It is often very hard for us to learn something different about what we already knew than learning something entirely new about it. Even if we know some things incorrectly, our mind has already stored that information and often times linked it to certain other things as well so that we do not forget about it. Unlike machines, we cannot just make our brains delete the wrong information and copy/paste the new information in its place whenever we feel like it. While computers may be able to do it on an impulse, we need to not only forget about what we initially knew and how we had made connections for it in our mind but also try to make new connections in its place. Although it sounds a bit complex on the surface, we are fully capable of doing it on a day-to-day basis. The point that I am trying to convey is that letting go of something is much harder than acquiring it in the first place. The greater the effort that you put in to achieve something, the harder it will be for you to actually convince yourself to give it up. Now you might be thinking why anyone would want to give up something after they have already strived for it that much. Wouldn’t it be a waste of their time?
Let go of the Superfluous
Sometimes we have spent a considerable amount of time and effort in trying to obtain something in our life but we eventually grow out of it with time. Maybe it was something you really liked at first and then gradually got tired of it or maybe it was something that was not what you expected it to be at all. These acquisitions become purposeless at best but can also become a hindrance to you as well. The reason that they become a hurdle for you is because they work against whatever is your new goal in life now. Even if you only thought of that thing as pointless but also harmless to you now, it might not be the same for the future version of you. There can be a lot of examples but lets take a really simple one: Imagine that at one point in your life, you really wanted to have a particular hairstyle and so you grew out your hair and dyed them red. Now even if you really do not want to keep that same hairstyle, you are reluctant to just give it up because it took a considerable amount of time and effort. Now suppose that your current goal in life it to get a job at a highly prestigious company and you are in the process of giving multiple interviews. Your long red hair might not be the best fit for that job position so it is best for you to identify and give up on things that are no longer aligned with your goal in life. I am purposefully making exaggerating to help you understand the idea rather that limit the discussion to only once scenario.
Let go of the Old Habits
Our habits are another thing that we acquire with constant effort over a significant period of time. They can either be good or bad and the way that I make that distinction is by again considering your current goal in life. If your habit is limiting you from exerting your full potential to achieve your goal, it is a bad habit and it needs to be let go from your life. As an example, consider the habit you picked up over holidays where you stayed up till very late at night to play games with your friends and you had to stay up because that was the only time when all of your friends would get together. This was a good habit during your holidays but now if your School/College has resumed and you have to take classes early in the morning, this is probably not a very good habit to maintain and you should slowly try to erase it from your life. Maybe you want to get in shape and want to go the gym early in the morning, in that case as well, you need to give up on this habit and replace it with a better one to go to the bed early so that you can wake up early. Often times people find it hard to get rid of a deep-rooted habit and the way that I want you to think is not that you are removing an old habit but updating it with a newer and better version of it. Because you should almost always try to pick up a habit(preferably a good one) when you are giving one up(a bad one).
Let go of the Blame
The most challenging thing to let go of is your mistake or rather the guilt you feel because of it. No matter how much you want to move forward in life, you will find yourself keep coming back to the same guilt even though it will not accomplish anything to help you in the future. Just recognizing your mistake already makes you remember it for future references but adding more blame on yourself for making that mistake has an opposite effect. Instead of helping you to avoid making more mistakes, it actually makes it likely that there will be more slip-ups in the future. The reason for that is because after you have assigned a certain level of blame to yourself for making that same mistake, you will no longer be able to add more to it and that would cripple you from moving forward in any aspect of you life. The way that you will deal with is by becoming unresponsive to all the blame and to that mistake because you always will have to move forward in life, whether you like it or not. If you had moved forward after just realizing your mistake instead of trying to find blame in yourself, you would have moved forward with the intention to not make that same mistake ever. But now that you have filled yourself with guilt until you became stoic, you no longer care about making that or a similar mistake again.
The way to prevent it is by accepting that you made a mistake and once you have fully understood why you made that mistake, you need to believe in yourself that you can now move forward with your life and there is nothing left in remembering that mistake. To move forward and not fall for the same trap again, you do not need to remember how you fell into the trap or what happened afterwards. The only thing to remember is why it happened and what you learned from it to avoid it again. You have to live in the present and prepare for the future because your past is already behind you. Do not let it consume your mind and ruin both your present and your future.
Conclusion
To summarize, you need to re-evaluate your life from time to time and especially when you try to pursue a new goal to weed out all of your bad habits and all the things that have become a burden on you even though they were once very innocent. Most importantly, you need to avoid falling into the pitfall of assigning blame instead of learning and moving on with your life. To stop riddling yourself with guilt until you become unresponsive to it completely. This might seem like a lethargic process but it is actually very natural to us once we get started. You should try to continuously improve yourself by not only adding more positives in your life but by also removing as many negatives as you possibly can. I know that you will progress by leaps and bounds once you start on this process of cutting out the things that are slowing you down. I believe you can do it so at least give it a go once, Good luck!
