One of my favourite Christmas tales is Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol”. If you have never come across the story before the general gist is that 3 ghosts visit the principal character. The ghost of Christmas past who shows Christmases that have been, the ghost of Christmas present who shows the current situation of others in the present. The final ghost is the ghost of Christmas future who shows what may happen and become in the future.

I was reminded the other day that this phenomenon is something that isn’t actually confined to the festive period. I’m not saying that at the stroke of a particular hour a ghost arrives in your bedroom to show you some particular event! But we can have the same effect in our own heads! Over the next 3 weeks I’m going to take the 3 ghosts as a loose theme for each of the pieces, starting today with the Ghost of Christmas Past.

The Ghost of Christmas Past.

“The one charm of the past is that it is the past.”

(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)

As we come into this festive season you have possibly already begun to see various TV channels put together trailers full of short clips of the various highlights of their shows. You may have already seen one that specialised in a particular genre of TV, maybe it was a series of clips featuring all comedy clips, highlighting drama or animated films.

Just like the ghost of Christmas past in A Christmas Carol shows Scrooge a series of clips from his past, it’s not unusual for us to do that for ourselves with our own memories. Sometimes we place more emphasis on certain clips more than others.

I was listening to an interview with a film actor recently who was saying that out of 100 reviews 99 of them may be superb and 1 may be more critical – yet it was the more critical one that he found that he focused upon. In effect, just like the TV channels, he had created his own trailer but just choose to include the “negative” clips.

Perhaps you have done this for yourself, blowing anything that you view as “negative” out of proportion and ignored other events. This week I invite you to play with something that will deliberately create your own imaginary trailers and see the difference that has for you.

I’m going to start by saying that if you are haunted by flashbacks etc of a traumatic incident or events then I encourage you to seek the help of a trained professional. Not because I think that it means anything negative about you, but because it is often easier to be able to take a step back from anything that had a strong negative emotional impact with someone else there as a guide.

Imagine that you are creating your own trailer (that can be as long as you want) featuring memories of happy times, fun times, when things have gone well, times when you have received compliments. If this is something you are not used to doing you may want to give yourself time and allow yourself to come up with your answers.

These are your clips and your trailer so it is stuff that is important to you, it’s not being judged by anyone else so include the clips that are relevant to you.

When you have several times, imagine putting them together in your own trailer – You get to choose if you want to imagine this running on a miniature TV, as a 360 degree 3D feature or something in between.

This is your creation so by all means play with the lighting and the different shots you include, are these ones from your point of view or one from someone else’s?

You may have noticed that these trailers come with specially created soundtracks to accompany them. So what soundtrack do you want to include in your trailer – you can always play with the balance of the track(s) that you want to include.

Maybe you want a big power ballad or gospel choir. Perhaps there is a tune that every time you hear it always makes you feel really good.

Keep playing with what you include and how you choose to present this to yourself and notice how different it feels. Remember that you can play with this anytime that you want or need to 🙂

Bonus Tip

Extend this trailer to include even more important aspects of your life.

If you feel that includes the occasional “bump in the road” then by all means include that and this time you get to choose how much “air time” you want to give it and if you want to make it appear more important than other aspects. Do you really want to give 1 “negative” review more airtime than the other 99?

For example, is one occasion when a presentation didn’t go as well as you wanted it to as important as the birth of your children?

Have a week enjoying being the director of your own trailers 🙂

Love

Jen

This was originally posted on www.YourChangingDirection.com