Your Best Year Ever, Chapter 5: Regret Reveals Opportunity

0:02Wow, it means the world to me that you're listening to this newly revised Your Best Year Ever. and I so hope that you've been getting so much value out of the book already. This first part of the book is only the beginning. Just wait until we really dive into designing your future, which is coming up soon. I'm going to show you what it takes to make a great goal. How habit goals are different than achievement goals and the key elements to both. And then we're going to dig deep into why your goals matter to you. and I'm so excited for us to dive into that because that is the game changer in terms of achieving your goals.

0:38We're gonna be sharing that content a little bit at a time but if you don't wanna wait, I wanna encourage you to go ahead and buy the book. You can go to Amazon or Audible now to buy it and if you buy the book before December the 31st, 2023, make sure to go to yourbestyeareverbook.com. Now, why is that important? Well, enter your order number in and once you do that, I'm gonna send you a free ticket to our biggest virtual live event of the year. It's called Your Best Year Ever Live. We've done this for several years. Many people tell us it was the beginning of the best year in their life. So that's where we're gonna dive deep into the content for the book.

1:17And that's where we're going to dive deep into the content for the book and go even deeper. You'll walk away with a complete set of goals for the year and an action plan to achieve them. Now, normally we sell these tickets for$197. But if you buy the book, I'm going to give it to you free. So don't wait. Go buy the book and go get your free ticket to Your Best Year Ever Live at yourbestyeareverbook.com.

1:45Chapter 5. Regret Reveals Opportunity My new rule, whenever things go wrong, wait and see what better thing is coming. Scott Cairns If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow. Beyonce Knowles. Early in my career, I was a busy executive working to make my mark in the publishing industry. Books were my world, and I loved my work. I was hungry and eager to advance. But work was only part of my life. My wife, Gail, and I started having children a few years after we got married. We had five daughters in less than 10 years. As you can imagine, life was crazy. Given the size of my family, I felt a lot of financial pressure.

2:29That, coupled with my natural ambition, was a powerful cocktail. I worked long hours, hoping I could get another promotion and the raise that came with it. For most of those years, I also managed extra work on the side to meet our needs and gain financial ground. Long story short, I often felt overwhelmed with all I had to do. I felt guilty for not spending more time at home. And I was teetering on the edge of burnout. The stakes at work were too high, but the stakes at home were higher still. Somehow, I kept it all going, even through a few serious business crises. But eventually, I found out that I was in danger of losing my connection with my daughters, and Gail sometimes felt like she was a single mom, widowed by all my work.

3:12Honestly, things were touch and go at times. As I became aware of the cost my absorption with work inflicted on my family, it was like a giant regret bomb went off in my lap. Chances are good you can identify to one degree or another. Regret is part of our cognitive programming, according to author Daniel Pink. He recently led a massive study on regret. Pink's team asked almost 4 ,500 Americans many questions, but among them was how often they look back in life and wish they'd done something differently. Only 1 % of our respondents said they never engage in such behavior, says Pink, and fewer than 17 % do it rarely.

3:50But what's really amazing is how universal recognizing regret seems to be. About 43 % report doing it frequently or all the time, he says. In all, a whopping 82 % say that this activity is at least occasionally part of their lives, making Americans far more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth. No autocorrect for tattoo needles. When I was young, the only people with tattoos were bikers. convicts, and sailors. Over the last couple of decades, that's changed in a big way. Where I live, just outside Nashville, Tennessee, it's impossible to miss elaborate, colorful designs on full display or picking out of shirt colors, sleeves, and trousers.

4:35And that's true all over. According to a Harris poll, nearly a third of American adults have a tattoo these days. The percentage is higher at home. Three of my daughters have tattoos. So far, my girls love theirs. That's true for most. But regrets are also normal. About one in four laments the decision to get a tattoo. Why? Tattoos can last far longer than the desire to get one. Beyond that, not everyone with an ink gun is Michelangelo, and tattoo needles don't come with autocorrect. According to the Harris Poll, poor execution is one of the main reasons people regret tattoos. A website I checked had well over 900 examples of bungled designs and misspellings.

5:16No wonder tattoo removal is now the fastest growing cosmetic procedure in the world. And no wonder unflattering tattoos are such well-fitting symbols for regret. But that's only part of the picture. When Brene Brown was researching the topic of regrets for her book Rising Strong, a friend sent her a similar example. The parents' worst nightmare boyfriend for the Jennifer Aniston movie Were the Millers, who proudly shows off his no regrets tattoo. It's such a perfect metaphor for what I've learned, Brown says. If you have no regrets or you intentionally set out to live without regrets, I think you're missing the very value of regret.

