68. Regret
Ever make a career decision and then later really, really wish you hadn’t?
Or spend months and years ruminating over whether to make a certain change or not because you’re super afraid of regretting your choice later?
Regret is part of life sometimes.
We’re human. We make choices. Then we get more information and perhaps wish we’d made a different choice.
But regret (and the fear of future regret) can cause a lot of distress.
It can keep you from building a career that really delights you.
It can make taking risks feel excruciating.
But it doesn’t have to do any of that.
Even if you don’t do your career perfectly, you don’t have to spend all of it trying not to ever do anything you’ll regret later.
A lot of people only celebrate when things go perfectly.
But regret can also be something to welcome, something to celebrate.
Instead of seeing it as a mistake, you can see it as you having tried something.
You can see it as bringing you closer to your satisfied as fuck career, even if it momentarily takes you further away from that future.
When we’re trying something new, we don’t always know if we’re going to like it or it’s going to work out exactly how we had hoped.
When we take a new job, we can consider the possible outcomes, but there are no guarantees. A lot of people get caught up and paralyzed by this uncertainty.
A lot of people create regret by trying to avoid regret.
What I mean by that is many people spend their lives not trying things they want to try, because that shit might not work out.
But then they look back on their lives and see that they’ve spent them trying to live by other people’s rules instead of building something that they loved.
But what if instead of trying to avoid regret, we learned how to have a better relationship with it?
What if your willingness to feel regret is actually the key to you creating something amazing for yourself?
Join me on the podcast this week and let’s talk all things regret. Because as much as it’s uncomfortable, this feeling is also one key to building a life that blows your mind.
If you want to supercharge your capacity to create a life that blows your mind, I have some one-on-one coaching slots opening up soon. Send me an email and let's talk about it or click here to schedule a call with me and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to start working together!
If there are topics y’all want me to talk about on the podcast, feel free to write in and let me know by clicking here! I’d love to hear from you!
I have a super fun announcement. This July, I’m launching my group coaching program Satisfied as F*ck. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever designed in my life, so if you want to come together and be part of a community, build relationships, and figure things out so your life can feel satisfied as f*ck, keep checking back here for updates.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Why celebration is so important, even when things don’t work out exactly how you’d planned.
How we get paralyzed by uncertainty when it comes to making decisions.
How to see where your willingness to try new things has benefitted your life experience.
How to make regret useful.
What you can do to start making decisions without fear of regret.
How to create a positive narrative about those decisions you do feel regret over.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:
FEATURED ON THE SHOW:
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Feel free to ask me any questions over on Instagram!
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week we’re talking about regret.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all, happy Wednesday. How are you? I am doing – How am I doing? I think I’m doing pretty well. I just took a walk outside. It’s beautiful and sunny here, pretty warm, high 50s maybe 60 degrees. And really this is the kind of weather I moved here for, so I’m pretty excited about that.
But what we’re actually talking about this week is regret. And sometimes the weather here hasn’t been so pretty and not what we moved here for. Although interestingly even when that’s the case I think I haven’t regretted moving here.
But sometimes we do regret things, right? In our careers and our lives sometimes we make choices where we wish we had made a different choice. And what I see a lot with my clients and my audience is that they get kind of stuck in a paralysis because they’re afraid that they’re going to feel regret later.
So there’s regret and then there’s also fear of regret, or when we let potential regret in the future kind of keep up stuck in the current moment or keep us from trying things we think might be interesting. And I have a real life example from my life. So, not about the weather in Sacramento, where we’ve moved to. But actually it’s something else that has nothing to do with work but I’m going to share it with you anyways because I think it’s a really great example of one kind of regret.
So my example is that I wanted to get bangs and I did. And when I wanted them I wanted them for, I think, at least a year before I actually had them cut. And I have had them before in the past, I just really love bangs. I love how they look, I think they’re so cute.
And I remembered that growing them out is kind of a pain in the ass and it’s not all fun and games because you have to style them and they’re shorter hair and they don’t always go back in ponytails and stuff like that. But after wanting them for like a year I decided just to go for it, I think it was around the end of October.
