Regret

Regret - to feel sorry, disappointed, distressed, or remorseful about; to remember with a feeling of loss or sorrow. Regret isn’t something I want to experience and I bet it isn’t something you want to experience either, but we have all been there. We’ve made a bad choice; we’ve missed out on an opportunity; we’ve failed to live up to expectations and we feel regret.

There are several ways you can cope with regret. You can deny wrongdoing. You can pretend that it doesn’t really matter. You can re-dedicate yourself to your objective and try again. You can get depressed, beat yourself up and retreat. You can vow to do better next time. You can distract yourself from those negative feelings by doing something else.

Some coping strategies are clearly healthier and more productive than others, but the most productive technique I have found is this:

This is a particularly useful approach because it is two pronged with both forward-looking and backward-looking components.

Don’t do things you will regret is an excellent aid in decision making. When you are faced with a choice, think about if either decision will leave you with a feeling of regret. If neither decision seems like a good one, think about which would you be less likely to regret. Maybe you have been asked to be part of a committee for a club you belong to. This commitment will mean more work with the club and less free time, but it will give you great experience to put on your grad school application and give you a chance to get to know new people. Will you regret your loss of free time if you say “yes,” or will you regret the lost opportunity to get into grad school and to make new friends if you say “no”? The answer might be “a little bit of both”! There are few ideal choices and, if you are faced with one, you probably aren’t spending any time thinking about it, you’re choosing the obviously better option and moving on. When you are facing two or more imperfect choices though, the trick is to pick the one which will leave you with the least long-term regret. When you think back on this decision in five years, which decision will you wish you had made and which decision might you regret. Choose wisely.

Don’t regret the things you do is particularly helpful when you forget to ask yourself if you will regret doing something when you are making your initial decision. We all make mistakes in the form of sub-optimal choices. Once the damage has been done, it’s often hard to un-do it. You can choose wallow in regret and beat yourself up about how you could have, should have, would have done better. That option isn’t likely to help you feel better or to rectify the mistake though. The more time and energy you spend looking over your shoulder wishing you hadn’t done something, the less you have left to look forward. Regret is only a productive emotion when you use it to make better choices in the future.

Instead of ruminating on and regretting the past, you can choose to own your mistakes, accept the consequences of your choices, take responsibility for your actions and make the best of the situation by moving forward with more wisdom. Maybe you need to make amends or issue an apology or maybe you can just learn and grow from the experience.

Re-frame your mistake as a learning experience. Rather than looking backward with regret on your mistake, you can look toward the future confident that this learning experience will help you to make better decisions in the future. By treating mistakes as learning experiences and growing from them instead of being embarrassed by them and allowing them to hold you back, you can be more authentic and secure.

You can’t go back and change the past. You can’t turn back the clock and make the other choice. It really doesn’t matter how bad that choice was. It’s done and over. Stop wasting time regretting the choices you made and the things you have done. Instead, move forward comfortable with who you are, determined to learn from all of your experiences both positive and negative, and empowered to make decisions which you will not regret.