7 Ways to Use Your Past to Set Up Future Success

Let’s look at how your past can be the ultimate playbook for future wins. We’re moving beyond the motivational clichés for some real talk about setting goals that actually stick, bouncing back when life throws you curveballs, showing yourself some much-needed love, and seeking divine guidance along the way. So, if you're tired of spinning your wheels and ready to turn your past into a launchpad for success, hit that play button and let's get this journey started!

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Imagine Yourself is hosted by Lanée Blaise and Sandy Kovach. Lanée is a TV writer and producer, motivational speaker and podcaster. Sandy is a radio personality, voiceover artist and podcaster. They come to you from the Detroit Metro area and invite guests from all over the world to help encourage you in your health, career, faith journey and more!

Transcript

Sandy Kovach  [00:00:03]:
Reinventing yourself or just kinda reassessing your goals? Don't forget to look back at all the wisdom and experience you've had over the years. We've got 7 ways to help you do that on imagine yourself podcast where we help you imagine the next chapter of life with grace, gratitude, courage, and faith.

Lanée Blaise [00:00:24]:
Thank you for listening in to imagine yourself podcast. I'm Lanee here with Sandy, and we just want everyone out there to know how much we appreciate anytime you listen to our podcast. We love it when you check us out on social media, when you take a look at our website, imagine yourself podcast.com. We really appreciate you and we hope that we're offering something and serving you in ways that will better your day and your life and your new attitude. Because today, we are talking about ways to set ourselves up for success, ways to reassess how we wanna do life, reevaluate how we wanna live our lives, who we wanna be, how we really do want to imagine ourselves.

Sandy Kovach  [00:01:10]:
And so we have 7 ways to use your past to set up your future success. So I think you have the first tip, Lanee. Yes.

Lanée Blaise [00:01:21]:
This is one that is near and dear to my heart. It's almost a tip that can be summed up in one word, the word reflect or reflection. Whenever we take that time to reflect back, it Lanee times gives insight, gives ways that we can avoid problems, gives ways that we can kind of see ourselves a little better. So I challenge anyone who is trying to set themselves up for success to take some time to reflect. Maybe, you know, like in the past year, the past season of your life, just really consider what achievements, what challenges, what lessons you have learned, areas of growth, areas where you still need to or want to grow and better yourselves. Take time to acknowledge what went well, celebrate those victories, and then also realize, you know, what things you'd like to improve upon. And that's a very important component too. Please don't forget to celebrate the wins.

Lanée Blaise [00:02:26]:
Sandy, I'm in a group of women creatives who we meet once a month, and we take time in every meeting to reflect and celebrate on the wins that we've had because we don't wanna just focus on all the things, all the areas we need to improve upon, all the things that went wrong. We like to really take at least a good 10, 15 minutes of each session just talking about where we're winning. And it's it's really contagious because one of us will start, we applaud each other, and then it goes through. So you can do that on your own as well. But that is the number one tip that we have for today on reflection.

Sandy Kovach  [00:03:06]:
I like that because both in groups and, you know, whether you're doing your self reflection, you often just think so much in terms of what you need to improve upon. But by applauding yourself for your wins, not only can you learn what goes right and how you can do it again, but it makes you feel more positive instead of just concentrating on the negative things. Now, I'm going to go with number 2 here. And it does have something to do with the negative things, but positive things as well, but it has to do with being honest with yourself and setting clear and realistic goals based on your past success and what worked in your past and what did not work. There are certainly some things you can learn to do and habits you can Lanee. And there are many books, including Atomic Habits and all these books about changing your habits. So I'm not on that bandwagon where I'm saying, you know, if you can't do it, you can't do it, forget it. What I am saying is there are certain things.

Sandy Kovach  [00:04:08]:
And in my case, as you were talking about reflection, I was thinking about, wow, you know, if I could only journal, that would be a really good way to look upon my past year or past 5 years or whatever I'm doing and reflect. Right? But of course, as many times as you have, we've had guests, Tareka, she was a business coach, she was talking about how we needed to journal and I was almost promising that I was doing it if I could pretend that it was, you know, a log from, Star Trek, if it was the captain's log.

