It’s a pet peeve of mine when people say they “don’t have regrets.” While I understand what they mean by that, I think it’s too dismissive of the lessons we learn from a life fully lived. In fact, I can name several regrets I have, without hesitation. From the way I handled friends and extracurriculars in and after high school, to my own missteps as an emotionally dysregulated young mother, plus a few more examples, you’ll see that I am far from perfect.
When regret leads to resentment and shame, it can be more harmful than helpful. What’s helpful is learning lessons from our past mistakes, what’s harmful is dwelling on our imperfections and making them mean something untrue about our identity. In this episode I walk through some of my regrets using my four step method designed to help you do the same on your own. My hope is that this helps you disentangle your identity from your mistakes, and allows you to move forward in your growth.
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TRANSCRIPT
Monica: Welcome to About Progress. I’m Monica Packer, a regular mom and recovering perfectionist who uncovered the truest model to dramatic but lasting personal growth. It’s progress made practical. Join us to leave the extremes behind and instead learn how to do something to grow in ways that stick. Do you find yourself regretting some failures that you’ve had with your habits?
What have you found out the truth about how you were set up to fail? Take my free class to learn more. Call the number one reason why women must do habits differently by going to about progress.com/habit class us.
I want to apologize in advance because I might break into song just a few times in this episode because I can’t cover this topic without this initial song in my mind, regrets. I’ve had a few. That was my terrible impersonation of Frank Sinatra. But alas, I’m not allowed to play the song my way because of royalties.
It would be illegal. I don’t wanna get sued, so you got my crummy voice instead. Today we are going to talk about regrets, and I want to dig into this by first admitting that I have a big pet peeve about how I hear people talk about regrets, and this is more just like public kind of people as an avid podcast listener. I also love good documentaries, and one of my weird things is I love to study interviews like how an interviewer interviews someone so I can learn from their craft anyway, and all these three areas I’ve, I’ve had one of these pet peeves crop up for me where the interviewer asked the person who’s being interviewed some form of this question, what do you regret?
And the answer that makes me so mad is when they say, I don’t have regrets. Now, I personally feel that you have not fully lived if you do not have regrets. I can acknowledge that many people answer. I don’t have regrets, or I don’t believe in regrets because they like to see their missteps as opportunities to learn and that’s great.
I can, I can definitely value that. I think most of the time though, there’s like this undercurrent of fear of failure going on. However, I think most of us, if we were being very honest with ourselves, have regrets and sometimes we have many of them.
Regrets aren’t just about missteps and mistakes and failures from our past. Regrets are the kind of missteps, mistakes and failures that if we were to go back in time, we would indeed change them. What regrets do you have that come to mind right away for you? I have some that I can just snap my fingers and know. Here are some of them.
I regret the way I dropped my dearest friends during my senior year because of this newer friend that I had who I thought needed me emotionally, like she was going through a hard time. But now I look back and I can see I did that more because she was part of this cool kids group, a group that I had never been accepted by in the past. I really regret that.
I regret that Brad and I didn’t go on more trips or solo walks and date nights before we had kids because we thought we didn’t have the time or the money.
I regret that I stopped regularly dancing, playing the flute, and acting after I finished high school. I regret how dysregulated I could be as a young mom with little kids who truly didn’t know any better than they did. Ugh. That doesn’t even feel good, right? To say out loud. I don’t enjoy living in those regrets or processing them or feeling them, but they’re totally there.
This is one of the reasons why I want to bring it up because regrets on their impact still come up for me as a full grown woman. And they come up for my, my, my clients too a lot. And there’s actually something else too that happened to me recently that made me think about how we need to be a little bit more careful about how we handle our regrets.
When I was 33 weeks pregnant back in December, I fell down a flight of stairs. It was on my own accord. I was going down a flight of very slippery wooden stairs, attempting to carry a laundry basket and a vacuum at the same time. So talk about regrets. I definitely regret that. Anyway, I broke my finger and I broke it bad enough that I needed to, you know, wear a splint.
