Three Words that Can Change Your Life
- Aug 19, 2025
- 3 min read
By Elaine Taylor-Klaus, MCC, CPCC
Even though I’d been a dedicated parent, trying to handle everything and keep myself, my kids, and my family afloat, my first decade as a parent had always felt like a house of cards. Everything felt so tentative, like at any moment, the facade could all come tumbling down.
When I finally got my head above water and I began to catch my breath, at first I berated myself for what I hadn’t done right, or well enough. I beat myself up for how I had unintentionally made things worse for my kids, even when all I wanted in the world was to make things better for them. I began to feel guilty for all that I had or hadn’t done based on my fear for my kids’ future.
I wasn’t wrong. I had made mistakes. I had been led by my anxiety when my kids needed my confidence. But focusing backwards, asking myself “Why didn’t I …?,” was not a useful perspective. It kept me looping backwards, likely to repeat old, unhealthy patterns.
Things changed for me as I started training to become a coach and learning about the role of perspective in creating positive change. It turns out that perspective is part of how we create our reality. How we think about something, and how we feel about it, leads us to take action. If we believe we can do something, the actions we take will support our success. If we believe we can’t do something, our actions will likely inhibit our success. So our perspective becomes fundamental to our reality… and it influences the outcomes of our lives.
This led me to a revelation that changed my life forever -- and has empowered tens of thousands of parents all over the world ever since.
These three words can change your life: Up Until Now.
Up until now, you've done the best you could with whatever circumstances you faced. Or maybe you haven’t done your best. It doesn’t much matter. Because you can't change what's happened. You can coulda, woulda, shoulda all day long, but you cannot change the past. It’s part of your story. You can learn from it. And from here forward, when you know better, you can do better (thank you Maya Angelou). From here forward, you can rewrite your future.
These three words can immediately guide us to find a new perspective that serves us in the present and invites us to create a positive future. It's difficult to make sustainable change in life without a perspective shift. Because the ability to imagine a different future is essential to moving in the direction of achieving it. When we change perspective, we begin to listen to different underlying thoughts and feelings. What is possible changes simply because we see different possibilities.
Andreas Krafft and his team of futurist researchers have studied hope and the future all over the world. They learned that when people feel hope, they move forward into a future that feels possible. When people lack hope, they’re more likely to feel defeated, like the world is coming at them, leaving them stuck and unable to move forward.
Hope or defeat. Possibility or impossibility. These underlying perspectives inform our lives in ways we’re often unaware.
So, I ask you: Is it time to stop holding yourself accountable for past actions based on what you know now?
It's not about blame at all. Here's where you are. You can't do anything to change what's happened up until now. Whatever has happened, whatever genetics, whatever circumstances, whatever you've done, whatever you haven't done – up until this moment in time, you can't change what's happened up until now.
But from here forward, you have the power to create change. As you begin to think differently, you can adopt a mindset that works for you, instead of against you.
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