And so this has really been an interesting experience for me because as soon as I had the bangs cut I loved them, I was like, yeah, look at these. And then when I went and got in the car and took my mask off, because I got the haircut with a mask on. As soon as I took the mask off and I saw them with my full face I was like, uh, I’m not actually sure that I like this so much.
So that’s super interesting just on another note of sometimes we like something and then we’re seeing it in a way that isn’t the way we’ll actually engage with it mostly. And then we see it the way we’ll actually engage with it, like me once I had my mask off, and we’re like, oh, I don’t like that as much as I thought I would.
The other thing with the bangs is they fucking touch my face. I mean this is something that bangs just do. Hair does this too even when it’s not in bangs. But with bangs in particular they’re going across your forehead so there’s a lot of hair touching your face action there.
Now, I probably even considered these things beforehand, like okay, bangs, they take a long time to grow out, they don’t always look cute, blah blah, blah, it is hair touching your face. But I had become really enamored with the idea of it and so I went for it.
And it’s not that I regret my choice because I actually don’t regret my choice, but I think some people in my current position could regret their choice. They could feel a sense of regret that they’re a smart person and anticipated some things that then turned out to be true and made the choice anyways.
That’s one way of being in the situation that I’m in. And that situation is I got bangs a few months ago and I have been enjoying them as much as possible since I already have them. But I’ve also basically been growing them out since I got them. And like I said, some people would be experiencing a lot of regret.
And I’m a human being over here so probably I’m experiencing some regret sometimes, but not that much. And part of it is because the way I’ve been framing this situation in my head is I wanted something, and I went for it and I’m going to celebrate that.
So a lot of times what I see people do is if they want something and they go for it and then it turns out the way that they want it to, then they celebrate maybe like what they’ve done. I mean some people actually never celebrate, we have whole podcast episodes on that. But let’s just go with the idea that some people are celebrating, but then it’s like they only celebrate when it goes perfectly.
So someone else in this position would be like okay, I really wanted the bangs, I got the bangs. Then I didn’t like them, so this was a big fuck up and I have to feel regret and I have to judge myself and be all up on myself about this. That’s an option that some people do. Versus what I really want to pitch here is seeing things that we do to try to create the life we like, and the dream life, and the satisfied as fuck life, career, et cetera.
Seeing all of those tests that we’re doing, all those things that we’re trying when we don’t actually know if we’ll totally like the outcome or not. I want to frame all of those as wins. I want to frame all of those as things we can celebrate, as delights, and as worthy of us including in the vision of a life well lived.
Okay, so what do I actually mean by this? What I actually mean is we don’t always know ahead of time when we’re going to try something new that we think we may like, we don’t always know if we’re going to like that thing or we’re not. We don’t always know if it’s going to work out the way we want it to.
When we’re thinking about taking a new job and we are like, “Will I like it? Will I not like it?” We don’t know. We can guess and we can do our thought work and coach ourselves about whatever happens, and we can reassure ourselves, and we can love ourselves through it. But there is a certain amount of uncertainty.
And so I think a lot of people get very caught up in that and they get, like I said before, very paralyzed, they’re not going to try shit unless they’re 100% sure how it’s going to work out. And the thing is, the only stuff you’re 100% sure how it’s going to work out tends to be stuff you’ve done before. And I would offer even if with stuff you’ve done before you don’t know 100% how it’s going to work out.
I’ve had bangs before. I probably had some learning from those previous experiences, and I still was like, I want to do it again. And then I did it again and was like, okay, maybe let me make a note for the next time I want bangs that I really actually fucking hate it when hair touches my face. Okay, good to know.
But my point is so many people just are not trying things. They’re not taking any risks, they’re not following any of the ideas that they have about things they could do that would be really cool because they’re really afraid of getting to the point where I’m at now. Where they try something, and it turns out not to be 100% what they want.
But what that means is then they’re not trying anything. And yeah, I’m not saying it’s my favorite thing ever that I got bangs cut and then was like, “Maybe this is not what I wanted.” It’s not my favorite thing ever but I understand that my willingness to want things and try them has created a lot of amazing stuff in my life too.
My willingness to want to have a business and me leaving my corporate job to try having a business, that was a risk. I could have felt a lot of regret. Actually I did feel a lot of regret in the first several years of my business. I had a hard time, I was building a business. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I did figure it out. And now I’m on the other side of that and I’m so proud of what I’ve done and I’m so happy about it.
