Ep. 7: Time Travel Series: How to Change Your Past

If you spend any time in the past, listen to this episode to make sure you are using your past to serve you.  I will discuss how to change your past to make the past work for us instead of against us. Let's go!

Visit our website and sign up for updates: https://www.womenfaculty.com

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

0:01

Welcome to the thriving academics Podcast. I'm Ulya Tsolmon, a professor and certified coach, and I share insights on how to create your best work and live your best life. If you want to go from surviving to thriving without sacrificing what's important to you, then listen on To find out how. Hello, my friends, welcome to the time travel series. So I'm a big sci fi fan and time travel themed books and movies are always so fun. So even though time travel seems like a science fiction concept, we actually engage in time travel quite a bit, several times a day, actually. So we go to the past, then we go into the future in our head several times a day. So today, we want to talk about how very often we use time traveling to bring souvenirs back to the present, that can sabotage our efforts in the present. So in this episode, I will focus on the time travel to the past, and I want to offer you that we can change the past if we want to, and in the ways that we can make the past work for us in the present. So have you ever said to yourself, I haven't done this before, when you are faced with something new to do, maybe you've used this reason I haven't done this before as a reason not to do something. It seems like the older we get, the more we use our past to make decisions for the future. And that actually makes sense that we rely on our past experience, and accumulated wisdom to guide us today and to help us make decisions. However, when we use our past experience to limit us in the present, we really need to question it. Because this reliance on the past can cause us to become less likely to try new things, or even to try try attempting doing things again. So just because you haven't done something in the past doesn't really mean that you should not try something new. So most often when we say I haven't done this before, and use our lack of experience not to do something, then we are using our past against ourselves. So for example, compared to people who are much older, little kids do not have much past experience they can rely on and at the same time, they seem to be really curious about everything, their energy is driven by curiosity and the desire to experience a learn everything. So when my son was a toddler, my, it seems like my main objective at that time was to keep him alive. So he would actually, you know, stay away from things that could hurt him because he was just venturing into all kinds of things. So climbing up too high, trying to, you know, taste all kinds of things, usually dirty things, pulling stuff off surfaces, pushing things running too fast. I don't know, sticking his little fingers into everything. So one time, when I think it was two, he managed to push like an entire TV set off the TV stand. So fortunately, he was standing behind the TV and he just pushed it off the TV stand. We hear this huge crash and we run to see you know what happened. And we just see him, you know, standing and looking over broken TV set. And he's just you know, is just unfazed. Of course, we are freaking out. But our toddler he's just so fascinated by what has happened. And he's actually very excited about it. So he was actually really fascinated by the TV for a long time. And it really not by the images that was you know, it was displaying but really by the shape and the box itself. So I guess that day he when we were not looking he managed to push the entire set off the TV stand. Luckily, he was not hurt. He was just he was perfectly fine. He was just standing there. You know enjoying looking at the carnage that he caused. So kids really want to try everything. They're not constrained by past experience or fear of getting heard or doing something wrong. And but when we are adults, we and we have accumulated a lot experience and knowledge. And we have matured enough not to try to taste dirt at every possible chance, we can actually also lose the sense of adventure and curiosity because of our accumulated past experiences. So not only our past, keeps us safe, but it can also constrain us, and may not serve us in in the most useful way. So this is the point that I would like to discuss today. So when you say I haven't done something before, and you feel hesitation, and doubt, that's a sign that you're using your past against yourself, even though you have goals, and you want to work on those goals, and you want to get this project done. But you find yourself hesitating, and doubting yourself, just because you haven't done something before. That could be a clue that you're using past against yourself. So there might be other reasons not to try this new thing or approach. But just because it's new. And you don't have the past experience, that does not make it a very good reason not to try. Here are a couple of questions. When you think about your self confidence, how much of your self confidence depends on your past? And the second question is, how often do you feel regret about the past. So even though, you know, you cannot go back and change things, for example, for some reason, we tend to think it's useful to relive the past. And so for example, if you've procrastinated and now you're up against a deadline, how is that spending time regretting how you spend time in the past and blaming yourself, really hoping you meet the deadline actually doesn't. And in fact, the opposite effect happens, you spend the limited time and energy thinking about the past and feeling bad about it, instead of doing the actual work. Many times some people also replay events and situations from the past only to be horrified by them again and again. And use the past experience to blame themselves as though the blaming can get the results that they want. It just doesn't. All you end up doing when you're dredging up the past in this way is really wasting your time and energy and actually further degrading your confidence. So dredging up the past in the way that doesn't serve you is a really poor way to spend your time. So the key here is to recognize that the past cannot be changed. Like literally, you cannot go to the past and change the events. So no matter how much I blame myself, or regretted that TV set cannot be dropped, like that's done, it happened. What I can do is take what's useful from the past event, and use it in a way that serves me toward my goals going into the future. So how can we make the past work for