They Say “No Regrets”… So Why Do I Have Them?
How to redefine regret and use it as a helpful tool moving forward.
I’m Reid! I write about my life experiences and how we can all live in brave new ways. Dare You is a reader-supported publication. To receive weekly posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
“No regrets” doesn’t mean living with courage, it means living without reflection. To live without regret is to believe you have nothing to learn, no amends to make, and no opportunity to be braver with your life.”
~Brene Brown
Regrets. We all have them. Personally, I’m not sure it’s even possible for a person to go their entire life without having a regret. It seems like the cool thing these days for a person to say “I don’t have any regrets in life” and then list all the reasons why they are regretless… but don’t you reflect on your decisions? Don’t you assess the past so you can adjust moving forward? Don’t you want to learn and heal from past mistakes instead of excusing behaviors and stashing them in a dark corner where it’s almost like they don’t exist?
I think regret has been given a bad wrap. We’ve given regret this negative connotation and associated it with failure. What if regret wasn’t this dirty thing in our past, but a gift? Regrets can be beautiful opportunities that teach us how we want to live our lives moving forward and serve as guideposts for creating our moral code.
Two things can be true at once… You can regret an action or inaction from your past and still be grateful for the decision you made because of the knowledge you gained and how it changed the trajectory of your life. We can’t change the past. But we CAN change how we move forward.
Regrets can be a helpful tools in decision making. Regrets can show us what we want, and what we don’t want. For instance, I DEFINITELY regret how I treated my body in my early 20’s… the over-exercising and eating disorders are things I truly regret. However, having recovered and forgiven myself for the harmful choices I made during that time because it was what I felt I had to do to survive, I am now able to take better care of myself and nourish my body in ways I might not have known I needed if I had not struggled earlier on. I am grateful for that experience because overcoming that time in my life showed me how strong and resilient I am. I learned how to love and take care of myself moving forward.
See how everything can be reframed?
Last night, my boyfriend and I went to see the movie “Challengers,” directed by one of my favorite directors, Luca Guadagnino. This movie is centered around the sport of tennis and follows three main characters from their college tennis days into their professional careers as athletes. My boyfriend was a college tennis coach before making a career pivot less than a year ago, and let’s just say, this movie hit home. We both loved the film, and he said it showed the game of tennis in the most truthful way he had ever seen on screen. But I knew that being immersed back in the college tennis world through this movie might have stirred up a bit of emotion in him. We stopped to grab dinner after the movie at a cute restaurant across the street. I listened as he talked about the movie and how it had brought him back to his coaching days. I know how much he loved and misses coaching. “Do you regret leaving coaching?” I asked. “No” he replied.
You can miss something and still not regret your decision to move on from it.
This got us into a discussion about regret. “I don’t believe someone can live without a single regret.” I said. “Yeah, it’s like the car analogy,” he said and went on to explain, “So you are driving a car, and you are looking out the front windshield, and then there’s a rearview mirror. The analogy is that the front windshield is your future going forward, and the rearview mirror is what’s in your past, and they are the size they are for a reason because you are only supposed to look back at your past for that small amount of time. There is a healthy amount to look back, but just that much.”
I thought this analogy was SO GOOD.
What can be helpful is looking at regrets through the lens of the car analogy. What can become harmful is when we get caught in the “regret spiral” and spend too much time ruminating on our past regrets, beating ourselves up about them and questioning what could have happened if we had done things differently. If you ever find yourself in the regret spiral, the easiest way to get out of that cycle is to first forgive yourself. You were doing the best you could at that time. And the next step is to remind yourself how you most likely wouldn’t be where you are in life and have all the wonderful things you have now if you hadn’t made those mistakes in the past.
Like Brene Brown said in the quote above, regrets provide us opportunities to be braver with our lives going forward. I want to live bravely and vulnerably and consciously…. Which all require a healthy relationship with regret.
I am interested… how would you describe your relationship with regret? How have you taken a regret and turned it into a learning experience? How can you shift your current ways of being based of lessons learned from a past regret?
-Reid
Reid, thank you very much for this very needed text about regret. I fully agree that it is impossible to live without it, even if you did everything the way you wanted. If you are learning, you will have regrets. Which is a great thing. Cheers and greetings from Vilnius!
Yes! I love how you have framed regret, and I will never forget the car analogy. Thanks!