But there was a lot of parts in the middle where I was trying and trying, and it wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. And it was totally available to me to feel a bunch of regret about that and make what I had done and what I had tried wrong and mean something bad about me. And like I said, I did a lot of that.
But from where I am now I like to see it differently. And I like to see that when I try things I can wrap that trying up in the narrative of me being courageous and trying things and becoming a person who knows how to experiment and not get derailed when some of my experiments don’t turn out to be amazing.
If you know for sure something is going to turn out amazing, it’s really kind of not an experiment, right? And like I said, there’s nothing wrong with doing stuff that you’ve done before and going with your tried and true and all of that. That’s a very valid life choice and I make that choice a lot.
But sometimes in life I want to make a different choice and I want to try new things. And I want to move to a city I've never lived in before. And I want to try having a specific kind of bangs I've never had before because I keep seeing this haircut on the internet and liking it. And that's what I want for myself.
So including that definition in how I think about regret, for me, is really empowering. Because it means I can try all kinds of stuff and then not have to be mean to myself or beat myself up later if some of that stuff doesn't feel as delightful as I thought it would. Now listen, as a little side note here, you never have to beat yourself up and be mean to yourself. But I know for a lot of us that's just very habitual, that's what we do.
So to me, one of the things that's helpful to not do that is orienting myself to these new frameworks of ways of thinking. These new narratives about who I am and what I'm doing in the world so that I can see this test and learn I did with the bangs as something that belongs inside this narrative of I'm a person who tries things and sees what happens and I love that about myself. That also helps me stay out of the judging, and shaming, and beating myself up thing.
So it's like making the decision not to judge and shame ourselves and not to beat ourselves up. But also setting up these narrative frameworks for how we think about ourselves and how we think about our choices that also sort of steer us around that pitfall that maybe is an old habit that our brain sometimes tries to go back to.
Okay, here's the thing, this is an example where I wanted something and I was following my passion and desire, if you will. Yes, passion and desire for a haircut, I think that makes sense. Some of y'all might not, that's fine. But I know that you are all wondering, okay, Kori, but what about when I do something that I regret that I wasn't following my passion, I wasn't following my desire? What about when I've behaved in a way that doesn't align with my values, or doesn't exemplify who I want to be as a person?
And I think that is an excellent and important question. As human beings, we're probably not always going to be living up to our values and ideals. And we're probably not going to always be following our passions and our dreams. Sometimes we do shit because we're scared, sometimes we don't do shit because we're scared. Sometimes it's because we're angry, like we talked about last week.
There's all kinds of situations where you may do something that doesn't fit into that narrative of I'm trying things and I'm becoming a person who tries things and follows my dreams and passions and desires, et cetera. But I think that there is still a way that we can have a conversation about that with ourselves, that we can contain that situation that is still tied to who we want to be as people and that is still tied to a positive self-narrative.
And we talk about this a little bit in the mistake podcast episode, so you may want to go listen to that one also as well. But I think what that looks like is allowing things we do that don't align with our values or don't exemplify who we want to be, allowing those to be information.
Allowing those to be ways we get to know ourselves better. Allowing those to be something about which we can love ourselves more. And we can love ourselves through the experience of really seeing how we're having shortcomings according to our own standards for ourselves.
A lot of us when we do things that don't align to our values or don't measure up to our own standards, we just feel so much shame and self-judgment. We don't even want to look at the thing. We don't want to examine why it happened and we just want to avoid that feeling in the future, it's so emotionally painful for us.
But the thing is, if we don't look at it, I actually think it makes it much more likely we will repeat it. If we don't understand why did I behave in this way? Why did I do this? And we don't get in there and discover what were the thought patterns driving that action? What was going on in my head that this is the thing I chose in that moment? If we don't get to know ourselves in that way, it's going to be hard to make a change and to make a new decision in the future.
Also, it's going to set us up to spend a lot more time in that paralysis thing that I was talking about earlier. Because when we do things that don't line up to who we want to be as people, then we're like, well that's possible, I could wind up here again. I could do something I regret and then that's not fun. And then we're trying so hard to avoid that regret, it's like we're steering right towards it, but we also are pumping the brakes.
