Flipping the Script on Regret and Crafting an Unstoppable Narrative

Ever felt haunted by the "what ifs" and "if onlys" in your life? You're not alone. Join me, as we unravel the complex emotions tied to regret, examining its dual nature and the fictions our brains create. This episode promises to empower you with the tools to challenge your brain's overconfidence in predicting alternate realities, turning the pain of regret into choices that empower. Regret doesn't have to be a source of endless suffering; it can be a story you have the power to rewrite.

We'll explore the transformative power of journaling and reality checks, providing a practical guide to documenting daily predictions and their outcomes. This method not only lessens the sting of regret but also opens up a world of possibilities and action. By reframing regret from an inevitable pain into a conscious choice, we move past the cycle of suffering it causes, paving the way to a life ripe for action towards fulfilling your dreams and goals. You'll learn to see regret as a story we tell ourselves, a story that can be changed.

Lastly, we'll discuss how to harness regret as a superpower, leveraging it for personal growth and future success. I'll share four pivotal questions that can transform regret from a paralyzing force into a motivator for resilience. By embracing regret as part of our authentic journey, we'll discover how it can lead us to a more unstoppable life. So, ready your compass for love and authenticity, and let's embark on this adventure together. Join me next week for more empowering discussions on self-discovery, but in the meantime, my book awaits with deeper insights into living authentically.

Enjoy!!!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

You were listening to the Authentic Life Connection Podcast, episode number 169. Welcome to the Authentic Life Connection Podcast. I'm your host, seth Lusk. I'm a master certified life coach, author, personal trainer and nutrition specialist. For over a decade I've been helping people with their dreams and goals for their life and health.

Speaker 1: 0:28

I've spent many years watching people get frustrated with their journey in life and giving up on taking actions towards their goals. So I dug in deep to find answers to why so many of us face this same frustration and struggle in life. So in this podcast, we're going to dive in deep on topics surrounding what it means to consistently live a fulfilling and authentic life where you are unstoppable in taking action towards your dreams and goals. So the only question is are you ready to start living your most authentic and fulfilling life once and for all? Then let's get started, shall we? Hey, everyone, welcome back to the podcast. For those of you listening in for the first time, welcome, welcome. You picked a great episode to join in on, whether it's your first time or your 100th time or 169th time. It's going to be a great episode because we're talking about something that affects, I would say, 100% of people on this planet, because we all have a human brain and the human brain has a way of creating stories of regret. So at some point in time, every human being, I believe, on this planet will experience the story of regret, and I want to talk with you all about that story today and how we can sort of take our power back from the story of regret so that we no longer see regret as this suffering and this painful thing that happens to us, but it's this empowered experience that we choose. So today, that's what I want to talk with you all about is regret and the fact that, if we look at regret, there's basically two main types of regret that humans experience, and, of course, we can break these down into probably billions of different subcategories, but mainly speaking, we experience two different types of regrets. We have the regret of not ever having done something and we have the regret of having done something and gotten a result that we didn't want. And I want to talk with you all today about how we can sort of shift the story of regret to kind of end this cycle of what I see regret causing so much destruction in people's lives and so much pain and suffering in people's lives taking the power back from regret.