Lanée Blaise [00:04:43]:
Yes. Captain's log.

Sandy Kovach  [00:04:44]:
Okay. I gotta make it entertaining. So but you know what? I'm never, for whatever reason, I'm just never going to do it. I know as a fact I haven't had a diary since I was a child and it's just not for me. So I have finally when I come to that, I say, You know what? Journaling is awesome. But it's not something I'm gonna go down that road again now. If some miracle can happen and I can start to journal fine, I'm not throwing it out. So there might be something like that in your life.

Sandy Kovach  [00:05:11]:
Look back and say to yourself, what worked, what didn't work? Maybe there are some things that you can tweak. Like what made that not work? Well, it didn't work because it was too hard. I need to make that habit a little bit more accessible for me and my schedule. There are definitely ways you can figure out things to change. And if it's something that's really important to your goal, like if journaling was so important to my goal that I had to do it, then I'd figure it out. But you hear what I'm saying here? This is like throw out some of the stuff that's not necessary, that may work for millions of other people, but just not for you.

Lanée Blaise [00:05:46]:
And also that part about giving yourself a little grace. Like, don't even reprimand yourself for not journaling. You've made peace with it. You've moved on and it's all good.

Sandy Kovach  [00:05:58]:
Yeah.

Lanée Blaise [00:05:59]:
All of this kind of leads me into the next tip, which hopefully gives some comfort to others listening. It's all about the component of embracing flexibility and adaptability. I definitely know there are people who are like, this is how I am. This is the way I do things. That's not exactly what I'm getting at right now. It's more that situation where you're living life as a journey. And even though you have these different goals that you wanted to accomplish in a timeline that you wanted to accomplish them in, When you reflect back on your life, you might realize that many times life has unexpected turns and delays. That doesn't mean that there's a full denial of what you're going to get.

Lanée Blaise [00:06:47]:
But if you can have that flexibility and that, desire to be adaptable, adapt and pivot where you need to, I just believe that you will set yourself up for not only tangible success, but your like inner emotional success as well. I kind of look at my son, Jay. He is just that guy who is able to adapt to situations, changes, people. He has a flow and an ease about him that I really admire and I really want to encourage, especially during this episode, because we have to understand that plans will change. Challenges that are unexpected are going to come up. And if we can stay open minded and realize maybe there is something in this that is for my good, maybe not the most convenient or the way that I saw it in my brain, it really can be a recipe for success.

Sandy Kovach  [00:07:52]:
That's cool. Yeah. You can learn stuff you might not have known, which is, kind of leads me to my next tip. This is number 4. And that is learn from setbacks and setbacks happen. Part of what you were saying sometimes, that's part of being flexible. But sometimes setbacks happen and not only can we learn to pivot and flow, but we can also learn to adapt new strategies, strategies that we wouldn't have known if we hadn't made a mistake. I love the term fail forward because we think of failing as like going back, okay, 1 step forward, 3 steps back, whatever the terminology is.

Sandy Kovach  [00:08:35]:
But every time you fail, but you've honestly tried, you learn what kind of mistakes that you made. You can take a look at your mistakes, you can tweak what you need to do. You can, say, okay, well, it's not gonna work for me this way, but maybe it'll work for me that way. And some of it I can't remember. It was a podcast a long time ago. You were talking about the guy that invented what was it? Oh goodness. Was it

Lanée Blaise [00:09:00]:
post it notes?

Sandy Kovach  [00:09:01]:
Post it notes.

Lanée Blaise [00:09:02]:
Post it notes. Notes. From an accident. I yeah. It was something with the glue component that was unusable for its intended purpose. But as we all know, it turned out to be perfect for sticky notes. Yeah. Yeah.

Lanée Blaise [00:09:19]:
Exactly.

Sandy Kovach  [00:09:20]:
So you never know. You could be the next sticky notes person. And I realize in the digital world, we may not use sticky notes as much as we used to, but we certainly do. And that dude is certainly rich.

