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Here’s a little known fact.

You get to choose what defines you.

You get to choose the experiences, the feelings, the reactions that make you who you are. You get to choose the meaning for everything you go through.

What are you telling yourself about yourself?

What vows have you made to yourself?

Are they helping you?

Who are you going to be?

Are you always going to be that person who had a bad childhood or who never learned social cues? Are you always going to be the one who can’t emotionally regulate or who has been abused, assaulted, or injured? Are you the person who has chronic pain or illness or lives in a cycle of lack?

What is your focus?

For the longest time, I was someone who was a lot of those things. Especially after my injury.

I had chronic pain and a diagnosis that not many people knew much about.

I had no money and was defined mostly by that and the injury for at least a few years.

My focus was on what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t go out and do things with friends or family because anything physical would mean days of recovery.

I couldn’t spend money on “fun” because I needed money for food and bills.

But when I changed my focus, when I decided that these things didn’t have to mean that, everything started to change.

It’s the meaning we give things that gives it energy.

So what the meaning of my injury and the cycle of lack was giving me or cementing in my mind was my belief that I was not worthy or that I was not good enough.

Until I changed. I shifted my perspective. I realised what was happening and asked myself, “What makes me any less worthy than anyone else on the planet?”

I spent so long seeing the evidence for why I couldn’t or why I wasn’t worthy or good enough.

I needed to break that pattern.

I needed to search for evidence that I am strong. I needed to start believing that it is safe for me to be successful and achieve my goals and dreams.

I needed to start pushing against the boundaries in my life, self-imposed and otherwise.

I needed to build my network to include people who could push me beyond my current beliefs.

I needed to surround myself with people who believed in themselves, and I wanted that for myself.

When we begin questioning what we currently believe about ourselves and what we think that means, we begin to see the possibility life has for us.

When we shift our perspective from “I can’t” and see experiences as cementing our current view, we begin to believe differently and choose a different life.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. So cliché but so true.

Today, you can break the beliefs of the past by looking for evidence to prove that not everything is about that past.

Today, you can start creating new beliefs and new patterns.

Today, you can attribute experiences differently.

Today, you can take those experiences of the past, take the lessons from them, and leave them in the past.

Today is the day you can choose to release the feelings associated with experiences of the past and move into creating the future you desire.

Today is the day you get to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough.

Those feelings and thoughts about past experiences—are they helping you move forward?

Is there some forgiveness work that needs to be done?

Denise Duffield Thomas said in a video I watched recently that forgiveness is the gift we give ourselves.

Forgiveness doesn’t change the past and doesn’t mean you open the door once more, but it does clear the feelings around the memory. It helps you see it differently. It brings a new level of acceptance and helps you take away the learnings from that experience and pack it away properly so you are no longer weighed down and your life is no longer affected by the feelings or the energy around it.

Old memories have the capacity to create self-sabotaging behaviours.

Releasing and relinquishing old memories and the feelings around them open space for you to decide who you get to be now.

So who do you want to be?

What makes you who you are?

And how do you want to show up in the world now?

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