Speaker 1: 2:48

So if we look at what regret is, it's really kind of fascinating because really what regret is is it's basically our story, our brain creating a story about an alternative timeline, an alternative story to life. And what's fascinating about this is, if we really pay attention to the story of regret. Usually our brain is picking like one alternative story, one alternative story where if we had done this or if we had done this differently, then we would have this life and it would be better, and it should have been this way and it could have been that way and it would have been that way. So it's really fascinating when we look at what regret is. It's really just a story. It's just a story that our brain creates, where it like plays out an alternative scenario in our life of if we had done the thing or if we had done this differently, this would have happened. And what's amazing about noticing that is automatically we can see that this is. We can already take so much power back from it.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Because if you guys have observed anything in your life that I have, it's that humans are horrible at predicting the future. The brain is horrible at predicting the future. We think that it's great at predicting the future because when we believe that it's good at predicting the future, what ends up happening is we look for evidence of the fact that the story that we believe is going to happen is going to happen, and if we look for it, we will find evidence of it. But here's what's fascinating is that when I have people journal about regret, when I have people journal about predictions for the future of what's going to happen, and then they honestly look at the prediction, what we find is that there are maybe one or two things in the story that they predicted was going to happen that are kind of true, kind of stretch it out, and we're like, oh yeah, I can see that kind of happen there. You can kind of see that. But there's also so much that they did not predict was going to happen, so much that they had no clue to even think about this could possibly happen in what actually happened. So when you get into this, this habit of sort of journaling this out, the the brain's predictions of the future, you can really already start taking a lot of the power away from regret, because you start to see that the brain is actually quite horrible at predicting the future. There are billions upon billions, upon billions, upon billions, upon billions upon billions, and I could keep going on for ten minutes and not even hit the number of pieces of data that make up the reality that is in this very one second, and then in the next second there are another billions upon billions, but reality is so huge there is no way for our brain to process all pieces of it and predict how all of those pieces are going to come together To create what the next moment is going to bring.

Speaker 1: 5:24

But our brain is designed to believe that it can, because it wants to protect us. That is, its biological drive is to try and protect us and keep us alive and safe. And regret is one of the stories that it uses to keep us in inaction, thinking that that's going to keep us safer. And when the goal of life was survival Because we were running away from dinosaurs and animals that wanted to eat us, and whether that was going to kill us, because we Didn't have places to live and we didn't have ways to protect ourselves from these animals, and blah, blah, blah, blah that was very useful. It kept us in the cave and safe by the fire. But today we don't live in a world where we have to worry about, every time we walk outside it, that saber-tooth tiger is going to kill us, or a volcano is going to erupt and kill us, or, you know, hale is gonna fall from the sky and kill us, or whatever kind of catastrophe is that we didn't know how to protect ourselves from or predict in the. In the past, you know, hurricanes would just come out of nowhere. Now we can see them coming, we know when they're coming, we know how to, you know, prepare ourselves for them and get ready Back. You know, thousands of years ago, I can see how this, this story, had its advantages. It kept us alive. Today, it's not serving us anymore. Today, it's keeping us inside the cave when we want to be out there creating a life that we want, and so instead, what we end up doing is Staying inside the cave and surviving a life that we don't even like.

Speaker 1: 6:41

And then we have all of these stories of regret, watching everybody else get Out there and try out their opportunities, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this brings me to the. We have these two main types of regret. We have the regret of not having done the thing, and we have the regret of having done the thing and gotten a different result. And what I'm here to sort of talk with you all about and advocate for is that, in my experience, people who regret having done the thing and gotten a different result have so much more opportunity in front of them than the people who regret never having tried, and here's what I mean.

Speaker 1: 7:18

Regret is about an alternative storyline. When we regret Having done the thing and gotten a different result, we can use the story of regret and so many different ways to create so many Alternative actions that we could take in the future to create different results. We can learn so much from the story of regret about what we want, what we don't want, what we want different and what we want more of, and and we can do so much with that story instead of sitting in a disempowered state of that. We can do so much more with the story of regret when it's we've done the thing and we got a result that we didn't want to do, that we didn't want and I'll talk about that more here in just a minute. We'll get to that. But first I want to address the alternative form of regret is regretting not having done it. And when we regret not having done the thing, there's only one option, there's only one opportunity, and that's to start taking action. Start taking action.

Speaker 1: 8:22

When we sit in the regret of avoiding regret, of Doing the thing and getting a different result, when we sit in that regret, then we we still experience regret, we still do.

