Did you know that when you open Netflix and arrive on the main menu, the preview you see is different from person to person, depending on your watch history? If you’ve been watching a lot of romance movies, the scenes Netflix shows you will highlight love and emotional moments. If you tend to watch action movies, you’ll see explosions, fast-paced scenes, and high-intensity moments instead. If you love comedies, they’ll show you the funniest parts of the series.

Yes, Netflix is choosing which movies and TV shows to present to you, but it’s also selecting which scenes from those shows to display, all based on your viewing history.

Now here’s the interesting part: our brain works the exact same way.

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We all have a collection of images, memories, experiences, and emotional “clips” that have shaped our lives. As we move forward, those memories are stored in the limbic brain, and they quietly influence our decisions, depending on what has been saved there.

Someone once asked me, “Nathalie, what do you actually do when you work with a client one-on-one?” People often know what I talk about on main stages, but unless they’ve experienced my private coaching, they don’t always know what happens behind the scenes.

The best way I can explain it is this: we go through those photos. We go through those old images. Because every single one of them influences how we see life today. Our past impacts the decisions we’re making right now.

If you were backstabbed in a previous job, for example, you may find yourself struggling to trust people in your current workplace. It’s all connected.

Now, sometimes your Netflix recommendations change because someone else is using your account. Suddenly, love and romance movies show up—even though you’re more of an action-movie person. Maybe at one point in your life, you loved romantic movies, and now you don’t anymore. Your taste has changed.

That’s exactly what happens when we do our internal clean-up.

The person you were at five years old, ten years old, or even twelve—like the moment you weren’t chosen for the basketball team and decided, “I must not be good enough”—that decision may still be influencing you today. It was made by a 12-year-old, yet years later, you might still be thinking, “I can’t apply for that promotion because I’m not good enough.”

But you’re no longer that person.

So we need to get rid of the images that are still influencing your decisions today, even though they no longer represent who you are.

That’s what I do. We look at all the photos that shaped your past, and we decide: this one isn’t serving me anymore. That one either. I don’t want my decisions to be based on that old story. I choose to keep this one, this one, and this one instead.

We do a kind of triage. We reframe how we see life so we can look at it through a completely different lens. And when that lens changes, the way you feel when making decisions changes too.

Because what we think shapes who we become. And who we are when we make decisions will be very different once we choose different clips from our life.

I hope this helps you better understand what I do—and what many of us in this field do—so that the next time you make a decision, you can make it through a much healthier, more empowering lens.

So enjoy rewiring and reframing the meaning of your past, so you can create a much better future.

Check out some of my previous blog posts...