I went to the labor and delivery and all that good stuff and had the x-ray and they said it would heal. Okay. Just heal crooked, which I was fine with cuz I wanted to avoid surgery. I. But two weeks later, I accidentally hit that finger really hard on a metal shelf while I was taking something down. The split was on, but it hurt bad enough.
I was like, oh, I think I just rebroke it. And then a couple hours later, I took the splint off because ironically, I was washing the wood floors. I originally slipped on because the next day we were getting a rug runner installed on those stairs to prevent people slipping. And as I was washing one of those stairs, My cute little then four year old accidentally stomped on that finger on his way down the stairs.
I went back to the orthopedic surgeon and said, hello there. I think my finger is worse now. And they did another x-ray and they said, yes it is, you need surgery. I had to do this surgery at 37 weeks pregnant by that point, and I had to do it without going under. It was not fun. Now, the reason I’m telling the story is not because I’m trying to pat myself on the back for making it through all that horribleness, but by the way, it was horrible And having two pins sticking out of my finger while I tried to nurse a new baby was really hard.
I am telling the story because of what came after. I went through my recovery like a champ. I did everything they told me to. I, I was really careful, treated this as, as carefully as I treated my newborn baby. This finger was another newborn baby, and I finally got those pins taken out. They told me to come back a few weeks later after some more healing.
Did that, and it was great. There’s like, yep, your finger is now officially healed. But there was one problem. My finger was not bending at all, like it was stiff as a board and there was no move. And I thought after having surgery, I was doing that so I could then play the piano and the flute and do the things around the house that I wanted to do.
Like kneading bread is actually kind of hard with the finger that’s not working. And I said, oh, that’s because you have scar tissue. And then he pointed at the x-ray and showed me that scar tissue and just how thick and gnarly it was. And now the past two months I’ve been trying to work on that scar tissue and my friends, it is incredibly uncomfortable.
I have a, when then pairing with this a when then pairing is a way that I help teach women on how to form habits so that you don’t have a dangling habit, right? When I’m driving my kids around, which happens a few times a day, then I do my exercises I’m supposed to do to help this finger bend, and basically what that means is I have to force it to bend.
Right now I’m doing it and I can bet get it to bend about two more centimeters than I could two months ago. I finally started physical therapy last week and she taught me some more exercises that I could do, of course, but I’m still astonished about how little this finger can move and how painful scar tissue is to try to move through.
Hopefully I don’t have to now hit you over the head with why this story matters. This scar tissue is like resentment. When we live in our regrets, when we let those regrets control a lot of how we view ourselves, how we view our capacity to choose in our lives, to show up to our lives, to live in the way that we want to.
Regret can be like the scar tissue. It can make it so we are limited in what we’re able to do and who we’re able to be. Regrets are something we all have, like I said, but they are bad when they lead to resentment and or shame. Neither of those things are helpful. So what are we supposed to do when we do have valid regrets in our lives?
We have to work on the scar tissue. This means that we have to be willing to handle a certain level of discomfort. For some of us, that will mean we do things like stretches and exercises to work on that scar tissue. For others that may demand a full surgery of digging into these regrets and digging out what is no longer helpful about having these regrets.
Now, depending on how big the regret is or how long you’ve had it, and to what extent it’s led to resentment and or shame in your life. Today, I want to offer four steps that I advise taking as you are working on the scar tissue of your regrets. And these four steps can apply to whatever the regret is, but also to the extent it is.
So whether you’re just doing exercises or you’re doing a full surgery on these regrets, these four steps apply. Step number one is to zoom out. When you notice yourself regretting something from your past, I want you to objectively get curious about this regret, zoom out to the full bird’s eye view of this regret.