Speaker 1: 8:32

We don't avoid regret. That's the thing. If you're if you're trying to avoid regret, you will experience regret period you will. If you're trying to avoid regret by taking action, you're still going to experience regret, but there's something we can do with it and we're gonna talk about that in a minute. But if you're trying to avoid regret by not taking action, you're also still going to experience regret and there's only one thing you can do with it, which is start taking action. Only one thing, one thing to learn there.

Speaker 1: 8:59

And so what I want to advocate for is that if we're going to experience the story of regret either way and Really what we're trying to avoid is not the story of regret, we're trying to avoid the suffering of regret, which I'm going to show you how we can empower ourselves with regret so that we don't have to suffer with regret. We can use it, but we can't really use it for for very much unless we've already started taking action, and that's what I want to get you all to begin seeing today. You're going to experience the story of regret either way because you have a human brain. That's what the human brain does. It wants to believe that it can predict the future, and it's horrible about it. So, if you are stuck in the regret of not taking action, here's what I want you to begin doing to start taking the power away from regret. I Want you to start journaling Predictions that your brain is making about what's going to happen in your future, in your immediate future, and Then I want you to go back and look at those predictions, not from the perspective of proving it right, but from the perspective of proving it wrong, and here's what I mean by that.

Speaker 1: 10:04

When you look, I want you to write down, I want you to predict what's going to happen today. What's going to happen today? All right, once you want to write it out in as much detail as you can, what exactly is going to happen today, and then, at the end of the day, I want you to go back and reread it. You and I don't want you to reread it looking for evidence of why it did happen or how it did happen. I want you to reread it from the perspective of okay, how is this not actually true? Ask yourself that first. Okay, I want you to sit down and write down all of the ways in which this story did not happen, why it didn't happen exactly as you thought it would happen. And then then, and only then, can you go back and start writing the ways in which it did happen.

Speaker 1: 10:49

And what this is going to do is it's going to shift your perspective on the story by writing how it isn't true. First, you're going to sort of start dismantling your brain's pride and the fact it's ego and the fact that it can predict the future. Because if you immediately go into reading the story from the perspective of, oh, let's prove how it is true, your brain's going to be like oh, this happened, that happened, this happened, that happened, this happened, that happened. It's going to fire off all of the synapses of its own ego and its own identity and the fact that it's a great future predictor. And it's going to be like oh see, look, it can predict the future.

Speaker 1: 11:19

But if you look at it from the other perspective, what you're going to start to notice is huh, you know what? Actually, maybe my brain isn't so great at predicting the future and you have so much more power there. You have so much more power in that space of recognizing that your brain is not an amazing predictor of the future. Then you have power in thinking that it does. I know that we think that we're safer when we believe that our brain can predict the future, but really all it does is keep us in action and keeping us recreating the same story about life and proving ourselves into the circle of living a life that we're stuck with. So, when we approach the story, the predictions of the future from the perspective of my brain is not a great predictor of the future, and I'm going to show myself how it is not a great predictor of the future. You open yourself up to so much more possibility in life and you open yourself up to, kind of like, breaking your own ego down into recognizing I'm holding myself back and you can truly see how you're holding yourself back the truth of how your brain isn't actually great at predicting the future.

Speaker 1: 12:20

It isn't so if you're stuck in that scenario of living in the regret of not having done things and you notice the pattern in your life of you're constantly living in the suffering and the pain of the story of regret, but that the regret is the story of not having done things that you wanted to do and you therefore you never know what would have happened if you had done it. If you find yourself in that story of regret, living in that story of regret, then I want you to try this exercise, try journaling. Just predict what's going to happen today. Just predict and do it for about a week. Do it for about a week and by the end of the week you're going to really start seeing. Really, my brain is horrible at predicting what the future holds. Can I get a couple of things kind of in the ballpark, right? Yeah, sure, it can kind of get me in the ballpark of what could possibly happen, but it's really horrible at predicting the future. It really is.

