An easy way to find out, what is keeping you back from Success.

Bad memories put boundaries to your future plans. Before taking a step forward, don’t think about your previous mistakes at first. This may not sound correct but that doesn’t mean that you will never consider your mistakes before making a decision. When you remember the past and project it to future, you must be sure not to let your mistakes eliminate all the possibilities for you. However, your brain needs some input to imagine the future, no matter if the input just fits your future plans or not.

Memories are the bricks building the wall. If you want to build the wall you desired, you should pick up the right bricks to work with.

Future is linked with your memories.

Imagine that you have a number of attempts to build a successful business which ended with failure. Do you really think that you still have the courage to start over? However, your brain still has the ability to notice the opportunities of establishing a new business. When the time comes to take action, bad memories of your unsuccessful attempts, start to make atypical projections about the future of your business.

Here is a research about how your brain uses your memories to predict future outcomes.

“Research on the topic of affective forecasting—which examines how people predict, and often mispredict, future happiness (Gilbert 2006)—has revealed important interactions between memory of past events and predictions of future happiness. For example, Morewedge et al. (2005) found that people sometimes base predictions of future happiness on atypical past experiences that are highly memorable but not highly predictive of what is likely to occur in the future."

"Both past and future event tasks require the retrieval of information from memory, engaging common memory networks. However, only the future task requires that event details gleaned from various past events are flexibly recombined into a novel future event and, further, that this event is plausible given one’s intentions for the future.”

Source: The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: remembering the past and imagining the future

doi: 10.1098/rstb.2007.2087 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 29 May 2007 vol. 362 no. 1481 773-786

If you know that your future predictions is based on your memories, you may have chance to protect your projections to be misleaded. There are simple things to do:

When you are making future plans never put barriers to your imagination.
If you hesitate to take a step forward, be sincere to yourself about the reasons.
If you find out that your bad memories play an effective role on your future plans;

* Examine your bad memories that are keeping you back.
* Examine the factors that were in play at the same period of time;
* Examine your capabilities, at the same period of time.
* Examine your social status, at the same period of time.
* Examine your economical status, at the same period of time.
* Examine your emotional state, at the same period of time.
* Examine your social environment at the same time of period.

Did you find out that none of the situations, listed above are the same?
Did you find out similarities about your memories and future plan?
Did you discover that all the situations in your memory and in future plans overlap each other?

If there isn’t an overlap between past and future, stop letting your experiences affect your future.

Not only mistakes can keep you back from your plans or desires but also your bad memories play an important part at building boundaries. You may have had bad experiences in your daily life about casual events. Sometimes these events can be a part of your plans or desires. This can have a negative effect for future tasks.

Fear of making mistakes never protects you from failure; it just keeps you away from the possibility of catching success.