Most importantly, with those regrets, Consider the circumstances that surrounded those regrets. How, what were the circumstances and how did they influence what you regret? How were your choices? Maybe limited by the circumstances that you had? What did you know at the time and what did you not know at that point in your life?
Zoom out, get curious, and see things more objectively without shaming yourself. The second step is to then insert compassion. Now, I wanna point out two things here. I have shared in some growth spurts this year about some progress principles. One is to get curious, and we did that in zoom out. The second is compassion.
Having self-compassion is what helps us grow more over time. So this is where that comes in right now. This is when after we’ve taken stock of what was really going on surrounding these regrets in, in that time, we look at our past selves and the circumstances, but we do it almost like we’re seeing someone else and we’re having compassion on that person.
Almost look at your past self as you would a child version of yourself. And how can doing so help you see the errors and the flaws of that little person, their lack of experience, their lack of maturity, the hard circumstances they were in, and how can you choose to have compassion towards that younger person?
If you’re struggling with this, here’s a phrase I adopt that helps me insert compassion when I’m struggling. Especially when I’m struggling with the ugh feeling of when I’m thinking about some past regrets I have. I’ll say to myself, I only knew what I knew when I knew it. How did you only know what you knew when you knew it?
And how can embracing what you knew at the time, which is oftentimes so little, give you more compassion that you need to then move on to the two bigger and final steps to come more on that in just a bit. But first, let’s take a quick break for our sponsors.
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So far we’ve talked about zooming out and inserting compassion. Our third step is to then turn the regrets into wishes. Once we’ve inserted that compassion, what we do now is we can acknowledge that there were some things we honestly could have known and done better with, and there are some things that we could not have known better and done better with.
Either way. I think it’s helpful to, with what, whatever regrets we can, it’s not all of them. We can see some of them more as wishes than regrets. Mostly because if we were to go back with the same knowledge, the same circumstance, the same maturity and life experience behind us, we wouldn’t necessarily have been able to do anything different.
Let me share some examples of ones like this in my own history where I can take the regret and turn it more into a wish because. I couldn’t really change much of what happened or how I dealt with it at that point in my life. One is that I wish a professional had taken my concerns more seriously that I had with my oldest child and much sooner so that we could have had more support for her.
She’s on the autism spectrum if you don’t know, so I wish a professional had taken my concerns more seriously, but I know I did my best to make that happen. Here’s an example of when you are turning a regret into a wish, you state it as like, I wish this had happened, or, I wish I had done this differently, but, and then the dot, dot dot.
There is an acknowledgement of that compassion piece of inserting that compassion there. So let me share a few more. I wish I’d had the bandwidth to go to graduate school after graduating from college, but my mental health was unstable and I’m proud of myself for prioritizing that as much as I could.
Let’s do two more examples. I wish and again, wishes instead of regret here. I wish Brad and I had had more time to date just for fun, so we could have known each other even more before we had gotten married, but we had the timeline we had, and I’m grateful he’s a man. I married. And a final example for you, I wish I hadn’t sent an old boyfriend some clipped fingernails in the mail because I thought he’d think it was funny. He didn’t. Okay. But I was young, I was immature. I had never had a boyfriend before, and I didn’t have the foresight that I have now of the likelihood of me being the butt of all party stories to this day for him.
I’m sure. Because honestly that was downright freaky as heck that I did that. Okay, so regardless of what your regrets are, what, whether they’re pretty serious or not, I hope that gives you a good example of variety there. Insert, I wish instead of regret and then a, but at the end of it to acknowledge, but this is what life was like then or, but this is how I lacked the maturity, or this is what I didn’t know then that I know now.
Regrets can definitely be about choices we made, but we can turn regrets into wishes when those choices were really the only ones we kind of had at the time. Yeah, we would do it differently. Now if we were to have the same scenario now, but back then, maybe that’s all we had. Even if that was last week, the final step, whether or not you can turn a regret into a wish, this is what you do, you turn the regrets into lessons.
