by Ken Vincent, Featured Contributor
If you ask anyone that question you will most likely get a response akin to, “Of course we all do”.
We all take courses of action and make decisions in both our personal and professional lives that don’t turn out as hoped. Some even become total disasters. But, I submit to you that those don’t need to be giving you nightmares or fits of regret when you think about them.
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‘m going to give you an exercise to help you put these matters in their proper perspective.
Get a cup of coffee or you favorite tea and write down the three most grievous regrets you have. Why three? Because for most of us if we don’t limit the number we could be writing for days.
Now, pick one and go back to that time and what you knew and based that action upon. Forget how it turned out and all that you know now that you didn’t know then. If you had to make that decision again, knowing only what you knew then would you do the same thing? If the answer to that is yes, then you should strike that off your list of regrets. Keep in mind that it isn’t easy to forget what you now know, so this takes some significant effort.
The next day do it again with three new regrets. You will probably find that most of those regrets were not really mistakes based on the knowledge you had at the time. After all, no one knowingly makes mistakes. It is also likely that the process will bring to mind what you learned from those events and how that knowledge helped avoid similar “mistakes” later. Therefore it wasn’t a total loss.
In my case, it took quite a few days of working at that to clear my slate.
Do you have regrets? How do you deal with them?
You are in good company, Steve. Those of us that have been around for more than a handful of years have learned that a college education is far easier and less expensive that the one dealt by real life.
I have learned much from my past personal and business mistakes. I wish I hadn’t had to go through them but I learned from them all, gained experience and knowledge as well. As the saying goes, “education is expensive”…wow, I should now be the smartest person in the room!