Lanée Blaise [00:09:30]:
Yeah. And then there's another one, though. You've got me thinking. There are so many times when people either start a career or change their career based on a setback. This one is fictional, so I don't know if this is fair or not, but I don't know how many people used to love to watch This Is Us. But on

Sandy Kovach  [00:09:49]:
the very first episode

Lanée Blaise [00:09:51]:
Yeah. This Is Us is amazing. Right? On the very first show, the lady is set to have triplets, and she's there with the doctor. He's her obstetrician. And he's telling her kind of the story of how he became a doctor. And he said that he's an old man now and, you know, even nearing retirement. But he started because many years back, he had to deal with the sourest lemon that life can ever give you, and that was the loss of a child. And that was the day that he realized he was going to use his medical degree to become a doctor to help deliver babies, and he was going to do the very best job ever to try to help other people avoid what he had to go through.

Lanée Blaise [00:10:38]:
And like I said, I know this is fictional, but it just was so touching the way that he said it and the way that he embraced the fact that a terrible setback was going to still be used for something for good for others.

Sandy Kovach  [00:10:57]:
Yeah. That's a a little bit of different from like making a mistake. It's a setback in life and kinda so it kinda goes back to both that and, embracing flexibility. And I think fictional stories are absolutely up for, you know, discussion because you're a writer for television. So I mean, and you are inspiring people for that very reason. Right? You're using that medium. I think that's a great medium to use.

Lanée Blaise [00:11:23]:
And that's another reason why too. I just I thought about how do I want to influence others because there's a lot going on in this world that I don't agree with and I don't like and I don't care for. So I really do want to try to learn from those setbacks in my life and in the world and try to create what I wanna see and have life imitate art when it's good art. This told story from This Is Us, and that's from years back.

Sandy Kovach  [00:11:53]:
Yeah. Right. Exactly. So tip number 5, Lanee.

Lanée Blaise [00:11:57]:
Tip number 5 is practice self compassion. Self compassion. Even the word compassion is just beautiful and underused in my humble opinion. And I know that it's about self compassion, but just having compassion for others and situations is a freeing concept. But as far when it comes to yourself, I want you to just say this to yourself right now. Be kind to myself. Be kind to yourself. Don't crush your goals before they even get a chance to blossom.

Lanée Blaise [00:12:37]:
Don't step on your heart because you're not perfect. Nobody's perfect. Treat yourself with the same kindness and understanding that you would want to offer to a friend if they were in a similar situation or that you would offer to a little kid, you know, a cute little kid. We all used to be cute little kids at one point. -Yeah. -You know, really, really think about giving yourself that grace, that love, that encouragement, that compassion that you need. Because even though we need God, we need other people, we can also learn to be a supporter and a friend of ourselves. And I think that that is perhaps an under used concept.

Sandy Kovach  [00:13:25]:
I think so too. We get so much negativity out in the world like you were saying. We don't need to add to it with our own negative self talk. In fact, we had an episode not I don't know, maybe a year ago, with a psychotherapist about negative self talk. He lost Hey, Lawson. Yes. Doctor doctor Blaine. I really like that episode, and maybe we could even link to that one because not only does it, you know, say, hey, negative self talk is bad.

Sandy Kovach  [00:13:53]:
I think we all know that. But it gives you actual strategies on negative self talk because you know we're gonna do that. Right? I mean, that's our default position. And I don't know why, but we just like to be hard on ourselves.

Lanée Blaise [00:14:05]:
I can't figure it out either. Sometimes it's getting worse because there is such a there has been such a movement for accomplishment, accomplishment, accomplishment. And I really think that even though our generation cares about accomplishments, it has really been pushed to the younger generations to just accomplish, accomplish, make sure you've got your sports, make sure you've got your resume by the time you're, like, 14 years old, make sure you do all the things that you're good at, all the areas, which was never meant to be for a human. So, yeah, that's a tough one.

Sandy Kovach  [00:14:42]:
Yeah. So practice self compassion. I love that tip. And number 6 is look on the outside too. Stay connected and seek support. Like you were talking about the group you're in, Whether it's a virtual group or whether it's your friends and family, whether it's just your bestie, whether it's a class, whatever. I guess it would depend on what your goal is. And in your case, you said you're in a group of creatives, people in similar fields, bouncing ideas off of each other.

