Your Past Does Not
Have to Define You
What I learned about carrying a mistake, and why the story you tell about it matters more than the mistake itself.
When I was in college there was a show called Jackass, and like a lot of guys my age my friends and I thought it was hilarious. We started filming our own videos, trying to recreate that same sense of chaos. One night we decided to take a shopping cart to a dirt hill near campus. We carried it all the way to the top, laughing the whole way, convinced this was going to be one of those things we would watch later and laugh even harder at.
Most of the runs ended the same way. The cart tipped halfway down, we crashed into the dirt, and we walked back up to do it again. It never occurred to any of us that we were doing anything worse than being stupid.
Then we saw red and blue lights at the bottom of the hill.
The officers walked up and asked where we had gotten the cart. We told them the truth. It was from a store nearby, and the store’s name was still printed on the side of it. There was no version of this where we talked our way out. Within a few minutes I was standing on that hill in handcuffs.
What I remember most is not the metal or the embarrassment. It is what my mind started doing. I thought about my parents, who had supported me and trusted me to make good decisions, and I thought about how they were going to look at me now. I thought about jobs I had not applied for yet and interviews I had not had. I stood there doing math on how long this was going to follow me.
We were charged with theft by unlawful taking. The charge was printed in the local newspaper, which meant something that felt personal became public. For a long time after that, everywhere I went, I had the feeling that people were seeing the arrest before they saw me.
The mistake was not the problem
Here is the part I did not understand at the time. What happened on that hill took about ten minutes. What I did with it afterward took years.
A couple of years later I found out I was going to be a dad, and everything shifted. I had earned academic scholarships and I loved school. I was a first-generation college student and it felt like I was building something bigger than myself. But I could not see a way to work enough to provide for my son, raise him, and keep up with classes at the same time. Something had to give, and it was not going to be my responsibility to him.
So I left college. That decision was right and I would make it again, but it did not feel clean. In high school I had been voted most likely to succeed. Now I would run into people I had gone to school with and they would ask what I was up to, and even though I was proud to be a father, part of me felt ashamed. I had dropped out. I had gotten in trouble. I was not on the path anyone expected, including me.
For years afterward I would sit down to fill out a job application and stop at the same two questions every time. Highest level of education. Have you ever been convicted of a crime. I would stare at those boxes and hear the same thing. Why would anyone pick you?
That is what I mean when I say the mistake was not the problem. The problem was that I had quietly converted one night into a fact about who I was.
There is a real difference between what you did and who you are
This sounds like a distinction without a difference. It is not. It might be the most important thing in this entire article, and there is good research behind it.
Psychologists who study moral emotions separate guilt from shame in a very specific way. Guilt points at behavior. It sounds like I did a bad thing. Shame points at the person. It sounds like I am a bad person. Most of us use the words interchangeably in conversation, but the two do almost opposite things to us.
June Tangney and her colleagues at George Mason University followed hundreds of jail inmates from shortly after incarceration to about a year after release, published in Psychological Science. People who were prone to guilt, meaning they focused on what they had done, were less likely to reoffend. Shame worked differently. Because shame attacks the self rather than the action, it tends to push people toward defensiveness and blaming others, and that pattern predicted more reoffending, not less. Read the summary.
Think about why that would be. If the problem is something you did, you can do something about it. You can repair it, apologize for it, or make sure it does not happen again. There is a road out.
If the problem is who you are, there is no road. You cannot fix a self the way you fix a behavior. So the mind does the only thing left available to it, which is to protect itself. It gets defensive. It looks for someone to blame. Or it just quietly stops trying, because what would be the point.
That is exactly what was happening to me at that kitchen table with the job application. I was not feeling guilty about a stupid night on a hill. I was feeling like a person who did not get to have those jobs.
Shame makes a mistake
permanent by turning it
into a person.
What actually changed things for me
I want to be honest here, because this is where most articles like this lie a little. There was no morning where I woke up free of it. Nothing dramatic happened. What changed was slower and less satisfying than that.
I was bartending and serving at the time, and at some point I made a fairly unglamorous decision. If nobody was going to hand me the opportunity I wanted yet, I would become the best I could possibly be at the one I already had. I stopped asking for a chance and started trying to become someone who was worth choosing.
