My life changed when my best friend told me “I don’t live with regrets.”
That was the first time I realized that holding on to regret is a choice, we can choose how we think about the past and its outcomes.
Considering that a regret is a feeling of loss over a past decision, what can we do to deal with those feelings?
Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash
First, we can practice gratitude for what we learned from those past decisions. All too often we see failure as a hideous blight on our lives that we need to cover up. Without failure, we would never know how to succeed!
Every failure is a lesson on how NOT to do something, while a success only tells us one possible way to do something right.
Every failure builds our wisdom so that we can better direct our lives moving forward and increase our chances at succeeding.
If you regret a past failure, turn the situation around and appreciate it for the lesson you learned.
Second, practice gratitude for something in your life that came from a past decision. For every major decision we have in life, there are countless directions the course of our reality may split into.
To not live with regret is to recognize the beautiful things that have come into our lives from those forks in the road.
Take the time today to reflect and write down 3 parts of your life you are grateful for.
Once you have those written, think about how those parts of your life ended up with you.
For example, maybe you hold on to regret for moving to a new city where you did not know anybody, but since moving to that city you have met your best friend or life partner. Or maybe you picked up a hobby that was not possible in your previous city and now you cannot imagine living without it.
Reflect on the value that has been added to your life from that one decision. This can help to push away regret by replacing it with joy for the present.
Finally, let go of the past. We all love to watch the movie of our lives replay in our imagination, saying things like “I could have been a millionaire if I had bought Bitcoin when I heard about it back then!”
Constantly trying to live in the past does nothing for us. We cannot change our past, only learn from it.
Instead of regretting a decision and trying to imagine “how much better your life would have been if I had done something different,” learn to accept your current reality as a product of the past.
Instead of trying to change your past, change your future.
The future is unknown and constantly changing, we only have the present to shape our own story.
What will your story be? Will you languish over past mistakes or will you strive toward the future that you create?
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