I see this as pretty challenging, honestly, but it happens best if you followed at least the first two steps, and if you can’t turn it into a wish, that’s okay. But if you have that, that zoom out and you have the facts in front of you, and then if you have the compassion piece to it, I think you will then be able to do this the most easily.
Turning those regrets into lessons, ask yourself some questions about these regrets. How do your prior mistakes show you? Now what really matters? How can some regrets help you pinpoint what values you want to ensure you are better prioritizing in your life right now, the relationships you want and need better, the ambitions you want to pursue.
I am going to apply this example to two regrets that. Honestly, I did know better in the moment. I did have some choices, but I made them anyway. In fact, that’s just one of the ones I’m gonna share. The second is kind of a, a mix of the, the last two steps here. So let’s start with one where I’m like, I did know better when I was about to graduate from high school.
I promised myself that I would not be one of those people that stopped playing my musical instruments and doing the things I loved, like dancing and performing. But I didn’t get into anything in college that I wanted to. I wasn’t good enough to get into the musical production program that I auditioned for.
I wasn’t good enough to get into a more advanced band that I wanted to be in. I wasn’t good enough to have the flute teacher at the college level want to work with me, and I found myself losing my desire over time to practice to hold those up. And now I. I play the piano more for my own emotional… I guess when I’m trying to process things like emotional regulation and I play the flute maybe twice a year when I’m asked to at church, and I’m disappointed in that.
I’m also disappointed I don’t perform in any way. Right. So I’m gonna walk through the couple steps, like I can zoom out now and I can see my circumstances from back then. I, I felt insecure at that time in my life. I wasn’t used to being such a huge failure, and I was also beginning to have a few years of pretty hard mental instability.
And that actually went back to that dumb boyfriend who did in fact break up with me after that finger, no clipping incident. Maybe the two are related. Don’t know. So with those circumstances of mine, I can then insert compassion because I knew what I knew when I knew it. And that’s nice to to remember and to tell myself you only knew that when you knew it be.
So, even though I did technically know better about the choices surrounding those important parts of my life, Here’s what I can go on to. I wish I hadn’t, but here are some lessons I can learn from that. Some of those lessons include some things that I really believe in deeply. Now, I deeply believe in this idea that it’s never too late.
When I was 18 and I didn’t make those programs, I thought it was too late for me to keep trying. And to, I don’t know, maybe try in the same capacity of trying out for those things or even just for myself or finding another way. So that’s a big lesson for me. It’s never too late. Also, some another lesson is that failure is an important part of the process.
I thought failure at that time meant that I was a failure and needed to stop something. I also learned the lesson that creativity really matters to me, and that performing in some way, both creativity and performance are essential to my soul. Now, it’s not like I’m going to now become a flutist in a local I don’t know, band or even the symphony.
It’s not like I’m gonna suddenly pursue a dream to go on Broadway, but I can take some grander and more generalized lessons from that regret and. Turn it into ways that I’m now going to do things differently now, and weirdly, I think the podcast has been a wonderful way for me to apply all those lessons.
Before I officially sign off, I wanna share one more. This example is kind of a combination of I did know better, but I also didn’t, you know, that kind of thing. So here’s the regret and then I’m gonna walk through the steps for you. I regret how dysregulated I could be as a young mom with little kids who truly didn’t know any better.
I shared that one at the beginning of the episode. Now this one is admittedly still a toughie for me. It’s not like I don’t regret that anymore. I do. I really regret how dysregulated I could be as a young mom. So let’s start with the zoom out. The zoom out is, it was a really tough situation. I had three very small children.
Brad was almost never home. We didn’t have money to hire out, support or help. And also I was living in a world of shoulds about whether what motherhood should look like and feel like, and I. Wasn’t able to show up the way I wanted to cuz I was tired and I also had some special needs kids I didn’t know were special needs yet officially.