Speaker 1: 13:13

And get ourselves more in that zone of taking action where we're still going to experience regret, but it's going to be the regret of not getting the results that we want. And you're like well, why in the world do I want to be in that zone of regret? So I just want to avoid regret whatsoever. So, first of all, we have to recognize that the reason why regret has so much power, why regret feels so painful and like so much, there's so much suffering, is because we believe that regret is something that we can avoid and that it's something that we should avoid. So let's take the power away from that, first of all because regret is simply a story that we choose to follow through on. We let our brain play it out. So it's not something that happens to us. It's a choice, it's a thought pattern, it's a story that our brain tells that automatically takes the power away from regret.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Number two recognize our brain will choose a story of regret. It will. It is wired to do so. So recognizing, first of all, that regret is only a story already takes a lot of the pain and the suffering away from regret. But number two, when we recognize that a lot of the pain and suffering that we feel when it comes to regret is that we believe that the story is true. We believe that that story is true and that therefore, we missed out on something so big. That's what creates the pain and suffering of regret. And when we recognize we have agency there, we have power there to do something different with the story of regret and we have a lot of the pain and suffering that we feel when it comes to regret, then we're no longer in that idea that we need to avoid regret. That regret is something that we should avoid because it's painful and it happens to us if we do the wrong thing.

Speaker 1: 15:01

Okay, so we can automatically take away the power of regret being this thing that we have to suffer through if we do the wrong thing? The truth is no, that's not what regret is. Even if we do quote, unquote, the right thing, our brain is still going to be like oh well, what if? Oh well, what if? Oh well, what if? And that's a regret story. It's always that oh well, what if? So when we first recognize our brain is the terrible predictor of the future, we take away power from regret. Then, when we recognize regret is not something that happens to us. It's a story that our brain chooses and we get to choose what to do with that story. We take power away from regret.

Speaker 1: 15:37

And the other way we take power away from regret is, instead of allowing regret to keep us in the inaction, of wondering what if I had done it, we can slip into the regret story of having done it and gotten different results. And here's where the magic happens, my friend. When we've already cast away this idea that we're going to avoid regret and we're in that space of taking action and the story of regret coming up because we didn't get the results that we want, here's where the secret sauce happens. Here's where we have this, is where I love getting my clients into the space of stopping avoiding regret like it's this horrible thing that happens to you, and recognizing okay, regret is just a story and I choose it. But I want to choose the story of regret where I've done the thing that I wanted to do and I got different results, because here's what we can do. So we've already taken away the power of regret, and regretting not having done the thing because you've already done the exercise where you can recognize your brain is a horrible predictor of the future. So therefore, you're in the space of taking action now. Okay. If you're not in the space of taking action now, we should talk. Okay, because I want to get you in that space of taking action.

Speaker 1: 16:43

Here's the other area where I see when people start taking action, where regret comes in and sort of has power and agency over their life again, and I want to help you get rid of regret having a power over your life and you using regret as a power in your life. The other space where I see regret coming in and taking people's power away from them because they choose to actually give it to regret is that they believe they shouldn't have done the thing. They experience the story of regret after doing the thing and getting a different result, and they make that mean I shouldn't have done it. And so they use the story of regret to kind of like, beat themselves up for having taken the action and beat themselves back into the cave of not taking action again. So here's where we can take the power back away from the regret of having done the thing.

Speaker 1: 17:32

When we experience regret from having done the thing, there are four powerful questions that we can ask regret. So I want you to write down these questions. And if you are in that space where you are taking action and you got a different result and the story of regret has come up and it's put you in this place where you're like, oh nope, I've got to go back to the cave, get safe, get safe. We've got to avoid regret. You're not going to avoid regret because if you stay in the cave, you're going to just feel regret about having not taken the action. So you're not avoiding regret. First of all, dismantle that story. You're not going to avoid regret. Period. You're not going to be avoiding yourself. You're going to avoid regret. Okay, but if you're in that space of having taken action and gotten a different result. Here are four questions that you can ask.

