Episode 6: “I have a big regret and I can’t get over it”

Regret is an incredibly common human emotion, and yet it's one we typically don't talk about. We'd rather suffer in silence or try to avoid or ignore it (which never works) that deal with it. And as a result, most of us walk around carrying past regrets into our futures. You don't need to do this. In this episode Coach Stephanie will walk you through her 7 step process for overcoming regret so that you can leave your past in the past, and move forward without past regret weighing you down.

Hey friend, welcome to another episode of the I'm the Problem podcast. I'm your coach, Stephanie, and on today's episode we're going to be talking about the problem with regret and how to actually manage your regret so you can finally move past it. I wrote a blog post about this topic a little while ago. It's up on the site at makeyourpivot.co, so if you want to read more, you can find more about it there. And I actually have a course on pivoting away from regret that's coming out really soon, so make sure you're on the email list if you want to be notified as soon as that launches.

So before we dive into regret, just a quick reminder about the purpose of this podcast. My goal with the show is to bring you an episode that's about something I've gone through personally or my coaching clients have gone through. And I walk you through how I coached myself or my clients through that topic so that you can have real life examples of how coaching works and hopefully pick up some tools or resources or practices that can help you if you're wrestling with a similar topic.

When it comes to today's episode on regret, this is a topic that comes up so much in coaching. So even though I have other resources for you, like I just mentioned, I wanted to do this podcast on this topic as well, just because this topic of regret, it's freaking everywhere and everybody has regrets. We all do. It's very rare to walk through the world and run into somebody who isn't holding on to or wrestling with or has overcome some sort of regret. We all go through it. So, really universal topic, that's why I wanted to dive in today.

All right, so to start, I wanted to flag initially, I've read a lot about regret from the work done by Daniel Pink. This is an expert researcher who's done an extensive amount of research and writing on the subject of regret, and I definitely recommend digging into his work if this is a topic that's interesting to you. The bottom line of his research is that it shows that, like I just said, nearly everyone with a human brain has experienced regret at some point, even if we won't all admit it. In other words, if you feel regret about anything, and the odds are you do, you are not alone.

Okay, so since regret is so common, it can show up anywhere, even if we don't like to share our experiences of regret. It is all around. Regret can show up in our relationships, in our finances, with our health, with our career choices, with our choice to have kids or not have kids, with our friendships, with our choice of where we want to live. The list is literally endless. I'll give a few more specific examples of regret from clients that I've coached before I tell you my own story, because I think it can just be useful to share, since none of us will get through life without regret, and we often feel alone when we have it.

So some of the regret topics that I've coached clients on include regret around credit card debt, regret around how someone has parented their young kids and the impact of that on a relationship with kids as they get older, regret around eating and diet. You know, if you eat, if you ate a massive meal yesterday and you felt awful today, that's an example of regret. I've coached on saying no to a big job opportunity that would have had you moving somewhere. And now you're sitting there wondering like, what if I had done that? Maybe I shouldn't have said no and regretting that choice, regretting quitting a job when you don't have another job lined up, breaking up with someone who you now think was maybe the one and so you're regretting that breakup. These are the type of topics that I've coached clients on and we really hammer home what the regret is and how to move past it, because these can be really challenging and I have a lot of empathy for anybody going through a struggle with regret and letting go and forgiving yourself because I have been there myself.

So for me, just like pretty much everyone, I've had regrets both big and small. I've had relationship regret, I've had financial regret, I've had professional regrets, I've had geographic regrets. Some of those regrets simply faded with time as my life moved in different directions that made those past regrets make more sense in retrospect. For example, I had a regret for years about a breakup that I thought for a long time that I'd live with my whole life. I thought I would just always be regretting this breakup until I dug in and did some real work on myself to understand that breakup and understand why I did what I did. It eventually made sense to me, the choices that I made and why the breakup occurred, and it even benefited me. I took all that learning into the life and the marriage I have now and avoided making a lot of the same mistakes, the same self-destructive mistakes that I made in the course of that breakup. So sometimes regret can fade with time and life experience, even when in the moment you can't really envision that.

However, there are other regrets that are of course harder to shake and those are the ones that we're talking about here because those are the ones that can become a problem for us if we don't address them. Another example, I made a big career pivot years ago well prior to becoming a coach and when I did that, I decided I was going to go to grad school. So the program I went to had a dual master's program but initially, I was planning to go for just one side of the program. So just to get one degree, that's what I was going to focus on. That said, about halfway through my first year, I was in really kind of a personal tailspin. I wasn't really sure if I was going to be successful in this new field that I had just moved into. I was panicked about that. I panicked about money. I panicked about a relationship I was in. I just was not in a really good headspace, although I couldn't really see that at the time. I was just kind of going through everything and As a way to pull myself out of that and frankly as a way to delay having to make any more big changes and big decisions I decided to complete the dual degree program and stay at grad school for a second year. This of course meant that I was making a huge financial commitment, not just in tuition and student loans and all of that, but in another year of living expenses, another year of not working full time, another year of not contributing to my retirement fund, you name it, the list went on. And so my spiral began to include a bunch of reckless spending. That's when I was panicked about it. My reaction was just to kind of spend more recklessly.

