Your Past Is Your Teacher, Not a Fortune Teller

We all carry labels we never chose. "The quiet one." "The shy one." "The one who isn't good at this." In this episode of Brave Moves, Julie DeLucca-Collins explores a phrase from her friend, weight loss coach Corinne Crabtree, that changed how she thinks about her own history: "Your past is your teacher, not a fortune teller."

Julie breaks down the difference between learning from your past and letting it predict your future, why old stories always come back but don't have to define you, and why reinvention is possible at any age, not just in your twenties. This episode is a reminder that the labels handed to you as a child were never a life sentence.

This episode explores:

• Why childhood labels quietly shape adult behavior
• The difference between your past as a teacher versus a fortune teller
• Why reinvention has no age limit
• One brave move to release an old story that no longer serves you

Transcript

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My friend Corinne Crabtree, a weight loss coach I deeply love and respect, said to me once as she was coaching me at one of her retreats Your past is your teacher, not your fortune teller. Let's hear that again. Because most of us are living like it's the opposite. We treat our past like it's already told us how the story in our future is gonna go. Now, stay with me to the end because I wanna show you the difference between learning from your story and being sentenced by it. I'm Julie DeLucca Collins, and this is Brave Moves, and if you are listening to this episode because you found me or because someone shared this episode with you, I wanna welcome you to the Brave Moves Daily-ish Podcast family. It takes two seconds to hit the subscribe or follow button on the app you're listening on, and this truly means so much to me, my friend. And if you want more inspiration from me in your inbox, join my newsletter community. Go to goconfidentlycoaching.com and you will find the subscribe button for the newsletter. Now, this episode today is not just for you and me. Please share it with someone you know who may need a boost of confidence or who needs to find the inspiration to take their next brave move. What I share with you today can impact not only our lives, but the lives of those around you and your community. So let's get into it. Now, think back to when you were a kid. Somewhere along the way, somebody gave you a label. Maybe it was well-meaning. Maybe it was in, "She's the quiet one. She's the shy one. She's the sensitive one. Ah, she's not good at math. She's the difficult one." I've heard that before. Now, nobody sat us down and asked if we agreed with that label. We just were handed it, and usually before we were even old enough to argue back. Now, here's the part that gets me. Sometimes we wake up decades later in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday and realize we're still carrying it. Still, we're quiet in rooms where we ha- should have said something, still shrinking because someone's decided that's who we were before we even had a chance to become anyone else. That label wasn't a prophecy, friend. It was one sentence said by one person one random day, but we let it write the whole book. And this is exactly what Corinne meant. Your past is your teacher, not a fortune teller. A teacher looks back at what's happened and says, "Here's what that taught you. Here's what you can take from it. Here's what it's prepared for you." A fortune teller looks at what happens and says, "This is gonna happen again. This is who you are. This is the ceiling." We treat our past like a fortune teller constantly, and most of the time, we don't even notice we're doing it. We failed at something once, so we assume we're gonna fail again. We were called the quiet one ones, so we assume that that's just a personality permanently instead of a chapter that ended a long time ago you know, maybe we got hurt in a relationship, a business, a friendship, and we let that one experience predict every future one before it's even had the chance to begin. But here's the truth: your past has information. It doesn't have jurisdiction. Here's what I want every woman listening today to hear. Reinvention is possible at any age, not just in your 20s when everyone expects you to still be figuring things out, at 40, at 50, at 60, at any point where you decide you're no longer willing to be the story someone else told you about. Old stories come back. I'm not gonna pretend they don't. You'll have a moment, a trigger, a comment from someone who knew you 20 years ago, and that old label will show back up, knocking at the door like it still lives there, and that's normal. That's human. I was visiting my cousins in El Salvador, and they said I was spoiled because my grandmother seemed to always be sticking up for me, and I tended to get the things that I wanted, and I wasn't spoiled. That was that label that I was given. Listen, I've had to work for every single thing I've had. I put myself through school. I worked since I was 13, and there's a lot of times in which I've had to go without. That's not a spoiled child. I am just an assertive person. I am the person that stands up for herself and talks about what they need. But here's the shift. Old stories can visit. They just don't get to move back in. They don't get to haunt you. They don't get to define you. They get to teach you, The moment that I finally understood what Corinne meant, my past had plenty to teach me. It just didn't get to tell me how I was gonna live my future. I think so many of us, and I see this with women every single day, you know, maybe they were in a relationship and they were the quiet one, or maybe they put themselves through school, but they didn't really do well in one particular subject, so they've carried that throughout their life. And it's not really how we want to live. It's not really the whole story. You are the author of your life. You are the person that decides how you're going to see yourself, how you're going to believe in yourself, and how you're going to take actions to maybe reinvent, become, do the thing that maybe in the past you couldn't do. Your brave move for today, my friend, is name one label you were given. Perhaps as a child, at any point in your life, you are still quietly living inside that name, inside that label, and I want you to just name it. Maybe you were told you were the quiet one. I was told I was the harsh one. Whatever it is, and ask yourself one question: Is this teaching me something, or is this trying to tell me my fortune? Is it trying to tell me what my life is gonna be like in the future? You have my full permission, friend, to fire that label. The labels that people have given us are based on an experience that they might have had in one little page of your book. Your life is a bestseller, friend, and you are writing it every single day, a paragraph doesn't tell you everything in the book. A paragraph needs to be taken into context. In your life, you, your gifts and talents are so much more than the labels that people put on you. So I want you to name it and look at how that has defined you and decide, "Is that me or not?" And shed it, because your future is out there for you to go and get, is not going to be defined by something in the past. Just use it as a lesson. And remember, if Brave Moves has been inspirational to you, I would love to hear about it. You can go to the show notes and you can send me a message. If this episode said something that made you go, "Hmm," I'd love to hear about it. Also, if you wanna hear something else on the podcast, I'm always happy to talk about it. Just let me know what you're thinking. All right, until tomorrow, don't forget, go confidently in the direction of your dreams.