Speaker 1: 18:17

Regret that will make regret a superpower for you Because, as I've said in the past, every emotion that we experience is important. Avoiding regret is ridiculous, because we can actually use regret. It is a powerful emotion because there's so much in that story of regret that we can use if we ask it the right questions. So, really, what we want to do is we don't want to react to regret, we don't want to avoid it because we can't avoid it. Period, our brain is always going to produce stories of regret. Stop believing that you're going to avoid regret.

Speaker 1: 18:50

But then, once we stop believing that we want to avoid regret and we allow regret to just kind of come in, we can use it as a superpower instead of reacting to it in this way where we become, like these, emotionally dysfunctional, like we feel like we're out of control of our own actions because we're reacting to regret and fear and injustice and all of these feelings that come up when we feel like regret is like we're trying to fight back against regret. So what if we don't have to fight regret? What if we can use it? What if we can ask it some questions and give it a seat on the couch, some space. Give us some space to tell us some things that we want to know so that we can move forward. Most of us aren't doing this with regret.

Speaker 1: 19:33

So I want to give you four powerful questions that you can ask regret when you notice that in your life. Question number one is when I look at the story of regret, what is in the alternative storyline that I truly desire and want? What's in that story that I want that I believe there is more of in that story? Ask regret, that question first. In this make-believe alternative story that you have made up, that is totally not true, because we already know your brain is a horrible predictor of the future. But let's just play out the story and let's ask the story hey, what's there that I truly desire? What's in that story that is truly important for me, that I want more of in my life? Write it down. Write it down because these are the key to noticing what you want to create in your life and noticing, when you take action, what the purpose of that action is. Ask this question, write it down.

Speaker 1: 20:31

Question number two that we want to ask regret is. So this brings me to the second question that we want to ask regret, and it's important that you ask them in this order. So I'm going to explain here in just a second why. The second question we want to ask regret is what worked? What do I want to repeat next time and do exactly the same the next time? What things worked that I'm like, okay, that is something that I want to do again, and why? Okay.

Speaker 1: 20:59

And the reason why I'm saying ask this first is because what most people do is they immediately want to jump into allowing regret to be the critic, telling it how you did everything wrong and what you should do differently next time, what you should have been, not have been so stupid to have done this and you should have done that and that, and like letting regret have this whole inner critic, judgmental voice. And if you give it the power to do that first, we'll take over the story and not let you see the things that you did that worked. So ask regret to tell you that first, so that regret has a constructive voice before it starts telling you all right now, let's look at adjusting this right here. How can we do this differently? So first question we want to ask regret is what is in this alternative storyline that is important for me, that I want more of in my life. Let's get that right it down.

Speaker 1: 21:50

Second question Okay, what did I do? That worked? That worked well. What did I do that I want to repeat the next time, that I want to just say, hey, listen, that that's that. That is something that I want to repeat, that is something that I don't want to adjust, that is something that I believe in is crucial for this process, and I want to repeat and do it again. Then, and only then, do I allow regret to tell me okay, now let's talk about adjusting. What are some things that we want to do a little bit differently and why do we want to do them differently? Okay, so we want to ask it what are the things that we want to do differently? How do we want to adjust them? How do we want to do it differently? Give regret the chance to say okay, so next time maybe, what if we tried this, or what if we tried that instead? What if we do this instead? Then the fourth question we ask regret is how doing things differently in this way is going to help us have more opportunity to create the things that question number one, the answers to question number one were so those things that were important for us in this alternative storyline. How is doing these things differently in this way going to help us to create more of those things? Those are the four questions I want you to ask.