So all to say that one year and that kind of panic move decision cost me thousands of dollars. And while I can look back now and understand what I was doing, and I can also see a lot of upsides to that decision being made, both professionally and personally, the financial regret I carried for years afterwards was massive. Again, we're talking thousands of dollars worth of regret. That is not something I got over very quickly.

So here's the thing about regret: regret itself is not a problem. Regret is just an emotion and there's no emotion itself that is an issue. It's the actions that we take as a result of trying to avoid or resist an emotion. That's where we tend to get ourselves into trouble. Regret is one of those emotions that we seem to have this collective asterisk in front of. Like we've all sat around and decided that regret is just a feeling that we are not going to accept, we are not going to sit with, we're not going to acknowledge. Even in self-help work or personal development work, there's a lot of, “I don't have regrets, I don't carry regret”, you know, “It's a lesson learned”, like, “I don't believe in regret”. You hear a lot of that over and over again. We also rationalize our regret by saying things like, “bBt if this hadn't happened or if I hadn't done that, then I wouldn't have XYZ now that I love so much”, which is what I did for years about my grad school experience because a lot of good did come from that second year of grad school. A lot of things I have in my life now that I love, I wouldn't have if I hadn't done that second year of school, including my marriage. And that's all true. I am so grateful for all of that.

But that being said, all me saying, “I really love all the things that have come out of that decision,” doesn't erase the financial regret that I was carrying. Two things can be true at once, right? I can be so glad that certain events occurred or that I made certain decisions even if there was pain involved at the time. I can still regret the fact that I made other decisions on that path along the way to these outcomes that I'm happy with. I can still be so glad that I took that second year of school for so many reasons and also regret the way I did it that put me in a really challenging place financially for a very long time. Both of those things can be true and we have a tendency to want to just shut down any idea of regret like, “No, no, I don't have regrets, I don't believe in regret” or the other way we do it is that we have our regrets, we don't even try to rationalize them, we just turn away from them and ignore them, but they're still there. They sit with us, they can haunt us, they can come back and bite us at strange times. Regret doesn't go anywhere just because you ignore it, avoid it, or try to rationalize it away.

So, what do we do? How do we deal with our regret? There is a way to move past your regrets and put them back in the past, where they came from and where they belong, so that you can move forward. And we do this by doing the thing that we don't want to do, which is face the regret, accept it, let it be there, and then learn to move forward from it. So how does that work exactly?

When I was working through some professional regrets I've had in the last few years, I ended up coming with a seven-step process for overcoming regret, which really got me to the other side of a handful of my own professional regrets, and it's a process that I really wish I had when I was trying to overcome my financial regret. So I put this together because this is something I wanted to share with other people because you shouldn't have to be haunted by your regrets. I shouldn't have had to be haunted by mine. There is a way to get around them. So it's a seven-step process which that can sound daunting but go with me on this. It can happen pretty efficiently for you if you work through this process.

Step one is simply to just see regret for what it really is. This is a human emotion that over 80% of us report experiencing. Again, that's from Daniel Pink's research. Regret is not some scarlet letter that only you need to walk around the village wearing. Everyone or nearly everyone experiences regret. And I always like to think of that 80% number as that's the number of people who report experiencing regret. So you can imagine it's a much bigger number when we consider all the people who don't acknowledge or admit regret. Step number one is just acknowledging for yourself, this is just part of being a human on the planet. We go through life, we have experiences, and sometimes we regret those experiences.

So the second step is to understand as humans, we have reasons for the things we do, even if the reasons are shit, especially in hindsight. Remind yourself that the thing you regret is something you did or didn't do because you had a reason for it. No matter how poor the choice might seem now in hindsight, at the time what you did or what you didn't do made sense in the moment. Even if we're talking about something like smoking, for example. I can relate to this one as a former smoker myself. Let's just say you knew smoking was bad for you, but you started smoking anyways years ago. Even though you knew it was bad for your health, you still did it because in the moment it made you feel better. Maybe you thought it was a stress reliever for you, or maybe you thought it helped calm you down, or maybe you enjoyed the chance to step outside for a break, or maybe you had some buddies that also smoked and it was like a fun way just to kind of catch up with your friends and like have a coffee and a cigarette before work. Whatever it was, you were getting some sort of pleasure from it. There was some rationale for why you did it, some sort of relief, something made you do it. And there's no reason to beat yourself up about it now, even though you knew then that it wasn't something you were really proud to be doing. So I like to always think about that example because, you know, a lot of us can sort of roll our eyes and be like why would you ever start smoking and I can look back and be like I know I started smoking I had all kinds of reasons and it felt great at the time even though I knew it wasn't good for me. You got to just look back at your regrets and understand like hey even if I knew it wasn't great there was a reason and I just need to kind of acknowledge what that was it didn't happen out of nowhere.

