I’d like to tell you about what might be the most important book published in my field this year (and it’s only February!): Dan Pink’s The Power of Regret: How Looking Back Moves Us Forward. I love this writer and how he helps us think about thinking.
Regret is considered to be the #1 negative emotion. It’s a feeling of sadness or disappointment over something from the past, like a missed opportunity or behavior we aren’t proud of. We all experience it, and we all hate it. In fact, we hate it so much that we’ve made buzzwords out of trying to avoid it.
“No regrets!”
“YOLO!” (you only live once)
“Never look back.”
“The past is past.”
Humans will do almost anything to avoid the pit-of-the-stomach feeling, and regrets can haunt us for years.
But this is the wrong approach to life, Pink says, because regrets can teach us valuable lessons. As Pink says in an interview, “The no-regrets philosophy is a colossally stupid idea. Definitely don’t wallow in regrets, but use information about them in a smart and systematic way.”
To learn more, Pink surveyed 16,000 people from 105 countries (including 4,500 Americans) to learn what they regretted. What he found were four types of regret that everyone should know about, because anticipating them can help us all lead more fulfilling lives.
The Four Types of Regret
1. Foundation Regrets: “If only I’d done the work.” Small decisions early in life, or daily, that accumulate to bad outcomes later. Not taking care of your health, not avoiding bad habits, not saving money, etc. These regrets show us that most of us want security in the form of health and stability.
2. Boldness Regrets: “If only I’d taken the chance.” Looking back on missed opportunities like studying abroad, asking someone out, taking a business adventure. These regrets show us that we want to maximize our potential and lead psychologically meaningful lives.
3. Moral Regrets: “If only I’d done the right thing.” When you didn’t stand up or act in a way that was aligned with who you are. When you did something against your core values. These regrets can be heartening; they show us that we want to be good.
4. Connection Regrets: “If only I’d reached out.” Instances where people lost touch, didn’t mend fences, etc. Most people believe it will be awkward or the other person won’t care, but it’s usually not the case. These regrets show us that others are much more like us than we think, and that relationships are central to our happiness.
What to do with this information?
If you deal with regrets systematically, it allows you to improve, because regrets can instruct and clarify. So don’t tune them out with a “no regrets” philosophy. We have to be willing to feel some of the pain in order to let regret teach us. As therapists, we help people reckon with negative emotions using self-compassion and therapy’s non-judgmental environment. We can then help our clients choose the ways that they will go bold next time. You may scan your life’s regrets and see that they generally fall into one particular category, and can choose to correct them.
But we have to be willing to look. As parents, friends, and partners, we can’t find our own or others’ regrets so painful that we bury them either for ourselves prevent them from happening to those we love. Regret is a wonderful teacher, if you can get out of your own way to learn from it. It can make you a better problem-solver. Children benefit immensely from learning on their own how their choices affect their lives.
Parents and teachers can remember that we must allow things to unfold and to let regret be a teacher. Research shows that regretting a medicore performance (Foundation regret) or acknowledging the consequence of not standing up for something or someone (Moral regret) actually motivate better behavior in the future. Missed opportunities are a reminder of what really matters to us.
Because regret teaches us what we care about, it deepens our sense of meaning. So don’t avoid the emotion of regret. Having no regrets is a warning sign that you’re not taking the right chances, or willing to acknowledge important feelings. Regrets should be signals of information.
One more type of regret that makes people stuck
These four regrets were a revelation to me as a therapist, because they clearly answered something I have always struggled to help clients overcome: anticipatory regret. This is when we’re basing our current behavior on predictions about what we’ll regret in the future, even when this goes against logic or goals we’ve stated are important. Many clients don’t realize they get paralyzed by this anticipated regret, and it lead them to bad decisions — or no action at all.
For example, Pink says, in a multiple choice test, many people go back to previous questions and consider changing their answer (which is proven to be right more often than their original answer) but instead stick with their original because they anticipate changing from the right to wrong answer will be very painful. In our offices we see clients worry about the result of something they want to do (ask someone out and be rejected) and imagine that to be so painful they avoid it totally — or settle for an action they deem safer but that is less satisfactory.
Now thanks to Pink’s research, we know the four categories of what we actually might regret! We can be more aware of at time when we need to tolerate the possibility of making a mistake because the odds are in our favor that it’s a good chance to take. It’s like having a blueprint for better decision making about what actually matters:
Build a strong and healthy foundation.
Take a smart chance.
Do the right thing.
Build connections.
Those are the regrets you should anticipate, and let the other things go.