And yeah, it is good in real life to pump the brakes if you're steering towards something you don't want to go towards. But what I see people do is pump the brakes so hard that they just stop going anywhere. And they're just frozen in this car that's not going anywhere that's pointed a tree. And they're like, “I don't know how to do anything and not regret it.”
And it gets like very sticky, and it gets very hard to move forward in any direction because it's like people get in this head space of anything I do could be something I regret and how do I ever know I'm in the right direction? And a lot of times in life there is no fucking right direction. There is no way for us to know that the choice we're making is definitely the good one.
And I see this a lot with the way people design their careers. And what I see a lot is that when we're afraid to make a choice because we're afraid that we might regret it in the future, or things might not go the way we want them to, or we can't predict the future so we're just getting stuck in that paralysis thing. People either stay stuck, they stay doing nothing. They repeat the thing they've already done, which is usually exactly what they don't want to do again. Or they do what is traditional.
They do what culture has taught them to do. Because for a lot of people it feels really dangerous to make their own choices about their own lives. And so when it feels too dangerous to make our own choices about our lives, that's when we look to like well, what's the smart thing to do? But when we say, what's the smart thing to do, we mean like what does my culture think the smart thing is to do?
And that's when you have like people, and I see this all fucking over the place, people designing their careers and designing their lives according to what culture has said is smart even though the data in their own lives often suggests it's not smart, it doesn't fit for them, they don't like it. And then they're fucking miserable. And then they're looking around their lives going, “I did everything right. Why do I feel this way?” So it's interesting because then you fucking wind up in regret anyways.
All right, so basically, just trying to avoid regret does not work. It keeps people paralyzed and not doing anything. Or sometimes it has us doing the same shit we've already regretted before because we are refusing to look at why that thing happened.
And it makes it really hard for us to have our own agency and choose our own really interesting, unique things that we want for ourselves in our lives because we're so oriented to will I regret this later? What do the authorities say about what the wise decision is here? And that makes it really hard to make your own decision.
And if you know that you're not going to be kind to yourself if you don't feel good about something later, it makes it really hard to make a unique decision also because none of us want to get in trouble in the future. So if we know if I make this really interesting, unique life, career choice thing, whatever and then if I'm not a million percent happy and have a bajillion dollars in the future, I'm going to judge myself and say I should have stayed in my corporate job. That's setting it up to make it really difficult for you to try anything at all.
At the end of the day, the idea that I really want you to take away is very basic. And that idea is that there's no real way to avoid regret. Trying to avoid regret often leads to regret, either because then we regret our inaction because we got so stuck and paralyzed we didn't do anything. Or we're so unwilling, again, to look at the thing that we regret that we repeat it because we haven't examined our behavior and chosen new ways of being that lead us to different places.
So there's no real way to avoid regret. But regret also doesn't have to mean everything is ruined and terrible. And even when you get into situations where you wish you'd made another choice, you can wrap that information into a narrative that feels really good and helps you stay on track to eventually and ultimately get to a place that feels really good to you.
And the way we can do this is we can find powerful ways to talk about the story of what we've already done. We can wrap what we've already done into the story of like, “Yeah, this one didn't work out the way I wanted it to. But this is part of like me becoming a person who embraces her creative instincts.”
For me and my bangs we’re like, this is part of me becoming a person who takes risks and just tries things. Or this is part of me honoring that I had this desire for a really long time, and I just wanted to try it and see what happened. I can put that all into a positive narrative that I like about myself, and the person I am, and the person I'm becoming.
And if you make a choice and you feel regret, and you want to feel regret about it, and you don't want to behave in that same way again, you can still put that into a positive narrative about who you are. It can be part of a narrative of learning. It can be part of a narrative of becoming. It can be part of how you have a conversation with yourself about what kind of person you want to be and why, and how you're going to actually make that happen.
One final thing I want to leave y'all with is regret is something we feel when we're thinking about the past. And when we're thinking about how the past or things we did in the past don't measure up to what we would prefer. And we're allowed to have whatever feelings we want. We're allowed to regret things we've done if we want to choose that.
And like I said before, I don't think there's really any way to avoid regret. I think it's a normal human feeling that everybody feels sometimes. But also what I want you to think about is, again, regret is past focused. But the past is done. You can't change the past now.