5:54The value? One challenge most of us face in completing the past is the nagging feeling that we failed somehow. This isn't tattoos. This is existential. If you're still breathing, you're probably aware of at least one way you haven't measured up. After a little backward thinking with help from the last chapter, that number can easily balloon to dozens, even hundreds. It can be a downer. But this is no tragedy. Some people are a little stunned to think regret has any value at all. Our culture tends to miss it. I don't mean to minimize the pain of regret. The pain can be real and intense. The problem is how quickly we distance ourselves from it.

6:33We'd rather not live with the feeling long enough to gain the benefit. But that's a big mistake. When it comes to experiencing your best year ever, we can leverage our regrets to reveal opportunities we would otherwise miss. Look at it the right way, and regret is the gift of God. To quote University of Michigan psychologist Janet Landman in her book on the topic, it all depends on what you do with it. The Uses of Regret Before we look at the benefits, let's examine one common but unhelpful use of regret, self-condemnation. The delta between I am a screw-up and I screwed up may look small, says Brown, but in fact, it's huge.

7:15When we focus on ourselves instead of our performance, we make it harder to address improving next time around for the simple reason that improvement isn't the focus. Let's say you lost your cool with one of your children or a friend. Or let's say you flubbed a report that cost your business a lucrative new client. You could go on about how bad you are as a person. That would be small comfort to your friend or co-workers and wouldn't accomplish anything as far as future behavior. Or you could identify the bad performance. By doing that, you'd be in a position not only to repair the present breach, but also to prevent it from occurring again.

7:52Self-directed regrets not only fail to help improve our performance, they sit on the evidence table in the criminal court of our minds as an ever-expanding mound of exhibits, proving all our worst limiting beliefs about ourselves. Never mind the built-in confirmation bias, we're all fallible. So if you believe you're a failure, you'll never run out of proof. Every new instance further cements the story. and since we tend to experience what we expect, as we've seen, you're likely to just get more of the same. If, on the other hand, you believe you simply sometimes fail, you can begin evaluating what's missing in your performance and seek corrective action.

8:32There's an adage, success consists of going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. You're not a failure, so the failure you do experience creates dissonance that requires your attention to resolve. That's what happened to me when I realized my approach to work was alienating my family. My wife and daughters mattered to me more than my work, but my actions said otherwise. That dissonance drove me to change my approach and rebuild those relationships. Landman identifies several benefits of regret. Three are worth mentioning here. Number one, instruction, which relates back to stage three of the after-action review process.

9:12Regret is a form of information, and reflecting on our missteps is critical to avoiding those missteps in the future. Number two, motivation to change. Landman says, regret may not only tell us that something is wrong, but it can also move us to do something about it. I sure felt that with Gail and my daughters. Number three, integrity. Regret can work in us like a moral compass, signaling us when we veered off the path. These three reasons alone should be enough to rethink our instant dismissal of regret. When the regret bomb blew up in my life, I was able to reevaluate and reorient my priorities.

9:50Restoring my most important relationships was hard work. But without regret, it would have been impossible. I would have been oblivious to the need or resentful that others weren't pulling their weight. Regret forced me to own my part in the failure and correct it. and the relationship with my daughters has never been better than it is today. But there's even more going on here. Hey there. First of all, thanks for listening. There's one thing I know about you already. You have a bigger and brighter future ahead of you than what's behind you. And I'd be willing to bet there's other people in your life you feel the same way about.

10:28If you found this book helpful so far, would you do me a favor and take just a couple of seconds and share it with your spouse, a friend, somebody else in your life that you think could benefit. All you got to do is take a second, hit the share button now. That would mean the world to me. Your sharing means that we can help more people achieve their goals and have a better future than their past. I really appreciate it. The Opportunity Principle. Several years ago, a pair of researchers from the University of Illinois ranked people's biggest regrets in life. Neil Rose and Amy Somerville combined the results of multiple studies and subjected them to fresh analysis, along with conducting additional studies of their own.

11:12Family, finances, and health all made the list, but the six biggest regrets people expressed were about education, career, romance, parenting, self-improvement, and leisure. Notice how these high regret areas correlate closely to the nine life domains I outlined at the start of the book. If your life score was low in any particular domain, welcome to the human drama. You're not alone. Rose and Somerville mapped a three-stage process of action, outcome, and recall. In the first, we take steps toward a goal. In the second, we experience the result of our effort. If unsuccessful, we often trigger regret.

