- How can you better confront your regrets to become a stronger person?
We think feeling regret makes us weaker, but actually, if we deal with our regrets effectively, it makes us stronger. It clarifies meaning in our lives. It charts a way to a life of purpose and success and contribution.Negative emotions are instructive. Fear is a very instructive emotion. Human beings without fear are human beings that aren’t going to survive. Human beings without a modicum of regret are human beings who aren’t going to flourish. If we ignore our regrets, if we don’t learn from them, they can capture us and debilitate us. Instead of seeing regret as a brutal judge passing judgment on us forever, treat regret as a teacher.
- How can you ensure you don’t have regrets later in life?
You have two paths. You can play it safe or take the chance. Over and over again, people regret not taking the chance. People who take a chance and fail are far less agonized about that than the people who never took the chance at all. In order to have fewer regrets in the future, we can better anticipate what we’re going to regret. It’s important to understand the difference between regrets of action and inaction. In general, when people are younger, they have equal numbers of regrets of action and inaction. As people age, regrets of inaction take over. People regret what they didn’t do, because action regrets are sometimes easier to resolve. If you’ve hurt somebody you can try to make amends. But if you didn’t take a certain action or express yourself, it can be harder to make amends for that.
- How can you better overcome painful feelings?
We all experience regrets. Treat yourself with compassion. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. We sometimes perform a posture of no regrets because we mistakenly believe that no regrets somehow signifies courage. It doesn’t. Courage is staring your regrets in the eye and doing something about them. It’s like grief. Imagine a world where we didn’t have the capacity to experience grief; at some level, the inability to experience loss or grief is an inability to experience love, which gives our life wholeness and meaning. Your regrets make you part of the whole human experience.
- How can you maximize the learnings you gain from regrets?
A good tool to use to learn from regret is a failure resume. In one column, you list your failures, setbacks, screw ups, and mistakes. The next column is to explore the question “What did I learn from this?” In the third column, ask yourself “What am I going to do about this?” This experience can be revelatory. When I used it, I learned I’d been making the same two mistakes over and over again and this failure resume brought that to the surface. I was able to see what I was doing wrong and apply it going forward.
- How can you empower yourself and others by better sharing your regrets?
We can move forward from the negative feelings associated with regret by disclosing them to others. One of my favorite exercises is a regret circle. You go around and each person discloses one regret and the others help that person make sense of it and extract a lesson from it. Leaders especially, when they disclose their own regrets, can lift others up. We’ve proven this over the last 10 years in vulnerability research. Disclosing your regrets and showing your vulnerabilities doesn’t make you weaker. It makes you a more effective leader.