We can change how we think about it. We can change the story we're telling about it. We can change the story from telling a story about why we suck to telling a story about why we're becoming someone really powerful and awesome. But at the end of the day, it's all about the past.
And you can't create your dream life in your past. You can't create you're satisfied as fuck life in your past. The only place you can be satisfied as fuck is in the right now. And we can be setting ourselves up to be satisfied as fuck in the future.
So if you're feeling a lot of regret, if you're afraid of feeling a lot of regret in the future, I just want you to think about that's a valid fear, but what if we reorient you from what you're afraid will happen or how upset you are about why happened in the past to what you want to create. Who you want to be. Who you want to become. What you want to build for yourself in your life and your career in the now and in the future.
And listen, you don't have to do that work alone. If you want to come do that work with me and a group of truly amazing, inspiring, incredible humans, come join the Satisfied As Fuck group coaching mastermind. The wait list is open now, it's on my website. I would love to have you on it. All right, that's what I got for y'all. Talk to you next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
You are listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It, the podcast for ambitious, high-achieving women who are ready to stop feeling stressed about work and kiss burnout goodbye forever. Whether you’re starting a business or staying in your day job, this show will give you the coaching and guidance you need to start loving your work today. Here’s your host, Career Coach, Kori Linn.
Hey y’all, happy Wednesday. How are you? I am doing – How am I doing? I think I’m doing pretty well. I just took a walk outside. It’s beautiful and sunny here, pretty warm, high 50s maybe 60 degrees. And really this is the kind of weather I moved here for, so I’m pretty excited about that.
But what we’re actually talking about this week is regret. And sometimes the weather here hasn’t been so pretty and not what we moved here for. Although interestingly even when that’s the case I think I haven’t regretted moving here.
But sometimes we do regret things, right? In our careers and our lives sometimes we make choices where we wish we had made a different choice. And what I see a lot with my clients and my audience is that they get kind of stuck in a paralysis because they’re afraid that they’re going to feel regret later.
So there’s regret and then there’s also fear of regret, or when we let potential regret in the future kind of keep up stuck in the current moment or keep us from trying things we think might be interesting. And I have a real life example from my life. So, not about the weather in Sacramento, where we’ve moved to. But actually it’s something else that has nothing to do with work but I’m going to share it with you anyways because I think it’s a really great example of one kind of regret.
So my example is that I wanted to get bangs and I did. And when I wanted them I wanted them for, I think, at least a year before I actually had them cut. And I have had them before in the past, I just really love bangs. I love how they look, I think they’re so cute.
And I remembered that growing them out is kind of a pain in the ass and it’s not all fun and games because you have to style them and they’re shorter hair and they don’t always go back in ponytails and stuff like that. But after wanting them for like a year I decided just to go for it, I think it was around the end of October.
And so this has really been an interesting experience for me because as soon as I had the bangs cut I loved them, I was like, yeah, look at these. And then when I went and got in the car and took my mask off, because I got the haircut with a mask on. As soon as I took the mask off and I saw them with my full face I was like, uh, I’m not actually sure that I like this so much.
So that’s super interesting just on another note of sometimes we like something and then we’re seeing it in a way that isn’t the way we’ll actually engage with it mostly. And then we see it the way we’ll actually engage with it, like me once I had my mask off, and we’re like, oh, I don’t like that as much as I thought I would.
The other thing with the bangs is they fucking touch my face. I mean this is something that bangs just do. Hair does this too even when it’s not in bangs. But with bangs in particular they’re going across your forehead so there’s a lot of hair touching your face action there.
Now, I probably even considered these things beforehand, like okay, bangs, they take a long time to grow out, they don’t always look cute, blah blah, blah, it is hair touching your face. But I had become really enamored with the idea of it and so I went for it.
And it’s not that I regret my choice because I actually don’t regret my choice, but I think some people in my current position could regret their choice. They could feel a sense of regret that they’re a smart person and anticipated some things that then turned out to be true and made the choice anyways.
That’s one way of being in the situation that I’m in. And that situation is I got bangs a few months ago and I have been enjoying them as much as possible since I already have them. But I’ve also basically been growing them out since I got them. And like I said, some people would be experiencing a lot of regret.
