You've probably heard that you're supposed to learn from your past mistakes, and although I think there's some truth to that mostly, there's also a difference between learning from your mistakes and just staying stuck in those past mistakes.
I do this myself sometimes, replaying a moment when I said something the wrong way or didn't handle a situation very well and at this point, I'm not even trying to fix the error, I'm simply ruminating about the situation, believing that if I think about it long enough, maybe things will turn out differently, the spoiler alert is they won't.
When looking backwards, the goal should be simple, find out what happened, why did it happen and the final goal is to give a good answer to what would I do differently?
After that, move on from that experience. I have a problem, the majority of the time I don't do this or perhaps everyone else has issues with this as well.
There's a don't dwell on the past saying, and I used to think it was a little on the dramatic cliche side, I hear it in church so many times, I truly believe that a lot of us not by choice live in the past and allow for our regrets to take up far too much time in our lives.
I'm sure I have not figured out when to stop reflecting and start allowing things to be what they are, my guess is that this is the hardest part, knowing when the lesson in the past has been learned and everything else is just a bunch of noise. I'm going to try my hardest to look back less and move forward more but that isn't as easy as it sounds.
