You’re seated in a red armchair, in a theater, with a large screen in front of you. The tape starts to roll and you realize it’s the movie of your life. Scenes flash before your eyes, stirring memories, and then the screen goes black. How does the movie affect you? Are you sitting there with a grin or a frown? Do you feel satisfaction or regret?
Life doesn’t always turn out the way you planned. People treat you wrong; an employer makes you redundant; or you’re affected by an accident or other unfortunate incident. Sometimes, things don’t turn out the way you planned because of things you have done or failed to do like: throwing out words before thinking, making commitments you failed to keep, leaving things unsaid until it’s too late, spending time in meaningless pursuits. Regret hits the hardest when you feel personally responsible.
When you face crushing disappointments or heartbreak, regret creeps in and it can keep you stuck in the place you most need to move forward from.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can avoid the pain of regret caused by your actions or inaction by applying the following simple rules in your daily life.
Put First Things First
The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
Stephen Covey
When you know what matters most to you and make decisions that reflect those priorities, you reduce the potential for regret. Even if the choice you make doesn’t bring about the outcome you wanted, you’ll be content to know that you made the best decision you could and honoured what matters to you.
When I moved to Canada from Nigeria in 2007, I couldn’t have picked a worse time for my career. Prior to the move, I had been made the first non-founding partner at a reputable law firm and the future looked bright. There were lots of reasons to stay but my husband, Francis, and I had decided on the move to provide better opportunities for our young family. Building my career was important to me but my family was a higher priority.
The best decisions are those that align most closely with your priorities.
What matters most to you may not matter as much to someone else and their choices may reflect the difference in priorities. That’s OK. Basing your decisions on what you value helps you make better decisions, and faster too, as you don’t lose time contemplating incompatible choices. Your decisions are truly yours and you can own them and their results.
Resettling in Canada presented its challenges, for my children and for me, but our decision was the best for us at the time and honoured what mattered most to us.
The 3 Step Process to Identifying your Priorities
You likely have several things that matter to you e.g. family and work. To avoid the tension that rises when faced with decisions regarding competing priorities, it’s important to understand the order of priority. The 3 step process for ordering priorities is:
- Reflect. Consider and make a note of what matters most to you – not what you think should matter, but what does. E.g. relationships, faith, health and well-being and career.
- Rank. Rate them in order of importance to you, from low to high. Note that priorities change with life seasons and adjust them as things change. For example, professional women without dependents may have more flexibility with their careers than those with young children or caring for aging parents.
- Remember. Now that you know what matters to you and how much they matter, keep them at the fore when faced with decisions and make choices that help you keep your priorities in order. For example, if quality time with family is a higher priority than career advancement, it will be easy to decide whether you want a job that has you on the road for weeks at a time.
You’ll experience greater peace when you make decisions according to your highest priorities.
Take Action
“It’s not that we have a short time to live but that we waste a lot of it.”
Seneca
More often than not, regret stems from things you’ve left undone than from the things you’ve done. Fear of failure, people-pleasing, distractions and procrastination are some of the reasons you don’t do the things you want to do. Developing a bias for action will help you quickly make decisions based on your priorities and move promptly into action rather than succumb to the paralysis caused by over-analyzing decisions.
Here are some tips to help you develop a bias for action:
- Do it Now. While putting off things you’re not enthusiastic about may feel good in the moment, procrastinating can build anxiety and, eventually, regret. Cultivate the habit of doing the things you should even when you don’t feel like it. Starting is often the hardest part. To overcome that, break the task down into smaller tasks that won’t feel as daunting.
- Make a plan and execute it. You’ve probably heard it said that a failure to plan is a plan to fail. You may even have learned the truth of that statement from personal experience. When you have a plan, you’re more likely to act. The likelihood increases when you write it down and, if you’re a list maker, there’s the feel good factor that comes from checking things off as you complete them. While planning your activities, leave some grace space in your schedule to think, recover and deal with the unexpected.
- Move past challenges. Obstacles are almost certain to arise when you start taking action and yet, too often, we’re unprepared for them and let them stop us from going after the things that matter. If you’ve driven a vehicle, you’ve probably encountered speed bumps at one time or the other. I don’t know anyone who turns around when they get to a speed bump; they either go over it at full throttle or slow down to negotiate it. Adopting an action-oriented mindset allows you to see challenges as bumps in the road to be jumped over or carefully negotiated. However you choose to navigate the bump, the important thing is that you keep moving.
Live Intentionally
How would you live today if you knew that you have only thirty days to live? What would be different in your relationships, your vocation, your faith? Would you spend more time with loved ones; pray more; be more charitable with your time and resources; finish that project? Whatever you would do, why not start now?
Choose to live everyday as if it was your last.
Go back to that red armchair in the theater. What made you light up as you watched your life play out before your eyes? Do more of it. What made you cringe? Stop doing it. What did you miss seeing? Go after it. In other words, take action to create the life you want. Every day is a gift. Don’t leave your gifts wrapped up in the corner, to be opened someday. No matter where you find yourself today, you can choose to do one thing to move you in the direction of the life you want.
Ready to make regrets a thing of the past? Get your free Avoid Regrets Worksheet here.
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