How Do You Prevent Your Past From Influencing Your Future?

How do you prevent yourself from letting the past dictate the future? I think it's important to look at the totality of your past and not incidents, right? And if you look at certain incidents and let that shape you, that's obviously going to be a problem. But for most people, they have a history overall when you total it all up that works. You just got to put enough stock on your ability to adapt to change to make things happen.