درسنامه صوتی

Breakups – Coaching Lesson

Hi, this is AJ, welcome to our topic for this month, Breakups. A bit of an intense and - on the surface at least - sad, painful topic. And when you think about the most painful experiences of life, most of them, perhaps all of them, are connected to loss and/or rejection. These are the most intensely painful life experiences and we all have them at some point in our life.

So because of this, and because we will all face more of these kinds of situations in our life, it’s very useful to learn how to deal with them in the most healthy and positive way. Now this includes past painful experiences, past breakups perhaps, past rejection, past loss, that may still be affecting you right now. The memory of it can still have a powerful effect on you right now. And certainly, of course, anything that may happen in the future.

I have my own story about this, several stories of breakups or loss, but one comes to mind immediately and that is the breakup of my very first relationship, with my first girlfriend. And she was my first love. Her name was Jessica and we dated for several years. And I kind of thought in my mind, I assumed, and I thought, I was imagining that we were going to be together for all of our lives, forever, as people in relationships usually think.

And then one day she left. She broke up with me and she broke up with me to be with another guy, another guy that I knew. I knew who he was. He was kind of a friend of mine. And this was devastating to me, as these first love, first breakup usually is. Smiling about it now, but at the time it was horrible. First of all, I was just shocked and depressed. I remember just laying around on the floor when I found out and then for days I could hardly eat. Really, for weeks I didn’t eat very much because I was so miserable and depressed.

And, of course, in the beginning it was just this feeling of shock. What happened? I can’t believe this. And at the same time this horrible, terrible jealousy. This horrible, terrible jealous gripped me because all I could think about was that other guy. Why did she leave me for him and what was better about him? And then, of course, at the same time I started blaming her. How could she do this to me? Why was she causing me so much pain? Why was she rejecting me? Y’know, and that led to even more blame, y’know, that she was being a bad person because she said she would be with me but then she broke up with me to be with this other guy.

So as time went on I became more and more bitter, in addition to being depressed and sad and miserable, a kind of anger and blame grew inside of me and that led to bitterness. Y’know, I just grew really just bitter about her, constantly thinking of all the things that were wrong with her, blaming her, and that other guy, of course.

And as a few weeks went on this bitterness, this blaming attitude, this jealousy, began to actually grow. The more I focused on it, the more I fed my energy to it, the more it grew and expanded into other areas of my life. I noticed that I started to have a more, y’know, bitter, blaming, jealous, unhappy attitude about more things in life, not just her, but in general.

For example, I started to have a generally bad negative mindset and attitude towards girls, women, in general. I started letting this blame and jealousy and these negative thoughts about her expand to other girls, other women. And then to just relationships, in general. And then to just many parts of life. So I grew more and more bitter and this expanded.

And then at some point I had a moment of clarity where I could, y’know, like kind of a little bit of a vision. I could see the path ahead. I could see the way I was going with all this blaming her and thinking of all the terrible things she did to me and this jealousy about the other guy and the bitterness about the whole situation and the misery, all of that. And I could see that if I continued on this path I would, in general, become a bitter, jealous, unhappy person.

And I realized that if I did that then my next relationship would likely be even worse. It would be miserable. Who wants to be with that kind of person? I would attract somebody not very good if I was a bitter, negative, jealous person and would probably end up destroying and ruining the next relationship, too. And I saw that it would ruin my happiness and enjoyment in other areas of my life, too. And I could see that this was a bad path to be on. I was going in a very dangerous direction that led nowhere good.

And that’s when I decided that I had to change completely, that I had to change the path I was on and I decided to take 100P responsibility for the breakup. I decided no more blaming her. I’m not going to point my finger at her anymore. I’m not going to focus on her or the other guy or anything like that, that I was only going to focus on myself.

I would take the responsibility. I would examine myself. What did I do wrong in the relationship? What did I do to maybe push her away? What did I do to cause problems? Interesting, I found a lot of things. I found a lot of things when I changed my focus and started looking at myself. It wasn’t very comfortable. It wasn’t very fun to realize all of that and to look at all of that.

And it took many weeks, and in fact, many months of doing this. But as I started seeing all the problems I had and all the things I did that were not very good in that relationship, I started to realize I needed to make some big changes. And I needed to learn more about relationships and communication. So then I went out and started buying books.

I bought every book I could find about relationships and dating. And I started, y’know, thinking about these things and trying some of the communication techniques with other people. And again, it took weeks and weeks and weeks, but I started to change. And guess what? Changing in a positive way. And eventually I reached a point where I realized I had to forgive. I had to forgive her and that other guy. I had to let go. It was doing me no good blaming them, and so I did.

Y’know, it took time. It doesn’t happen immediately. But, y’know, I just kept focusing on letting go and forgiving, taking responsibility myself. And then as I let go I just felt this lightness, y’know, this freedom to grow, y’know, this light, happier feeling. And it opened me up to learn to change and to continue growing in a much more positive way.

And now, y’know, this is many years later now, but…but even just several years after that happened I was able to stop and look back at that experience as a very positive thing and to be grateful for it. And now, I have even more perspective, even more years have passed, many more years, decades. And I now see that as one of the most positive experiences of my whole life and I am so grateful that it happened.

I am grateful to her for breaking up with me because I realize now, with the wisdom of being older, that it was not a healthy relationship. She was right to break up with me. She was right to choose that other guy because he was a better fit for her and they ended up getting married, in fact, and having kids. I’m grateful because the pain of all of that led me to grow and to become a better person and to have better relationships and now I’m in a very happy marriage and I’m very happy with my life. And this now wouldn’t be possible if she had not done that. So now I see it as one of the best experiences of my life even though it was horrible at the time.

