material you can pull from your past.

The more you take your past seriously, the more people will take you seriously in the present and future.

Taking ownership of your past requires spending a lot of time alone.

If you’ve freed your past from other people’s opinion, you won’t care about other people’s opinions about what you’re doing in the present.

Freedom with your past allows you to just be who you are.

Resources:

Video: How To Transform A Negative Experience

Capitalism—And Everything Else by Dan Sullivan

WinStreak® app

Episode Transcript:
 
Shannon Waller: Hi, Shannon Waller here, and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan.
 
Dan, you were having a conversation in the back of a workshop room not that long ago, and one of the things that you said is that the past is really important. And I think we live in a world where everyone’s focused on the future, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but you regularly educate people in terms of the past, their past history, and really help provide context.
 
So let’s dive into the question, why is the past so important? And you have a really cool way of bringing that forward for people, but why is it important?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, in my case, it’s 100% my property. What I mean by that is since it’s my property, I can do anything with my past that I want to. One is, I don’t need anyone’s permission because nobody else knows what my past is. So I’ve got 78 years and I have a phenomenal number of memories that are my memories from a very, very early age. I actually have memories of sitting in the highchair at the dinner table, and I have memories of, not what was being said or anything else, but I have memories of sitting in the chair and seeing all my family—mother, father, and four siblings—around the table. So I think that I was unusually observant at a very early age that things were going on.