That is not a mindset trick. It is just a change in where the effort went. Instead of spending energy managing how I felt about my past, I spent it building something in the present that was harder to argue with. Consistency. Work ethic. How I treated people. A reputation that had nothing to do with a degree I did not have or a charge from years earlier.
Eventually I got the first leadership promotion. Then another. The past did not disappear and I never pretended it did. It just stopped being the loudest thing about me, first to other people and eventually to me.
How to stop letting it define you
If you are carrying something, and most people are, here is what I would actually tell you to do. Not because it is clever, but because it is what worked.
Move it from the self back to the behavior
- Say the thing out loud in the right grammar. Not “I am someone who failed,” but “I did something that failed.” It feels like a small edit. It is not. One of those has a next step and the other does not.
- Separate what you can repair from what you cannot. Some of it can still be fixed with a conversation, an apology, or a change in how you operate. Some of it is genuinely done. Make the list honestly, then do the first kind and stop relitigating the second.
- Stop rehearsing it. There is a difference between learning from something and replaying it. The first one changes what you do next. The second one just keeps the feeling fresh. If you have already taken the lesson, you are not reflecting anymore, you are rehearsing.
- Build the evidence on purpose. The most reliable way to stop believing something about yourself is to accumulate proof against it. Not affirmations. Actual proof. Do the thing you said you would do, enough times that the old story stops fitting.
You cannot improve a reality you refuse to accept
There is one more piece to this, and it is the part people resist most.
A lot of us spend years arguing with what happened. Replaying old decisions, wishing things had gone differently, resisting circumstances that are not up for negotiation anymore. That is a fight nobody wins, and it burns the exact energy you need for the part that is still open.
Acceptance is not the same as approval and it is not giving up. It is acknowledging what is real so you can start working with it instead of against it. The past happened. Certain things exist. Your current situation is your current situation. Every meaningful change I have ever made started with an honest look at where I actually was.
The question is never whether the thing happened. It is what you are going to do with what is in front of you now.
What that night is to me now
I have told the shopping cart story on stages and in boardrooms. I have told it to people I was interviewing and to my own kids. Somewhere along the way it stopped being the thing I was hiding and became one of the more useful things I own.
Not because it turned into a good story. Because it taught me something I could not have learned any other way, which is how quickly a person can start believing that one bad moment is the whole truth about them. I know exactly what that feels like from the inside. That has made me better at noticing it in other people, and better at telling them the truth about it.
Your past is information about what happened. It is not a verdict about what is available to you. And if you have been carrying something for a long time, the thing worth remembering is that you have already survived it. Whatever it cost you, you are still here reading this, which means something in you was stronger than it was.
You do not have to make peace with all of it today. You just have to stop letting it make your decisions.
A mistake becomes permanent the moment it stops being something you did and becomes something you are. Move it back. Repair what can still be repaired, accept what cannot, stop rehearsing it, and start building evidence for a different story. Your past is information, not a verdict.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris speaks to companies, associations, healthcare organizations, and teams on ownership, resilience, and helping people reach their full potential. Every program is built around your audience and your goals, and the impact is designed to continue after the room clears out.
Response within one business day
From Doubt to Done
Twelve reframes for the moments when your past starts making your decisions for you. Free and printable, no email required.
You Are Capable of More
Ten principles and a no-excuses playbook for becoming the person you know you are capable of being. Launching August 13, 2026.
Do something with it.
An article can name the thing. These are what move it, and all of them are free.
Break the Barrier
Seven barriers, each with the reading, an exercise from the book, and something you can print. Start with the one that sounds like you.
Find Yours →The Ten Principles
The framework this is all built on, in four movements. Each one has a page of its own and a worksheet you can print.
See Them →The Comfort Ceiling Assessment
Twenty five questions across five areas of your life, scored, showing where comfort is quietly making your decisions.
Take the Assessment →The Free Tools
The Framework, the Playbook, the worksheets, the challenge. Free to read on the page or print and keep.
See Everything →Run It With Your Team
Four workshop formats you can run yourself, from one hour to ten weeks. Every word you need, and a workbook for each seat.
See the Formats →More, in your inbox.
Ownership, discipline, and growth, straight from Chris. Only when there is something genuinely worth sending. No fluff, unsubscribe anytime.