You Must Stop Arguing With Your Ghosts If You Want Freedom.

Posted on February 18, 2023 by Bryan Yates, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.

Are you still replaying old disagreements and conversations in your head? Do you fantasize debates with that person who may have mistreated or wronged you?….

If you are, then why are you sabotaging your own freedom?

In spite of having done a ton of work in this area and having tools to handle it, I STILL catch myself doing this from time to time. I’ll bet you do too. In a moment, I can be caught right back up in the reliving that regrettable moment, conversation, or behavior with that person. It’s so vivid I can feel it in my body.

Being drawn into the embarrassing points from my past tends to arise in times of heightened mental and physical stress. Whenever I’m riding on a challenging climb, for example, there’s one person and one argument that always seems to pop back up. It’s a total fabrication of a conversation never happened, and never will. When I catch it, I have to wonder WHY I’m replacing feeling the intensity of an activity I actually love with these other intense feelings that I’ve simply manufactured in the moment.

Our minds do twisted things to us in those stressful moments that elevate our ancient, primal fears. The amygdala kicks in with a fight or flight response, and it becomes easier to slip into imagination than to face the discomfort of the moment. It’s easier to control the outcome of an argument with the ghost of someone from our past.

Why are you letting that person, institution, or event take up residence in your mind rent free?

It’s because we’ve got parts of our emotional, personal, professional lives that are begging for repair. We can train ourselves to have a different response. To focus on repairing those patterns is to move from injury into recovery. One way is to go back and mend that connection you know is broken. I certainly can see a few areas of my past professional behavior that need an “I’m sorry for that [fill in the blank]; I’m not that guy anymore.”

Mending relationships is HARD. It’s often easier to revel in our self-righteousness. (This always comes up as my least favorite non virtue in the Proust Questionnaire.) But, hanging on to past grievances means you must be obligated to it, because it demands ongoing care and feeding. Being obligated to something is to be trapped by it. To be spiritually trapped by a thing is the opposite of freedom.

Ask yourself, “would I rather be right or would I rather be free?”

Clinging to being right is a weight that slows me down. It keeps me stuck in the problem. If I’m in the problem, then I’m outside the solution.

Personally, I’d rather be free. I’m faster when I’m free.