And I’m a human being over here so probably I’m experiencing some regret sometimes, but not that much. And part of it is because the way I’ve been framing this situation in my head is I wanted something, and I went for it and I’m going to celebrate that.
So a lot of times what I see people do is if they want something and they go for it and then it turns out the way that they want it to, then they celebrate maybe like what they’ve done. I mean some people actually never celebrate, we have whole podcast episodes on that. But let’s just go with the idea that some people are celebrating, but then it’s like they only celebrate when it goes perfectly.
So someone else in this position would be like okay, I really wanted the bangs, I got the bangs. Then I didn’t like them, so this was a big fuck up and I have to feel regret and I have to judge myself and be all up on myself about this. That’s an option that some people do. Versus what I really want to pitch here is seeing things that we do to try to create the life we like, and the dream life, and the satisfied as fuck life, career, et cetera.
Seeing all of those tests that we’re doing, all those things that we’re trying when we don’t actually know if we’ll totally like the outcome or not. I want to frame all of those as wins. I want to frame all of those as things we can celebrate, as delights, and as worthy of us including in the vision of a life well lived.
Okay, so what do I actually mean by this? What I actually mean is we don’t always know ahead of time when we’re going to try something new that we think we may like, we don’t always know if we’re going to like that thing or we’re not. We don’t always know if it’s going to work out the way we want it to.
When we’re thinking about taking a new job and we are like, “Will I like it? Will I not like it?” We don’t know. We can guess and we can do our thought work and coach ourselves about whatever happens, and we can reassure ourselves, and we can love ourselves through it. But there is a certain amount of uncertainty.
And so I think a lot of people get very caught up in that and they get, like I said before, very paralyzed, they’re not going to try shit unless they’re 100% sure how it’s going to work out. And the thing is, the only stuff you’re 100% sure how it’s going to work out tends to be stuff you’ve done before. And I would offer even if with stuff you’ve done before you don’t know 100% how it’s going to work out.
I’ve had bangs before. I probably had some learning from those previous experiences, and I still was like, I want to do it again. And then I did it again and was like, okay, maybe let me make a note for the next time I want bangs that I really actually fucking hate it when hair touches my face. Okay, good to know.
But my point is so many people just are not trying things. They’re not taking any risks, they’re not following any of the ideas that they have about things they could do that would be really cool because they’re really afraid of getting to the point where I’m at now. Where they try something, and it turns out not to be 100% what they want.
But what that means is then they’re not trying anything. And yeah, I’m not saying it’s my favorite thing ever that I got bangs cut and then was like, “Maybe this is not what I wanted.” It’s not my favorite thing ever but I understand that my willingness to want things and try them has created a lot of amazing stuff in my life too.
My willingness to want to have a business and me leaving my corporate job to try having a business, that was a risk. I could have felt a lot of regret. Actually I did feel a lot of regret in the first several years of my business. I had a hard time, I was building a business. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I did figure it out. And now I’m on the other side of that and I’m so proud of what I’ve done and I’m so happy about it.
But there was a lot of parts in the middle where I was trying and trying, and it wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. And it was totally available to me to feel a bunch of regret about that and make what I had done and what I had tried wrong and mean something bad about me. And like I said, I did a lot of that.
But from where I am now I like to see it differently. And I like to see that when I try things I can wrap that trying up in the narrative of me being courageous and trying things and becoming a person who knows how to experiment and not get derailed when some of my experiments don’t turn out to be amazing.
If you know for sure something is going to turn out amazing, it’s really kind of not an experiment, right? And like I said, there’s nothing wrong with doing stuff that you’ve done before and going with your tried and true and all of that. That’s a very valid life choice and I make that choice a lot.
But sometimes in life I want to make a different choice and I want to try new things. And I want to move to a city I've never lived in before. And I want to try having a specific kind of bangs I've never had before because I keep seeing this haircut on the internet and liking it. And that's what I want for myself.
So including that definition in how I think about regret, for me, is really empowering. Because it means I can try all kinds of stuff and then not have to be mean to myself or beat myself up later if some of that stuff doesn't feel as delightful as I thought it would. Now listen, as a little side note here, you never have to beat yourself up and be mean to yourself. But I know for a lot of us that's just very habitual, that's what we do.