Sandy Kovach  [00:15:11]:
And like you said, you share the good things, but I'm sure you also share your challenges and they give you ideas. Definitely, if you can connect like that, if you have a specific goal and you want to make it public, share it on social media so people are kinda holding you accountable. That's kinda like having an accountability partner or Lanee, in the case of social media, you can do that too. But, yeah, I would say the most important is, in stay connected and seek support is to seek the support of people who care about you.

Lanée Blaise [00:15:41]:
Yeah. And also too, there's a another component, a mentorship component as well. Just yesterday, I got to speak with a lady that I'd never met before. I was on a Zoom, and it was because a friend of mine happened to see her bio on LinkedIn, saw what she was doing, and had this overwhelming urge. She said, Lanee, I believe you are meant to meet with this lady. And I said, okay. So she had reached out. She gave us a warm intro through email.

Lanée Blaise [00:16:19]:
Even though, I guess, its initial intent was more on a professional level, We got on that Zoom together. She and I had so many common goals on a professional level, on our faith walk, in the things that we're trying to do to impact others. And all of this to say, you just never know when you're supposed to meet somebody and form a partnership or relationship with them or a professional level even too, I just say keep your mind and heart open. I mean, I know that we also have to be careful. Especially my daughter always tells me to be be careful with stranger danger or even on social media and even on LinkedIn. But at the end of the day, there are so many blessings right around the corner that might come from unexpected places and people.

Sandy Kovach  [00:17:11]:
Absolutely. So with that, we have one more tip and that, Lanee, is, you know, rely. P r a y. Yeah. Or p u s h. Pray until something happens. Push.

Lanée Blaise [00:17:27]:
Yes. And, fully relying on God, frog.

Sandy Kovach  [00:17:31]:
There's all kinds of things you can do. But, you know, realize that you need to stay prayed up and to get ideas on which direction that you want to go to get a nudge from God. That's very important, whether it's going to church, praying, reading scriptures, all of the things that we do to stay in touch with our Creator and living through our faith walk. If you're a faithful person, that would probably be the number one thing. I know we had it at 7 as kind of an ending, but it's actually a good start too.

Lanée Blaise [00:18:06]:
That's true. Yeah. That because that's the key too. If you pray and, you know, really get centered in general before you run off and do things, it is very likely that you will have more success doing it that way. When you just run off and do something or run off and say something or write something from experience. I have learned that it can sometimes either backfire on you. You might be less productive than you anticipated. Even though it takes a little extra time to sit still and pray and get centered, it can vastly

Sandy Kovach  [00:18:52]:
and then, we can wrap all of it up with, your takeaway or final words of wisdom that you always give so well. So number 1, reflect on the past. Then set clear and realistic goals. Embrace flexibility and adaptability. Learn from setbacks, practice self compassion, stay connected and seek support, and stay prayed up.

Lanée Blaise [00:19:17]:
Yeah. This is just our way of trying to share ways that you can move forward instead of backwards that you can move forward instead of staying stuck push forward in your mindset in your faith walk, in your career, in your relationships, in your mental and physical health goals, and your financial goals. All the things that we try to do every time we release an episode on Imagine Yourself podcast, period. We're trying to kind of put in a simple 7 step formula for people to really sit with.

Sandy Kovach  [00:19:57]:
And so we would love it if, you gave us some feedback on it too. Tell us what works for you, or maybe there's a step that you think we need to add.

Lanée Blaise [00:20:05]:
I like that. I like that a lot. And so overall, in the meantime, from your friends Sandy and Lanee, imagine yourself adopting successful life remembering that progress takes time. It's okay to take small steps towards your goals. Remember to celebrate your achievements and just move forward with determination, positivity and imagination. Thanks for listening.

Sandy Kovach  [00:20:43]:
So glad you're a part of the imagine yourself family. Love to hear from you anytime on our website, imagine yourself podcast.com on social media, and certainly hoping you'll drop us a review or a rating. Until next time when we have something new to imagine, here's to your success and happiness.