Right? So there’s a zoom out and having that knowledge helps me have a little bit more compassion towards myself. Like, oh Monica, you did know better in terms of like getting mad about spilled milk. Yeah, you did know better. Like that was a dumb thing to get mad about, but, We know the circumstances and we know where you were at in your life and your maturity.
So we can turn that into like, I wish. So some things I can say I, I wish I’d had more support sooner as a young mom. I wish I knew then what I know now about emotional regulation and how me as a parent, it matters more than anything else. I had a friend recently say that online, Julie Taylor, she just put on her stories and I was like, you know, snapping my fingers on my side of the screen.
She said, I think the only skill we need to perfect as a parent is emotional regulation for ourselves. And man, she’s right. And I think one other wish I could say there, I wish someone had noticed and stepped in sooner for me so that I could have been the mom I wanted to be for my first like two or three kids.
So there’s the wish part, and let’s go into some lessons. And I shared some of that self-regulation, just how much that matters. I’ve also learned a sense of self as everything as a parent too, like having a strong inner support and also getting support when and how you need it, whether that’s through therapy or a counselor, or coaching, or even just hiring a little mommy’s helper to come and, and not be as expensive as like a nanny or, or an older babysitter.
And by the way, we have an episode coming next Monday. If that regret I shared with you, like how dysregulated I was, if that’s something you share. So there’s the final example of me walking through all those four steps. And when I, when I share these steps with you, I do want to acknowledge to you still, these are regrets still.
It’s not like a Pollyanna lens where you just say, life is all good. I’d never made any mistakes, and I’m really happy with every choice I’ve ever made my entire life. It doesn’t need to be that way, but it also doesn’t need to be us going down the path of resentment and shame because that’s when the scar tissue comes up and that’s when it builds up and that’s when our hearts harden and we stay stuck.
So instead, I’m gonna leave you with a final little push here. We’ve gone through two other pro progress principles here of getting curious and using compassion. And another one that you’ve heard me talk about is having courage. I want you to have the courage to do this, to being willing to be in the discomfort and to dig around in the scar tissue a bit for yourself.
Have the courage to do that, and then have the courage to learn and then to try to implement what you learned from this to try again to start anew. I feel like with time, The regrets that you have and I have, they can become the wishes and lessons that we need to with more time, be the person that we want to be.
And then the best news is, as you are learning to better deal with these regrets, you can look back on your life, you can own your regrets, and if someone asks you about them, you can talk about what you learned from them. And you can say, Even with those regrets, I did it my way.
I did try to move away from the microphone on that last little beat there, but I’m sorry if that blew out. Your eardrums. Oh my friends, I hope this episode gave you the hug and kicking the pants you need to grow. Let’s share the progress pointers from the episode. This is where I share the point, the, the notes I took, so you don’t have to, number one, we all have regrets.
What we don’t want is for our regrets to turn into resentment or shame. Number two, to work on this, follow these steps. Zoom out, get curious about the circumstances surrounding your regrets. Insert compassion. Create loving understanding about your circumstances, yourself and your choices. Turn regrets into wishes, turn regrets into lessons your do.
Something challenged for this week is to choose just one regret from your past. Maybe something that’s a little bit less deep so you can practice with it, and then walk through those four steps. When you’ve done that, I would love to hear from you about how it goes. You can DM me, you can email me, and I love to spotlight from the people who do the do something challenge or to just share about progress in any way.
Twice a month on our growth Spurt episodes, I spotlight a progressor. So I’d love to be able to spotlight you. Before we go, I want to remind you to get on the wait list for Finding Me Academy. Now I have plans to launch us in the fall, and before I open up to the general public, I’m going to offer it first to the wait list.
And this is my coaching program that used to be called the Progress Program, and it’s going to be expanded and deepened and it’s a beautiful combination of a community, a course, and coaching for a year. Because that’s how long it takes to really change, I think. Thank you so much for listening. Now go and do something with what you learned today.