In the United States, the divorce rate is something like 60P, meaning something around 60P of couples who get married later divorce. Now the rates are different in each country, but the general trend, internationally, is the divorce rates are going up almost everywhere in the world. In addition, most of us do not marry necessarily the first person we start dating so quite likely you have in your life already, or will, face some kind of breakup.

Looking beyond dating and relationships, you’re going to face rejection and loss in life. If you’re in any kind of business or career, you’re going to be rejected. I mean the classical case of this are salespeople. Anyone who’s in sales and marketing, especially direct face-to-face sales, you face a lot of rejection. And in many ways, your ability to succeed is based on your ability to overcome rejection and not be destroyed by it.

But this is true for all of us because all of us in life, to accomplish anything great, you have to face rejection. You’re going to face rejection. You’re going to face failure and loss. It’s a necessary part of life and the more you aim high, the more chances you will have to fail and lose and be rejected. Just the way it works.

You’ve got to learn how to deal with this and to see the positive sides of it and why rejection and loss, and in relationships why even breakups, can actually be very positive things that lead to better things in the future. And why that anything that’s happened in the past, a breakup, a loss, a rejection, should not make us bitter now. We’ve got to forgive and turn those past experiences and see them as positive things, turn them into positive memories.

I know that in the case of very painful breakups or losses or rejections, I know this can be very difficult. Y’know, I know one thing I hear people say, if I encourage people to let go and forgive, and one of the common objections I hear is, yeah, but they were so bad to me. They did all these things. They, they, they. Blame, blame, blame. Just as I was doing with Jessica.

Give you a little metaphor. If you look and you close your hand, this is the pointing action, at least in America, right? It’s a closed hand and you’re pointing your finger at the other person. And when you’re doing this, if your hand is closed, nothing can enter. When you let go, you open your hand. You let go. And by letting go you also open your hand and are able to receive. Your hand is open to receive new gifts.

And this is the same psychologically, it’s a good metaphor, because the same is true psychologically. When you point and blame and focus on the other person, the memory or the current situation, your mind is closed. Your mind cannot accept new gifts, new abundance, new relationships that are healthy, new abundance, nothing. But when you let go and forgive, your mind opens and it opens and can accept a great deal of new learning, new growth, new happiness, new relationships, all of this.

Now another thing I hear sometimes from people who’ve had a terrible breakup or a terrible failure or loss, in the past or more recently, is that they go I’ll never recover from it. I can never let go. I can never forgive. And it’s not true. But you do need to commit. You have to be persistent about it. It does take time. The more painful it is, the longer it takes to heal.

But it’s not going to happen automatically. You have to choose to let go. You have to choose to forgive. You have to choose to learn and grow from it. And you have to keep being persistent about that so that when those blaming thoughts, those bitter thoughts come up, you have to calm yourself and let go and say, no, that’s not what I want to do. That’s not what I want to be. I am responsible.

Focus back on yourself. What can I learn? What did I do? How did I contribute to the problem? What can I learn and how can I be better? These are the questions you need to continue asking yourself whenever bitter, angry, blaming thoughts come up, especially in breakups which are so powerfully emotional or any kind of emotional rejection or loss.

There’s a little mental technique you can use to help yourself. When this painful memory comes up, it might be this person you think did something bad to you. It might be the memory of a rejection or loss or failure, whatever it is, close your eyes and you can see that picture in your mind again, that memory, that person, that event, something like that.

And then, what you can do is while you see that you suddenly just destroy that image in your mind. Imagine it explodes. It’s gone. And then suddenly a new image comes into your mind. And that new image is a very positive image. You see yourself smiling. You see yourself happy. You see yourself saying and hear yourself saying I forgive you. And you feel in your heart a kind of warmth and love and forgiveness.

Then you can reset, open your eyes, and then do the whole process again. First, see that painful memory, see it, hear it, if there’s some sounds in that memory, hear those too, any terrible feelings you have that come from that memory, feel it as well. And then suddenly it explodes, the painful explodes and it’s replaced instantly by this warm, forgiving movie. You see yourself smiling, feeling happy, and saying I forgive you.

And you’ve got to do this again and again and again, many days in a row, maybe for weeks, it might even take months with some really painful experiences. But over time, you’ll train your mind to change from bitterness and blame and pain to forgiveness and love and happiness. You’re reprogramming your brain. It’s like changing the software in your brain. It takes time but with repetition you will do it.

The only thing I want you to do, anytime you face loss or rejection, is instead of focusing on the event, on the failure, on the other person, instead focus on who you want to be. Keep asking yourself, what kind of person do I want to be? What do I want to accomplish in my life? What kind of father, mother, husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, do I want to be? What kind of leader do I want to be? What kind of brother or sister do I want to be? What kind of human being do I want to be, am I going to be?

And keep that positive vision of yourself in your mind at all times. Focus on that rather than the blame. Focus on that rather than the pain. Focus on the kind of person you want to become and then work to do it. Work to become that person. See an image in your mind. Hear it. Feel it and then become it.

The benefits of this, number one, you just feel lighter and happier. Y’know, by doing this I changed from being absolutely miserable and bitter and angry and jealous and blaming and quickly changed my focus to learning and growing. It was immediately this feeling of lightness, like I had let go of a big heavy burden. Immediately I felt lighter and happier. It was still tough. I was still in the middle of this painful breakup, but it helped so much. And it helped me heal much faster. The same will happen with you. No matter what the painful loss is.

Number two, by doing this you open yourself to abundance. The world, the universe is abundant. There’s so much out there. There’s plenty of money out there. There’s plenty of love out there. But you have to open yourself to receive it. You have to open yourself to accept it, to attract it. Closed and blaming and angry and bitter pushes it all away. Open and smiling and forgiving and caring, letting go attracts it and welcomes it into your life.

That is your assignment this month. Good luck to you. See you next time. Bye for now.