So to me, one of the things that's helpful to not do that is orienting myself to these new frameworks of ways of thinking. These new narratives about who I am and what I'm doing in the world so that I can see this test and learn I did with the bangs as something that belongs inside this narrative of I'm a person who tries things and sees what happens and I love that about myself. That also helps me stay out of the judging, and shaming, and beating myself up thing.
So it's like making the decision not to judge and shame ourselves and not to beat ourselves up. But also setting up these narrative frameworks for how we think about ourselves and how we think about our choices that also sort of steer us around that pitfall that maybe is an old habit that our brain sometimes tries to go back to.
Okay, here's the thing, this is an example where I wanted something and I was following my passion and desire, if you will. Yes, passion and desire for a haircut, I think that makes sense. Some of y'all might not, that's fine. But I know that you are all wondering, okay, Kori, but what about when I do something that I regret that I wasn't following my passion, I wasn't following my desire? What about when I've behaved in a way that doesn't align with my values, or doesn't exemplify who I want to be as a person?
And I think that is an excellent and important question. As human beings, we're probably not always going to be living up to our values and ideals. And we're probably not going to always be following our passions and our dreams. Sometimes we do shit because we're scared, sometimes we don't do shit because we're scared. Sometimes it's because we're angry, like we talked about last week.
There's all kinds of situations where you may do something that doesn't fit into that narrative of I'm trying things and I'm becoming a person who tries things and follows my dreams and passions and desires, et cetera. But I think that there is still a way that we can have a conversation about that with ourselves, that we can contain that situation that is still tied to who we want to be as people and that is still tied to a positive self-narrative.
And we talk about this a little bit in the mistake podcast episode, so you may want to go listen to that one also as well. But I think what that looks like is allowing things we do that don't align with our values or don't exemplify who we want to be, allowing those to be information.
Allowing those to be ways we get to know ourselves better. Allowing those to be something about which we can love ourselves more. And we can love ourselves through the experience of really seeing how we're having shortcomings according to our own standards for ourselves.
A lot of us when we do things that don't align to our values or don't measure up to our own standards, we just feel so much shame and self-judgment. We don't even want to look at the thing. We don't want to examine why it happened and we just want to avoid that feeling in the future, it's so emotionally painful for us.
But the thing is, if we don't look at it, I actually think it makes it much more likely we will repeat it. If we don't understand why did I behave in this way? Why did I do this? And we don't get in there and discover what were the thought patterns driving that action? What was going on in my head that this is the thing I chose in that moment? If we don't get to know ourselves in that way, it's going to be hard to make a change and to make a new decision in the future.
Also, it's going to set us up to spend a lot more time in that paralysis thing that I was talking about earlier. Because when we do things that don't line up to who we want to be as people, then we're like, well that's possible, I could wind up here again. I could do something I regret and then that's not fun. And then we're trying so hard to avoid that regret, it's like we're steering right towards it, but we also are pumping the brakes.
And yeah, it is good in real life to pump the brakes if you're steering towards something you don't want to go towards. But what I see people do is pump the brakes so hard that they just stop going anywhere. And they're just frozen in this car that's not going anywhere that's pointed a tree. And they're like, “I don't know how to do anything and not regret it.”
And it gets like very sticky, and it gets very hard to move forward in any direction because it's like people get in this head space of anything I do could be something I regret and how do I ever know I'm in the right direction? And a lot of times in life there is no fucking right direction. There is no way for us to know that the choice we're making is definitely the good one.
And I see this a lot with the way people design their careers. And what I see a lot is that when we're afraid to make a choice because we're afraid that we might regret it in the future, or things might not go the way we want them to, or we can't predict the future so we're just getting stuck in that paralysis thing. People either stay stuck, they stay doing nothing. They repeat the thing they've already done, which is usually exactly what they don't want to do again. Or they do what is traditional.
They do what culture has taught them to do. Because for a lot of people it feels really dangerous to make their own choices about their own lives. And so when it feels too dangerous to make our own choices about our lives, that's when we look to like well, what's the smart thing to do? But when we say, what's the smart thing to do, we mean like what does my culture think the smart thing is to do?