Number three is accept your regret. This is the one that people really hate. But when you resist or avoid something, it doesn't mean it goes away. Just like that nagging pain in your tooth or like that noise that the car is making, it won't get better by pretending it's not happening. You got to accept that the pain is there and go to the dentist. You got to accept that the noise is there and take the car in to get looked at. Just by saying out loud to yourself, “Yes, I did this,” or, “Yes, I didn't do this and I regret that”. Say that over and over again and just notice the more that you think that thought the less it stings over time. It's unbelievable how much freedom there is in just acknowledging to yourself like, “Yeah I did that and I regret it,” or, “Yeah I didn't do that and I wish I did and I regret it….Yeah I turned down that job and I regret it…Yeah I broke up with that person and I regret it…Yeah I ran out my credit card and I regret it.” Just saying that, there's so much freedom in that. You're not avoiding the truth anymore. You're acknowledging it, even just to yourself. That is really powerful.

Step four is to process the emotion that comes up. Regret is an emotion, which just means it will create a vibration in your body like all emotions do. And it won't stop vibrating until you deal with it. So what that means is that you need to process your emotion before you can move forward. Otherwise, just imagine it's like a gong that you strike once and it will just keep vibrating on and on and on, right? It will still be there. So you have to work on processing your emotions. You have to work on feeling them and letting them go. We do a lot of this in coaching, but in short, what it means is that you notice the feeling, you notice where it is in your body, you notice what it feels like, you describe it just to yourself, oh that's a feeling in my stomach and it feels very heavy and it feels like a pit or like, oh there's a, the feeling's in my shoulder and it feels very tingly, intense. Just describe it, sit with it, allow the feeling to move through your body, the more that you think about it and focus on it and notice it, the, the faster it will actually move through your body. I know it sounds very woo-woo and weird for those people that have never done this before, but just try it. It really, really does help.

Step five, forgive yourself. This is a big one, but if you jump to it without doing steps one through four, it probably won't work. Forgiving yourself can look different depending on what it is you're wrestling with, so it's important to customize this one for your situation, but you have to do this. Look at your past self, whether the thing you regret took place 20 minutes ago or 20 years ago, and see your past self in your mind. Just imagine her. Remember that the you of right now, the you that's listening to this podcast, is not the you of back then. And then you tell your past self that you forgive her. Literally imagine her in your mind and say the words, I forgive you for_____, and fill in the blank. Or one thought that I've seen work really well is, and I love this one, I've used this for myself, you think about your past self, you imagine her in your mind, you say, “You should have done better, and you didn't. And I forgive you for that”. You just acknowledge, you should have done this better, it should have been different. And I know in coaching we say a lot, “don't should all over yourself”, but this is an exception I'll put in here. Because you can say that to yourself, “Yeah, you should have done better past self. You should have known better, and you didn't, and I forgive you for that”. Just practice that, and practice forgiving yourself, and make sure that you keep in mind that your past self is a different version of you today. Okay?

Step six, practice step five over and over until it becomes normal for you. That you have to do this one. And notice the more that you practice it, the more normal it becomes, the more that regret, that vibration starts to fade from your body. This is also the part in step six where you can ask for forgiveness from someone else if your regret story calls for that. It won't be necessary or maybe not even possible in every situation, but if it is for you, and if that's something that you want to do, this is the step to do it. Because at this point, you've faced what happened, you've accepted it, you also are working on forgiving yourself. The key here is to remember that the other person or the other people get to have their feelings about the situation. You can't control that. You can't base how you feel on how they feel about it. They get to have their feelings and you have yours. If someone has been impacted by your choices, don't also put the obligation on them to make you feel better. You do the work to make yourself feel better and then you ask for forgiveness from a clean place because you genuinely want to, not because you're seeking somebody else to also do that work for you.

And then step seven, the last step is when you're ready, you can think about what you can learn from this past experience. So it may be as clear as, “I don't want to do that again, that was a mistake, I will never do that again”. Or, “The next time I have this kind of opportunity, I'll make a different choice”, right? It might be something like that. Look at whatever it is that you learn as data. It's a jumping off point for you to do the work going forward. So don't just jump to try and learn the lesson right away, because you've got to do the other steps in between. But when you're ready, when you've done the other steps, you've processed the emotion, you've accepted, you've forgiven yourself, you've asked for forgiveness from others if that's a part of your story, then from there you can think about, all right, what do I want to do? Now what do I want to do with this? What do I want to learn from this? And again, look at that as just data. It's information that you can then take forward as you move forward into the next phase of things.

So finally, remember that your regret is not a requirement. You can choose a different way forward. You don't have to always regret a mistake. Continuing to punish yourself or beat yourself up is not going to help you and it's not going to change what happened. So for you to figure out a way to move forward is such a gift that you can give to your future self from yourself today. Let it go and move forward with whatever lessons you've learned and with the progress that you've made. Move forward without the heavy baggage of regret that's weighing you down. It is not a requirement for you to go through life carrying that. Learning to forgive yourself and moving past your regret is a major, major gift and I want you to give that to yourself, okay?

You can always make a pivot. Do not forget that.