No Regrets
Did you know that regret is optional? It may serve you. It may not. Either way, you get to decide if you want to feel it or not. Because like all emotions, the feeling of regret comes from your thoughts. And you can decide now that you choose not to feel regret about anything. You can intentionally choose thoughts that have you feeling something else instead. Like confident. Or content. Or whatever you want to feel.
Maybe it serves you. Same as guilt can be useful in moderation sometimes. Guilt tells us that we did something out of alignment with our true nature. Regret is similar. So if there is something we want to learn from the emotion, we take note, and try to apply it in the future.
But dwelling in guilt and regret leads to shame which says there is something wrong with you. Which is not true. Yes you make mistakes. We all do. We are just humans, after all. So we are here for growth and change which can’t happen if we don’t acknowledge that we did something wrong. But that awareness is the end of the usefulness. Indulging in the regret just leads to shame so lets consciously choose thoughts that drop that war.
The other biggest problem I see with regret is that we usually use it as an emotion before hand. We tend to regret in advance. Which is killer for decision making.
For example, maybe I need to choose whether to put my kid in full-day or half-day kindergarten. I vacillate back and forth undecided because I don’t want to regret my decision. I don’t want to make the wrong choice.
Did you know that there is no such thing? There is just the choice you make and you can make it right or wrong with how you think about it. And when you choose to think about it that way, making the choice is a lot easier and then when we are tempted later to blame ourself for making the wrong choice, we can remind ourself that there is no wrong choice and we choose to have no regrets.
It looks like this: “I don’t want to do full day because my kid might have a hard time adjusting. 8 hours a day for 5 days a week is a lot and is very different than what they’ve been doing and they might not like it. On the other hand, half day kindergarten is kind of a joke. By the time I drop them off, i come home, put the baby to bed, and then it’s time to pick them up again. I get hardly anything done around the house and i have to wake up a sleeping baby.” So you can see the regret ahead of time. If i decide on half day, i’ll regret that cause i won’t have enough time. If i decide on full day i’ll regret that my kid will feel bad. So i stay stuck in indecision.
Instead I decide to think that the timing will work out just fine and whatever i get done was all that was meant to be accomplished that day and the baby will be fine with whatever amount of sleep she gets. Or I decide to think that my kid will adjust perfectly. That 8 hours of structured time is just what he needs to learn and develop exactly how he should and when did growth and development ever feel good? So he might think that he doesn’t like it but it’s what’s best for him.
Basically, however you think about it in the future is how you will feel about it in the future. So decide today that you will choose to think about it in a way that leads to no regrets.
Then you can start easily making decisions and get on with your life!
