We must first make peace with our past in order to come to terms with the present.

“I’m happy and grateful to be able to give people the opportunity to shine a light into their true depths.”

This is the sentence I have formulated as my MIKS. A phrase that inspires me. It brings together my work as a deep-dive leadership trainer and therapist. At one point, when I was choosing between coaching and therapy, I chose therapy because I sincerely believe that we must first make peace with our past in order to come to terms with the present. And it is only when we have been able to be present in the present that we can create the future.

🔦 Yes, it is not worth digging in the past endlessly and just wandering around with a torch, otherwise we will identify ourselves with our past, recreating the same pattern over and over again.

But I’m convinced that if we don’t shine a light into the depths of it, we are not aware of what creates our patterns and why we get into different relationships or situations that break us up. There are automatic choices and repetitive thoughts day after day (e.g. thoughts about how the future could be better and how the present is not good enough).

If there is no awareness, there can be no will to change, there can be no will to create the knowledge and capacity to get out of it permanently. Through meeting the past, freedom can be found in the present and for the future.

💭 Thinking and talking doesn’t usually solve very deep issues, because the bigger pains have usually come when you didn’t have the adult logic of today. The problem lies at a much deeper level than thinking can reveal, and to do that you need to know how to get that information out of the body.

When you find yourself again and again in patterns or something inside you creeps up, and even though life seems like it’s going okay on the surface, something is still creeping up in the past.

And with all of these hang-ups, people come to work in the organisation, creating layers of protection around themselves to keep others and themselves from reaching that depth. When you are busy with yourself, there can be no common goal and no sense of purpose.

Any change is to question and then change the present and the past. The paradox is that we cannot live life in the present if we are chained to the past. In most cases, the chain is completely incomprehensible, unconscious and you don’t understand that the block is there somewhere. It’s just that you feel that things in life are not quite 100% as they should be. Something is missing. Somebody checks up on you, etc. Checks. Your own unresolved ghost of the past is controlling you like this.

Self-acceptance and self-realisation can come when I am very aware of who I am. We are all our own history, and with these histories we are also creating new history. If we want to change history, we have to change something deep within ourselves.

Ivar Raav