11:52Where it gets interesting is stage three. recall. The researchers found that feelings of dissatisfaction and disappointment are strongest where the chances for corrective reaction are clearest. Regrets, in other words, don't just flow backward like a blocked sewer pipe oozing bad past experiences. They also point forward to new and hopeful possibilities. They call their findings the opportunity principle, and it's almost 180 degrees from our typical assumptions. Regrets don't only goad us toward corrective behavior. Studies show we also tend to feel regret the strongest when the opportunity for improvement is at its greatest.

12:33No one does well under a crushing burden of regret. Thankfully, our minds have natural processes like reframing to take the weight off, especially when there's little chance to fix a situation. We've recognized that since forever. It's where we get folk wisdom like time heals all wounds. What we haven't always recognized is that regret sometimes dogs our heels precisely because it's signaling a chance to improve our situation, whether that's going back to college, changing careers, or repairing relationships. I'm going to fictionalize some of the details, but a woman I know, let's call her Jen, fell out of touch with her family.

13:10Feeling trapped in a controlling relationship, she had bought into several limiting beliefs her significant other had told her. She didn't believe she had any skills to hold a steady job. She was told and then believed that she was bad at math and therefore couldn't handle the couple's finances. She was also told that her family had been negative toward her partner and that she should hold a grudge against them and not keep in contact. These toxic beliefs burdened her. Holidays were sad and lonely. The COVID-19 pandemic created a perfect environment for her partner to take advantage of her mindset about herself and her potential.

13:47When yet another Christmas came and went, without seeing her parents or siblings, Jen started to recognize the feeling of regret. One day, after a particularly heated argument with her partner, she picked up her phone and instinctively dialed her childhood home phone number. Her mother answered, and Jen broke down in tears. Hearing my mother's voice brought this wave of regret that I had suppressed for years, Jen shared. I was led to believe my family were the bad people of my life story that they were to blame for all my struggles. Jen tearfully recounted her restorative conversation with her mom that ultimately became the catalyst for Jen leaving her rotten relationship, moving in temporarily with her sister, and rebuilding her relationship with her family.

14:30Freed from the influence of her partner, Jen also found it easier to combat the limiting beliefs she'd accepted. Jen did what Daniel Pink says we should all do, optimize regret. Rather than remaining under the weight of her situation, she allowed that feeling of regret to propel her toward reconciling with her family. It's a perfect picture of the opportunity principle in action, and I'm sure Jen's tug of regret resonates with all of us in one area of our lives or another. Rose and Somerville say, regret persists in precisely those situations in which opportunity for positive action remains high.

15:07This points to at least one reason, Landman subtitled her book, The Persistence of the Possible. Regret is a powerful indicator of future opportunity. A road sign, not a roadblock. The opportunity principle is a game changer. Think about your life score. In which domains did you score the lowest? Maybe your social life, hobbies, and spiritual development? Or maybe your career path or financial health? Whatever those domains are, it's time to rethink regret. Instead of a roadblock to progress, think of it as a road sign pointing the way forward. Earlier in this chapter, I quoted Daniel Pink saying that regret is part of our cognitive programming.

15:50The positive features of regret are actually baked right into our neurobiology. Brain scans locate the experience of regret above our eyes in the medial orbital frontal cortex. When that portion of the brain has been damaged, patients not only lack feelings of regret, they are unable to correct behavior that would trigger regret in a healthy person. In other words, the fact that we feel regret at all is evidence that we have what it takes to make positive change in our situations, no matter how dire they might seem. The only people with no hope are those with no regrets. Thankfully, as Pink's regret study shows, that's probably not many of us at all.

16:29If you feel regret, there's still a possibility of rectifying the issue, or at least growing from the experience. Regret feels bad, yes, affirms Neil Rose, but it also forces the individual to look inward, to reassess the assumptions and patterns of the past. He points to value in experiencing regret deeply, listening to what these emotions tell us, what they reveal about our deepest wishes, then acting quickly on these newfound insights. What if your greatest frustrations from your previous year were actually pointing you to some of your biggest wins in the next? What if regret isn't reminding us of what's impossible, but rather pointing us toward what is possible?

17:12Instead of seeing our regrets as working against the chance to grow and improve, we can see them as actually pointing the way toward the growth and improvement we most desire. Talk about trading a limiting belief for a liberating truth. As we take the next step in our journey toward your best year ever, I want to encourage you to stay in a frame of possibility. And I have one more suggestion on how to do it.

17:39Hey there, just want to take a quick moment to thank you for tuning in. You've just heard a chapter from my newly revised book, Your Best Year Ever. I'm hoping it's offered to you some actionable insights to fuel your dreams. And if you found this helpful, it'd mean the world to me if you leave a review on Amazon or Audible. Your feedback helps others decide if the book is for them. So simply search for your best year ever and then share your honest thoughts. Thanks.