When looking at our career and our future it is easy to get caught up in our past. Too often business men and women use negative self-talk about the past to keep them from having the future they want. Too often they tell themselves that the better future they desire will never happen for any number of reasons. It is important to take a glimpse of the past for reference and to learn from our failures. But, the truth is that when we dwell in the past we are prevented from creating anything different in our present and are more likely to repeat the failures that we are focusing on.

It's like going to a movie and sitting with your back facing the screen and wondering why the picture stays the same. After a while, you realized that because you were dwelling on this, you missed the entire movie. It is very important to put past successes, failures and other matters where they belong; in the past. Once we have properly placed the past in the past, we can look toward the future with businesses and careers. To really place the past truly behind us we must understand that failure is the key ingredient to learning how to we have successfully reached the present we are now experiencing. Now, armed with the lessons of the past, you can be truly successful.

One important part of accepting the failure as lessons is to evaluate your relationships. Do you have business partners, acquaintances or friends that you feel are holding you back? You may not even realize that they are holding you back until you really evaluate the situation. Often times we stay in relationships with people because that's the way things have always been. We don't really evaluate whether these relationships are productive or beneficial, because that person is someone that we have accepted in our lives and we haven't thought of changing it. It is very important to have a deep look into the relationships we carry.

If this is true for relationships, what about old companies, business ventures, etc? Have you had a good look at them? Are they successful and fruitful or are you keeping them because you haven't learned how to detach? Is it because there is a lot of emotion attached to them? The truth is that if it is not productive, you need to evaluate and let it go. You can't swim toward the shore of success if you are laden down with unnecessary burdens. Take a good hard look at your burdens and decide which ones you should let go of. Ensure that you don't get tired of swimming before you reach the shore because you have been carrying too much from the past. Your past is only a school. Your present and future are determined by what you learned in school and how well you applied it.