Let me be blunt for a moment…

One of the biggest reasons for low self-confidence and low self-esteem is getting stuck in the past.

Deep down you know that there is simply nothing you can do to change the past. No matter how many times you wish you’d done something differently, the past will always remain the past.

You must find a way to, once and for all, be done with your regretful feelings. When you continue to fret over the past, you allow negative feelings to consume more and more of your life, and more and more of your confidence. Once you’ve put a stop to it, you can think positively again and start moving forward.

Getting Stuck In The Past

It’s easy to get caught up in the past. It’s like this web of memories and that pulls you in and once you start thinking about it all the emotions that surround those events works to keep you there.

No-one is perfect and, no matter how hard you try, you’ll still continue to make mistakes. It’s how you handle the mistakes that will make the true difference in your life.

If you’ve made a mistake or suffered a tragedy in the recent past, don’t allow it to replay in your head over and over. You’ll continue to relive the negative feelings as if you were continually going through it. If you’re a follower of the Law of Attraction, you know that what you focus on expands, and you really don’t need to be expanding negative feelings and energy when you’re trying to rebuild your self-confidence.

No one deserves this! Instead, you have two choices, you can actively work on correcting your mistake, or you can let the feelings go because they’re not helpful to you in that moment.

Learn Your Lessons and Let Go of the Rest

There are lessons to be learned in every mistake you make no matter how minor it might be. The goal is to work on discovering what these lessons are.

When negative feelings surround you regarding your past, focus on the lesson learned. Maybe you would have never learned that lesson without the mistake. And now that you’ve gained this wisdom you can avoid making that mistake again in the future.

You can take everything one step further and do more with the lessons you’ve learned. Perhaps you can raise awareness by telling others about your experience. If you can help others avoid the same mistakes, you’ll be doing something great for the world. It’ll also help you feel better about the situation. This is one of the main reasons I share my story of being a survivor of spousal abuse. If sharing my story just helps one woman regain her sense of self and her confidence, then it’s worth it to me to have gone through what I did to get here.

Depending on what you’ve gone through, there may be a mourning period associated with your situation, but you’ll eventually need to let it go. Since you know that nothing can change the past, letting go can prove to be very liberating.

When you let it all go, you learn to forgive yourself and forgive others. Forgiveness is such an important thing to promote in your life. It allows you to grow as a person and blossom forward to enjoy all that life has to offer. You weren’t meant to sit around mourning the past no matter how tragic it’s been for you.

How Resentment and Negative Thinking Hurt Your Self-Confidence

Whatever it takes, you need to do your best to avoid resentment and all negative emotions. Resentment is a poisonous emotion that can go out of control if you don’t deal with it.

You’ve probably heard of people who have had a falling out with a family member and resentment keeps them apart for the better part of their lives. Think about all the good times they’ve missed out on because of this bitterness! All that bitterness and negative emotion saps your confidence because instead of remembering the good parts of your relationships, you only remember the negative events.

When it comes down to it, sometimes you keep telling yourself you’re over it but the negative thinking keeps creeping back into your life. You need to fully realize that the only person you’re hurting is yourself. When you beat yourself up over something that you can’t change all you’re really doing is beating down your own self-confidence and self-esteem.

For example, let’s say you’ve hurt someone’s feelings. You may think about this day and night until you can’t take it anymore, and you have to seek this person out to apologize. The person might not even remember what happened, or they may just accept your apology. The point is you suffered with negative thoughts until you sought forgiveness.

Another example is what happens when someone hurts you. If you’ve been abused, you know how that can drain not just your self-confidence but your whole sense of who you are. Even after it stops, it takes awhile (sometimes a lot longer than awhile) for you to stop seeing the whole world through the lens of abuse. Since your confidence is in the gutter, you question your choices, and worse, you question the motives of everyone around you. Every single person you come into contact with has to pass the “Will he/she hurt me” test and every single decision you make has to pass the “What if I make a mistake again” test.

Until you can let that go, you will have trouble moving forward.

The bottom line is that there’s no need to cause yourself any more suffering than you already have just because you made a mistake. Once you accept that you have learned from your past, you can let it go and learn to trust yourself to make better choices. With every piece of the past you send on its way, you’ll regain another piece of your self-confidence.