If you close your eyes and look back 5 years or 10 years back, would you say that you have changed? Have you improved in any way? or are you the same person you were in the past.

If you close your eyes and look into the future 5 years or 10 years from today, would you say that you will be the same? or will you be a different person?

We can choose who we want to be in the past, present, and future

Our personalities are not permanent. We are continuously changing and can decide what kind of past, present, and future we want to have.

Six years ago, I joined McGill Toastmasters Club, a public speaking club.

I was petrified to speak in public. My hands were sweating, my voice was cracking, my eyes were crying, and my speeches were terrible.

Today, I feel comfortable speaking every week. I have a podcast, and recently I started a YouTube Channel.

The person who I was six years ago, it’s not the same person who I am today. And the person who I am today is different from the person I will be five years from now. The only question is: will I be a better person or a worse person?

If we want to be better versions of ourselves, we have to:

• Constantly be learning, even if it’s for learning’s sake
• Constantly try something new
• Constantly try things that are outside of our comfort zone

When we do that, every day of our lives, we have no choice but to get better. We have no choice but to become the person who we want to become.

We can re-write the past and make it better

One thing that constantly prevents us from building a better life is our interpretation of past experiences. But we can always look back in time and give a different interpretation of the past and in that way, pave the way for a better future. The past is not permanent. The past is not something that happened to you, it’s something that happens for you.

I choose the lens through which I see the past.

One of the worse an best decisions of my life was to go to University.

• I didn’t learn any marketable skills (Everything was too abstract and disconnected from real life)
• I didn’t have fun (I spent my time off working as a janitor to be able to pay for tuition and books)
• I didn’t get a return on my investment (none of the jobs I had ever since required a college degree, and I created businesses in unrelated fields)
• The opportunity cost on fun and money was huge.

On the other hand, I could interpret my years in university as one of the best things that ever happened in my life.

As an immigrant, I used my admission to a University as the reason to immigrate to this country where I have found my happiness.

It’s up to us to evaluate the present

Imagine that after I give my speech, my friend Louise-Veronique evaluates me.

She highlights a list of things that I could have done better. She speaks about my tone of voice, my accent, the content, etc.

And she doesn’t mention any of the things I did well.

I get to choose the lens by which I see her evaluation.

I could decide that Louise-Veronique doesn’t like me, or that I am a terrible speaker.

Or conversely, that she likes me so much and cares about me so much that she only wants to spend time telling me the things that will make me a better speaker so that my next speech will be even better.

Or imagine someone says something insulting to me because I am a Latino who speaks with a Spanish accent.

I can choose to feel insulted and hurt, or I can choose to feel sorry for the lack of education and diversity in that person’s background.

Conclusion

We can change the past, present, and future. Everything depends on how we interpret it. We can grow or we can shrink, it’s all up to you.

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