Negative past experiences that you don’t fully process turn into mental obstacles to your future. Whether it’s a failed relationship, a lost job, or a goal you never reached, unresolved disappointments have a way of quietly undermining what comes next.
The good news is that you can prevent this by deliberately reflecting on what happened, integrating the lessons you learned, and letting go of what’s holding you back. Continue reading to learn how to get closure and move on.
How to Get Closure
Michael Hyatt’s book Your Best Year Ever is about moving forward with strategic purpose. You can’t do that if your past is holding you back, so he discusses how to get closure on your previous negative experiences.
As a caveat, this process addresses everyday setbacks and frustrations, not serious trauma. Traumatic events such as loss or violence require professional support from therapists. (If professional support isn’t accessible to you, psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey argue in What Happened to You? that sharing your thoughts and feelings with a supportive community is invaluable—especially since processing trauma happens slowly over time. They recommend regularly having small chats about your experience with loved ones rather than trying to process everything in a single deep conversation.)
For everyone else, here’s Hyatt’s structured six-step exercise for getting closure on a difficult experience, with supplemental advice from Maxwell Maltz and organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich.
1. Describe what you wanted to see happen.
Identify your original hopes and expectations going in. How did you envision things progressing? Note that it’s normal to have an emotional reaction to this step, such as feeling disappointed. To keep that from distorting the rest of the reflection before it has even begun, try stripping emotional language from your description and stating only the facts—what you expected, not how you feel about having expected it.
2. Describe your accomplishments and the moments that made you proud.
Even painful experiences usually contain genuine wins. Hyatt argues that stating your successes helps you acknowledge the power you have over your life. To deepen this, take this tip from Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics): Note the specific action that made each accomplishment possible. This upgrades a general acknowledgment to a concrete, repeatable insight.
3. Describe your disappointments and the instances that make you feel regret.
Write only what happened, and then ask what the actual cause was. This helps you focus on the learning opportunity the exercise is meant to surface instead of self-criticism.
4. Identify two or three recurring themes that capture how the experience went.
State each theme as an observable pattern rather than a judgment—for example, “I kept avoiding difficult conversations” rather than “I was a coward.” Keeping the emotional weight low here ensures the themes you carry into the next step are factual rather than distorted.
5. Ask yourself what you can learn from both your accomplishments and your disappointments.
This advice from Hyatt pairs well with what Tasha Eurich writes in her book Insight. She suggests you ask yourself “What would need to be different?” This question directs attention toward solutions rather than fault. It’s worth contrasting with the more instinctive question—“Why did this happen?”—which tends to keep you stuck ruminating on the failure rather than moving past it. Hyatt recommends that you summarize each lesson with a brief statement you can easily remember—for example, “Make contingency plans for any big decisions.”
6. Decide how you’ll change your behavior.
Again, this is worth blending with Eurich’s advice. For each lesson, frame your takeaway as a “What will I do differently?” statement. This keeps Hyatt’s final step oriented toward forward action rather than backward analysis. He suggests you choose a concrete change you can make so things go differently next time. For example, the lesson above might become a rule: Don’t make any big decisions without first writing down contingency plans for every risk you can envision. Bringing Eurich’s and Hyatt’s recommendations together in this way can separate genuine closure from endless rehashing.
Here’s one final idea from Maxwell Maltz that’s worth holding onto as you work through this process of closure. Negative feelings aren’t necessarily an accurate read of reality; they’re often a product of habitual thought patterns. The more you free yourself from responding to and identifying with negative thoughts—deliberately replacing them with rational, fact-based thinking—the more likely you are to keep past experiences from hardening into permanent mental roadblocks.
Wrapping Up
Getting closure isn’t about making peace with the past so much as clearing the path forward. To learn more about moving on, check out Michael Hyatt’s Your Best Year Ever and Shortform’s guide to the book, where we provide a comprehensive summary of Hyatt’s ideas and add valuable related insights from other experts.
