Your Past Doesn’t Make You Special Whether You’re a Veteran or Not

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

The Warrior Soul podcast is written, produced, and edited by me, Albert. Our mission is to provide tools, tactics, strategies, and ideas to US military veterans and anybody else willing to listen to help them to navigate toward living their absolute best lives. If you find these episodes helpful, please share them out with somebody that you know of that can use them. And if you really like the podcast, please also head over to iTunes and write us a written rating and review. It really helps us to spread word about the show, and it really helps to get these tools in the hands of others who really need them.

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If you head over to www.dropanfbomb.com and use the code Warrior Soul at checkout, you'll get 20% off of that first order. And I'm gonna keep the announcements short and sweet today. You can stick around to the end. I got a really special announcement about a brotherhood that we're creating here at Warrior Soul. So hope you enjoy this episode.

I hope you get a lot out of it. And without delay, let's get into it.

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. That's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

And we need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul podcast.

Whether it's positive or negative, dwelling on your past can be a trap. And it's a trap that we often fell onto. We sit there and we think of either past times where we've had a lot of glory. Maybe it's a, an athletic career in high school, or maybe it's a time when you excelled academically, or maybe it was your military career. We also dwell on pain, and we think of painful moments from our past, times where we might have lost people who were very dear to us, or times when we face tragedy or hardship.

Either way, the past can color your present in a way that keeps you from obtaining the future that you really want. And that's what we're going to talk about today. We're gonna talk about the idea that regardless of what happened to you in the past, it doesn't make you special. First, I just wanna say this. The Warrior Soul podcast has been going on for three years right now.

And I have to say that it's one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done in my life. The notes I get from all of you, the encouragement I get from all of you, the satisfaction that I get from helping this community, The US military veteran community that I view as the sleeping giant in this country. And when that sleeping giant wakes up, I think that we are going to have a major impact on where this country is going to go. This work that I do here, it's important. And it's important for a few different reasons.

It's important because I am speaking to veterans. And as we know, over the past decade and a half, The US military veteran community has been through a whole lot. And what I'm trying to get you to understand at the end of the day is that your status as a veteran doesn't take you away from your quest to find remaining purpose in your life. And if you're not a veteran, here's the thing. Anything that I talk about here on this show can apply to you.

And if you find these episodes helpful, please head over to iTunes and write us a written rating and review. It really helps to spread the word about the show, and it really, really helps get this information to the hands of more veterans who can use this information. The more we communicate, the more we spread this information, the stronger our community will be and the better off our country will be. So with that, let's get into the subject matter of the day. Why do we dwell so much on the past?

Why do we think so much about events that have already passed us by? In a way, it's part of our human existence. We grow up on stories about people who have lived in the past, and we develop our own stories about who we are and what we've done. And in many ways, they are just that. They're stories.

Looked at through someone else's eyes, the situation might appear drastically different than what you think the situation was. And when we think about it like that, it's really this other world that our brain creates. A world that we go back to often. A world that we go back to when we're distracted with the present moments in life, when life seems to be a little bit difficult in the present, when we're going through pain, and when we're going through hardship. I want to say that it's not a bad thing to remember the past.

Your memories are part of who you are. They're part of where you're at right now, and they've led to this point where you're existing in this moment. But at the same time, when we dwell too much on the past, when we think too much about it, it takes us away from our real mission, which is to accomplish something right now. Let's talk about positive memories. Things that occurred in the past that put you into a good light.

Like I said before, it might be some former high school glory. It might be your service in the military. It might be a romantic relationship that you once had that you lost. And when we think about those too often, what tends to happen is we start to think of those moments as times that can never exist again. That was a good time, and we really, really wish that we could go back there and experience it again.

And there's a huge fear within us that we're never going to be able to recreate those moments. We're never going to be able to recreate that meaning and purpose we felt at the time. You might also experience a sense of guilt, a feeling like somehow it's your fault that those moments aren't existing anymore. Maybe you got into a fight with your partner or you did something that he or she didn't like, and that ended the relationship. And so now you're carrying guilt with you, and you're venturing back constantly to think about those moments when you guys were closer, when you had a romance, when you had someone in your life who cared about you.

Maybe you ended your enlistment early in the military. Maybe you just got out after one enlistment, and you're constantly thinking back to when you actually had a purpose, when people were trusting you, and and when people were putting you in charge of teams and in charge of expensive equipment. And now today, you're starting a new life where you have to learn everything over again, where people don't trust you as much and where you don't trust other people as much. And so you're carrying guilt with you because you ended your service in your mind, too early. And when it comes to reflecting on the past, the positive past too much, I think it's really, really important that we understand this.

Regardless of what happened, regardless of how the past how great the past was, you still have so much time in your life to do so many more things. One of the things that I came to terms with after I got out of the military was that I wanted to be known, not just for my military service. I didn't want that to be the only great thing that I did in my life. I wanted it to be just one of many amazing things that I was able to do. And I think you really have to understand that.