And that's when you have like people, and I see this all fucking over the place, people designing their careers and designing their lives according to what culture has said is smart even though the data in their own lives often suggests it's not smart, it doesn't fit for them, they don't like it. And then they're fucking miserable. And then they're looking around their lives going, “I did everything right. Why do I feel this way?” So it's interesting because then you fucking wind up in regret anyways.
All right, so basically, just trying to avoid regret does not work. It keeps people paralyzed and not doing anything. Or sometimes it has us doing the same shit we've already regretted before because we are refusing to look at why that thing happened.
And it makes it really hard for us to have our own agency and choose our own really interesting, unique things that we want for ourselves in our lives because we're so oriented to will I regret this later? What do the authorities say about what the wise decision is here? And that makes it really hard to make your own decision.
And if you know that you're not going to be kind to yourself if you don't feel good about something later, it makes it really hard to make a unique decision also because none of us want to get in trouble in the future. So if we know if I make this really interesting, unique life, career choice thing, whatever and then if I'm not a million percent happy and have a bajillion dollars in the future, I'm going to judge myself and say I should have stayed in my corporate job. That's setting it up to make it really difficult for you to try anything at all.
At the end of the day, the idea that I really want you to take away is very basic. And that idea is that there's no real way to avoid regret. Trying to avoid regret often leads to regret, either because then we regret our inaction because we got so stuck and paralyzed we didn't do anything. Or we're so unwilling, again, to look at the thing that we regret that we repeat it because we haven't examined our behavior and chosen new ways of being that lead us to different places.
So there's no real way to avoid regret. But regret also doesn't have to mean everything is ruined and terrible. And even when you get into situations where you wish you'd made another choice, you can wrap that information into a narrative that feels really good and helps you stay on track to eventually and ultimately get to a place that feels really good to you.
And the way we can do this is we can find powerful ways to talk about the story of what we've already done. We can wrap what we've already done into the story of like, “Yeah, this one didn't work out the way I wanted it to. But this is part of like me becoming a person who embraces her creative instincts.”
For me and my bangs we’re like, this is part of me becoming a person who takes risks and just tries things. Or this is part of me honoring that I had this desire for a really long time, and I just wanted to try it and see what happened. I can put that all into a positive narrative that I like about myself, and the person I am, and the person I'm becoming.
And if you make a choice and you feel regret, and you want to feel regret about it, and you don't want to behave in that same way again, you can still put that into a positive narrative about who you are. It can be part of a narrative of learning. It can be part of a narrative of becoming. It can be part of how you have a conversation with yourself about what kind of person you want to be and why, and how you're going to actually make that happen.
One final thing I want to leave y'all with is regret is something we feel when we're thinking about the past. And when we're thinking about how the past or things we did in the past don't measure up to what we would prefer. And we're allowed to have whatever feelings we want. We're allowed to regret things we've done if we want to choose that.
And like I said before, I don't think there's really any way to avoid regret. I think it's a normal human feeling that everybody feels sometimes. But also what I want you to think about is, again, regret is past focused. But the past is done. You can't change the past now.
We can change how we think about it. We can change the story we're telling about it. We can change the story from telling a story about why we suck to telling a story about why we're becoming someone really powerful and awesome. But at the end of the day, it's all about the past.
And you can't create your dream life in your past. You can't create you're satisfied as fuck life in your past. The only place you can be satisfied as fuck is in the right now. And we can be setting ourselves up to be satisfied as fuck in the future.
So if you're feeling a lot of regret, if you're afraid of feeling a lot of regret in the future, I just want you to think about that's a valid fear, but what if we reorient you from what you're afraid will happen or how upset you are about why happened in the past to what you want to create. Who you want to be. Who you want to become. What you want to build for yourself in your life and your career in the now and in the future.
And listen, you don't have to do that work alone. If you want to come do that work with me and a group of truly amazing, inspiring, incredible humans, come join the Satisfied As Fuck group coaching mastermind. The wait list is open now, it's on my website. I would love to have you on it. All right, that's what I got for y'all. Talk to you next week. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Love Your Job Before You Leave It. We'll have another episode for you next week. And in the meantime, if you're feeling super fired up, head on over to korilinn.com for more guidance and resources.
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