Speaker 1: 23:02

Regret, okay, and what this does by us asking regret, these four questions, instead of regret becoming this horrible thing that happens to us, that we have to suffer through, that we have to survive, that we have to feel the pain of an oh my God, regret. I shouldn't have done it. Instead of going into all of that, we can say, okay, so the brain has a story about regret. Let's lean in. There's something here for me to learn. There's something here for me to notice that I want more of. There's something here for me to notice about what I did right. There's something here for me to notice about what I want to do differently. There's something here to notice about how this is going to help me to create more of those things that are important for me in life. And so we get to see regret as being an opportunity and it helps us to move more into that second type of regret, instead of the regret of not having done the thing. When we recognize if I'm going to experience regret anyways, by asking regret, these four questions, we say sign me up for the regret of having done it and gotten it a different, gotten a different result. Because in this space of choosing that form of regret, we have so much more opportunity to learn.

Speaker 1: 24:20

When we choose the first form of regret of not having done it, the only opportunity that we have is to start taking action. That's it. You. Just you have to get up and start taking action, start doing the thing and learning from it and letting the story of regret come up because it's going to happen. So first we get rid of that story about the fact that we're ever going to avoid regret. You will not avoid regret. You have a human brain. Regret is part of the process of being a human. Our brain is designed to create stories of regret. So not taking action is not going to avoid regret, but it is going to put you in the spiral of regret of just sitting there and just being like just take action. Just take action, because the only thing you can do is just start taking action Versus being like, okay, if I'm going to experience regret anyways, sign me up, let me do the thing, let me get the results that I don't want, and then let me ask regret, these empowered questions, instead of fearing it and using it to beat up an old version of myself that didn't have the information that I now had because I took the action and got the results that I didn't want, so I only had this information.

Speaker 1: 25:23

I'm using it to beat up a past version of myself that didn't have that information, which is totally cruel and unfair and like when we really pay attention to it, we can notice how ridiculous and sort of pointless this process is of beating our past self up. But instead, what if we turn that on its head and say, hey, listen, there's regret here. Let me lean in, let me look, I did something. I did something right if regret is here and telling me that there's something that we want different? And then we lean into regret and we ask it those four powerful questions. Question one what is in this alternative storyline that I want more of in my life, so that I'm clear on what I want to create? Question two what did I do right, what worked and what do I want to repeat the second time around. This next time around, what do I want to keep and do again? Number three what can be adjusted? What can be adjusted? And number four how is this going to help me create the answers to question number one in my life? Ask regret. These four empowering questions to make regret your superpower. Make it something that pushes you, that drives you into action, versus hiding in the cave and avoiding, avoiding regret as if you're going to avoid it anyways.

Speaker 1: 26:37

My friends, I want to teach you all how to take unstoppable action towards creating the life that you are authentically designed to experience and feel fulfilled by, and avoiding regret is not going to do it for you. Avoiding regret is not going to do it for you. If you notice yourself in these cycles of avoiding regret, not taking action to try and avoid regret, let's talk. Let's talk about how we're going to break apart that story and get clear on what it is that you truly want and the action steps that you're going to take to create it. And then how you're going to use regret when it comes up because it's still going to come up anyways how you're going to use it to keep creating unstoppable steps towards creating that vision of purpose, but first, my friends, you have to have a clear vision of what it is that you truly want for your life.

Speaker 1: 27:26

What I see so many of you all out here doing that are taking actions and trying to just like work through regret is that you're taking actions towards something that you're surviving instead of taking actions towards something that is authentically important for you. So you need to be clear on that first, and then we can start using regret as a superpower. Stop being afraid of experiencing regret and get out there and say regret, yes, sign me up for it. Sign me up for it and I'm going to learn through it and I'm going to use it to pull me forward into the life that I truly desire. I love you all. That's all I've got for you all this week.

Speaker 1: 28:05

I just basically want to tell you all regret is not something we need to fear. Regret is not something that we need to avoid. It's not something that we can't avoid, and I want to begin seeing more of you all using it as your superpower. So get out there. Let's use regret as a superpower in 2024. I love you all. I'll talk to you again here next week. Until then, ciao, you can also check out and order your copy of my book to get a taste of what I'm all about as a person and as a coach. I'm so happy that you joined us today, and I hope to have you here again next week. So until then, let authenticity be the guide to your most unstoppable and fulfilling journey of life.