us? So we're looking for learnings and takeaways that could be useful for the pursuit of our goals. One reason that we should not really use our past against ourselves is that the recollection your recollection of the past may not even be true. So there is this really fascinating work by neuroscientists that have shown that human memories actually mostly wrong and some of them are completely wrong. And this is no matter how confident we feel in our recollection of past events. So there's this one study about how people's memories can be extremely inaccurate, even if the memories about really large emotionally charged events. So for example, do you remember where you were and what you were doing on 911? So I vividly remember on 911 coming back from school and watching the news on on TV. I remember who was around and which room I was in, but it turns out these memories actually may not be accurate. So back in 1986, the day following the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle, two psychologists collected questionnaire so they handed out a questionnaire to the students, asking them to write down where the students were when they heard the news, who they were with and what they were doing. And the questionnaire was administered the day after the event. So presumably, the memories should be pretty fresh, and the recollection should be pretty accurate. Then they repeated the same questionnaire two and a half years later to the same students. And they compare the answers. And the surprising thing was that they really found barely any similarities. So when they actually rated the accuracy of students recollections, the average score was less than three on a scale of seven, and almost quarter of the students scored zero. So that basically says that whatever they wrote two and a half years later, was nothing what they wrote originally. But when the students were asked how confident they were about their recollection about the event, their confidence score was really high, like almost five on the scale from zero to five, maybe one to five. So the memories were to them, pretty vivid, pretty clear. And they were very confident than them. But they were very wrong. So I think there were also subsequent studies on human memories. And basically, there's really very little relationship between confidence about memory and accuracy of the memory. And obviously, it has a lot of repercussions. If memories are mostly faulty and wrong, then can we rely on witness recollections and use them in courtrooms. But for our purposes, what the key takeaway is that if memories are mostly wrong and inaccurate, then should we even be dredging them up to believe them in a way that what we remember is accurate. And especially when the memories are not serving us in the present moment, then it becomes really, you know, questionable, or how useful they are. Another interesting thing is that memories also can change over time. And because of that, we can generate completely false memories. So every time we recall our memories, our memories change. So it's not that like, our brains are recording events with our eyes. And then we have this accurate record of what happened and we replay them every time. But how our brains store and recall memories is going to be very different from recording. So brain will fill in the gaps and every time recall memories with basically changing them. This is really fascinating work. And I could just nerd out on neuroscience all day long. But the point that I want to make is that our memories are very likely inaccurate, and they're malleable. So then why should we agonize over some past events, that first of all cannot be changed, we cannot literally go to the past and you know, relive the experience and change it and get into some different universe. The second thing is our recollection may not even be accurate. So how does that serve us to bring things from the past and use those things against us? Now, if memories are inaccurate and malleable, then this is actually really good news for us. So, what we can think of as an embarrassing memory can be reframed, so we can experience different emotion when thinking about that memory. So, what we can do is, even if we bring a memory to the present, we can make the same memory means something else that is actually useful to us. So for example, if you are hesitant about trying something again, because you have failed in the past, then what we can do is think about the past failures in terms of how it could serve you today. So past failures could mean nothing until you give them meaning. And we probably trained to think about the past failures as something to avoid. We want to avoid making mistakes in the future. But we can reframe it. And if we thinking that past failures is an evidence that we should not try again, then we're really using our past against us. So if you look at past attempts that did not result in desirable outcomes, which we commonly call failures, you can choose either to think that, well, I've done this before I feel this before. So I'll probably fail again. And really try not to get that project going. Again, you don't want to look at it, you don't want to do it. It doesn't make sense. Or you could adopt Thomas Edison's approach and be like, Well, I haven't failed is I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work. And then keep going until you get to the lightbulb moment. Okay, so if you travel to the past, which we tend to do a lot in the course of the day, be sure to bring souvenirs that work for you instead of against you. Bring things that give you energy, confidence and information that's useful to pursuing your goals. We have to make our past work for us instead of against us. One footnote that I will add to this is that trauma is another way how the past can affect our present experience. I will discuss trauma in future episodes as it is a very important topic. In this episode, I'm not talking about trauma, but tendency to use our past against ourselves more consciously. So I'm talking about the past that's more valuable for us more accessible to be malleable. Okay, so remember that your past is all yours to make use of the past is not something that you should use against yourself. Be sure to examine whether you using your past against yourself, or you're using it for yourself. So until next time, Bonville Yosh to the past, but bring things that help you create your best work and live your best life. So that's all I have for you today. Have a great day. Hey, if you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more about all the things you're talking about, check out women faculty.com Where we take these concepts and apply them. Come join us and do your best work and live your best life.