There's gonna be different seasons in your life. When you start something new, when you end something that you're you're experienced in, and then you start something new, there's gonna be a relearning phase. Things are going to be a bit difficult. The people around you might not mesh as well with you as you did with your squad or your team. And you have to understand that's okay.

That's part of everything that comes with transition and coming into the next season of our lives. You need to go through that retraining phase. And if you want to use the past positively, stop thinking of yourself when you were at your best in the military, start thinking about yourself when you first went through basic training or when you first went into boot camp. Think about all the learning you had to do, all the work you had to put in to becoming the marine, the soldier, the airman, or the sailor that you were. When you think about your past relationships, think back to the time before you got into those relationships, when you were independent, where you were following your own path and seeing to your own existence, without dependence on another person for emotional fulfillment.

Think about working on yourself rather than trying to fill that void that somebody left. Think about making yourself stronger, smarter, and more resilient. And when you do that and you start investing in yourself, what happens is chances start coming before you. When you actually stop living in the past and stop dwelling on it, and you start putting work in yourself in the moment, then you'll see that there's so many possibilities in front of you. Your confidence is gonna grow.

You are going to be looked at in a better light by other people who see what you're doing. That is the answer to getting yourself out of thinking of or dwelling on positive moments in the past and start working on your life as it is. And then we often dwell on the negative moments that happened in the past. Those times where we faced immense pain, immense hardship, and immense loss. And these are not easy things to get over.

But you have to remember that they've been part of the human existence since the dawn of man. And one of the illusions I think we go through when we do experience loss, we do experience pain, is the idea that that pain is going to last forever. There's a part of us that actually wants to hold on to it, because that forces us to remember. Forces us to remember maybe that person we lost, the the the way things were before that bad thing happened. But in so many ways, it takes us away from who we need to be, which is a stronger person, which is somebody who can get through these hard times and really turn their lives around.

Somebody who uses those hard times not as something that that makes you weaker, but it's something that makes you stronger. Many of the great people throughout history have gone through immense pain and immense hardship. A few weeks ago, I covered a book called Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. That man went through the Nazi concentration camps for three years. He faced absolute brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis and at the hands of the Jewish Kapos who were running the camp.

And when he finally got out, the one thing that he was dreaming of his entire time while he was witnessing brutal murders, while he was while he was experiencing the filth and the dirt of the camps, the one thing that he was dreaming of the entire time was his family. And he returned to Vienna only to realize that his wife, his child, and his entire family had been killed. And yet, he kept going. He returned to his work as a psychoanalyst and he developed a new theory of psychoanalysis, logotherapy. And through that he created insights that changed the entire field of psychoanalysis.

In turn, he also started a new family. And it was because he didn't look upon the negative experiences that had happened to him as something to make him weaker or as something to dwell on. He used them to make him stronger, to give him new insights on life. And you can do the same. It's not what happens to you in this life that matters.

What matters is how you choose to respond to it. And if you continue to dwell on it, all that's going to happen to you is it's going to break you. And if you search deep within your soul, you'll find that you don't want to be broken. You want to move past it. You want to make something actually happen in your life and you want to bring greater meaning to this life.

And when you do, the opportunities that are in front of you, again, are endless. Opportunities not just to improve your own state, but to use the wisdom that you've gained to truly help others. And through that, you'll find real fulfillment, real meaning, and real purpose. And that's all I've got for today, guys. I hope that resonates with you, and I hope you get something out of it.

Again, if you find this episode helpful, please let me know. Write us a written rating and review on iTunes, and let's start the discussion. Head over to our Facebook page or our Instagram account, and either send me a DM or make a comment. Let me know how this is impacting you and whether or not it resonates. I want to thank you guys so much for listening, and I want to thank you for all your support.

Together, we're going to grow stronger. And in turn, we are gonna make this world and this country as great as possible. This is Chris Albert, and I am out. Hey, guys. I hope that you're getting a lot out of these episodes and, hope that you're actually applying the things that we talk about here to your lives and actually taking action on them.

One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is a group we've developed here at Warrior Soul called the Warrior's Obituary Society. What this is is a group for men that empower each other to live epic lives, lives worthy of epic obituaries. And it starts with an eight week development program. That's where we're identifying your vision, helping you identify the goals that you want to go after in this life. And then we get into specifics.

We're looking at your finances, we're looking at your fitness, we're helping you to accomplish the things that you need to in order to make that vision come true. After that eight week development program is over, we go into the hard work. That's when you're actually being held accountable to the goals you lay out for yourselves. And that is when you're actually taking action. We also have an online forum that we're starting conversations over each day, and none of this is run over social media.

We have a private Slack workspace and a Voxer channel that we speak over. And the reason for that is because I don't want our members to get distracted by social media and I really don't want anybody to feel like anybody's looking over their shoulders. If this is something that you think that you'd be interested in, send me an email over at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com and we can set up a call and we can talk about if this is right for you. You can also send me a DM over at warrior soul agoge on Instagram. With that guys, again, I want to thank you so much for your support, and we'll be back at you later on this week with some more awesome content.