By Stephanie Wilson-Coleman.
Cesare Pavese once said, “If you want to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.” This article shows you how to make rapid progress by lightening the weight of your invisible backpack.
What Is The Invisible Backpack?
People travel through life with experiences, memories, and stories that serve as the backdrop of their lives. We all approach each new encounter carrying an invisible backpack which is filled with everything we believe we need to successfully navigate life.
If we look carefully at our backpacks, we will find within it joyful memories, financial successes, satisfying aha moments, hopes, and dreams. These items are packed side by side with sadness, losses, unforgiveness, and fears. Though our lives are filled with a cornucopia of experiences, we tend to discount the good and amplify the bad.
Psychologists have discovered that in spite of the good things people accomplish, negative emotions are processed in a different part of the brain than positive emotions. Consequently, negative emotions require more information to resolve, and more thinking to process.
In addition, Professor Roy Baumeister, co-author of Bad is Stronger than Good, discovered that bad experiences have more impact on people than good experiences. This makes it easy for people to forget the things for which they are grateful or should be grateful.
Lightening Your Backpack
To lighten our bags and empty our invisible backpacks so we can travel fast, we must unpack the unforgiving attitudes, and negative beliefs we have justified hanging onto and the “they did me wrong” stories. We must eliminate as many of the items or things that slow us down and weigh us down as we can.
How To Transform Your Life
You can start transforming your life as well as unpacking your backpack by doing the following:
Remember the Good
Five good things will change one negative experience you have had. Starting a Gratitude Journal or a “Daily Miracle Journal” will produce excellent results, so this is a good time to start!. In the journal or notebook, list five or more things for which you are grateful.
Really feel the gratitude and say it. There are no limits in gratitude; neither are there big or small miracles, or little mercies or big things to be grateful for; there is only gratitude. In a year, you will have from 365 – 1,825 “daily” miracles. Acknowledge the miracles and be grateful.
Create Brag Lists
Create a list of things you have accomplished that you can brag about. Endeavor to list seven things. Keep this list handy and review it weekly at a minimum.
Your brag list will remind you that in the midst of every new storm that you have had accomplishments, and that you are amazing and have already conquered many storms. When life whispers “You cannot withstand the storm”, you reply, “I AM the storm.”
Identify the Miracle
Each experience brings with it a litany of blessings and lessons. List the lessons learned as well as the insights gained. When you find that you cannot immediately change the situation, use the lessons learned and the ideas gained so you can change how you think about it.
Asking yourself how you can grow from each experience will help you find the golden nugget in the midst of what you perceived to be darkness.
Now that your bags are lighter, what is your next stop?
Get on-board. Your dream is waiting.
Dream Big! Live the life you have imagined.
Remember, life is too short to drink cheap champagne.
Stephanie Wilson-Coleman is a Success Mindset Mentor & Transformational Specialist, who has the uncanny ability to help others break through toxic emotions and heal the residue left from traumatic experiences that are causing them to sabotage their success.
She is the founder of The Champagne Connection, Inc., the author of 3 books and the Host of the television show “A Sip of Inspiration”. Her superpower: Transforming Lives
