When You Feel Regret

In this episode, I’m talking about regret, the kind that keeps us replaying old decisions and questioning ourselves.

After coaching a lot of folks recently, I noticed how often regret shows up in business and life. Regret about things we did. Regret about things we didn’t do. Regret about money spent, time invested, opportunities missed.

We’ll look at:

• Why your past self probably made the best decision she could
• The difference between learning from a decision and punishing yourself for it
• The two kinds of regret (doing it vs. not doing it)
• And how to keep making decisions without turning yourself into your own worst critic

If you’ve been stuck in “What was I thinking?” or “What if I had just…?” — this one’s for you.

And if you want support working through a decision in real time, you can join my free monthly group coaching call at www.tamarcoaching.com/group

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Yo yo yo guys, welcome back to the podcast. Brave Little Things. Welcome home. Hope you guys are doing well. I'm doing so good. My kid, who I know I've been sharing about, even had a whole podcast on him, fighting for what you want. He just walked in the door from being a week out in the sand dunes, basically, in the rain, doing crazy army stuff, and he totally got to the other side of that for an entire week. It's been insane. So he just walked in the door and he is okay and he is safe and he is home and he did it. So there's a lot of excitement happening in my house. So you might hear things. His sisters came home early from school because they heard he just got home. Lots of joy, lots of excitement. I hope you guys are experiencing the same kind of joy and excitement over there. All right, we're gonna talk a little bit about something I think is kind of fun, but definitely important, which is regret. When you feel regret. And, you know, I want to talk about regret today because this is how it kind of came up for me. We're like, you know, we need to do an episode on this. I had launched a January only offer. If you guys, you know, probably heard about it buzzing around, and definitely if you're a podcast listener, because I spoke about it for the month of January called the Success Series, and that was a special pop-up offer that was a three-session series package. Three session, yes, three session series package. Um, I usually only coach in six-month packages, so this was like a literally a different spin. Anyways, people were psyched. I had 19 signups. All of a sudden I had 19 new people, new clients in my world, which was amazing. I also was coaching my butt off like crazy. I also had my biggest revenue month of my entire business life, which was amazing. Lots of amazing stuff. And I loved it, and they loved it, and you know, stay tuned because you never know. They're deaf, I definitely see in the future another pop-up of these because it was really great. But anyways, the point is that I really got to be in the brains of many new folks, new clients. And I got to like really hear like what are some real serious worries and what are their dreams and you know, what do they think about in your every single day when they wake up and all those kinds of things. And, you know, one of the main things that came up was regret. And there's other things which I will make I was like every after every coaching session, I'm like, amazing. This is a great episode topic, because people this is not just one person. This is like it's coming up over and over, which is what happens to us humans, right? We've got the same brain, so we've got the same stuff, even though we all think we're so unique in our things. We we're the only ones that self-doubt ourselves. Nope, not true. Anyway, so regret came up a lot, you know, and you know, the clients I was coaching, it was a lot about regret about decisions they made, regret about decisions they hadn't made, regret about money they spent, regret about money they didn't spend, regret about launching something, and then you guessed it, regret about not launching something. I mean, you know, you can make regret about anything. But I just kept in thinking, okay, this is like this is needs to go an episode. And, you know, regret is like such a sneaky little guy, unless such a sneaky character, because it feels really responsible. You know, it feels really responsible and righteous maybe, like to regret something. It feels like we're being mature and reflective. And if we don't regret, then it's gonna happen again. I think that's like a main thing that comes up, right? Like it's like this whole like I'm I'm just processing what happened to make sure that it's gonna happen again. But most of the time what's really happening here, guys, is that we're just beating the crap out of ourselves, which is unfortunately something that we're all a lot of us are very good at. And that's what it is. Right? We replay the decision over and over again that we made or didn't make. We zoom in on what we should have known. We judge the you know, the version of us who made that call. Like, what was she thinking? Why would she do that? And I always want us to slow that moment down. I always want to slow us down to bring some awareness to this place. Because one of the biggest things I teach my clients, and I also talk about it, by the way, on an episode, I believe the episode is called Making Peace with Past Me, something like that. And I talk about like, is that is that like your past self deserves your partnership, not your criticism. All right. What happens in that moment of regret is that we're being really like not partners, not good partners with our past selves. We're really criticizing them. And when I'm coaching someone who's deep in regret, I'll ask them to go back to that exact moment, that exact year, that you know, the exact time and space, the exact version of themselves, and ask, if you had to make that decision again in that same season of your life, with the same information you had, the same fears, the same responsibilities, everything, would you? And I will tell you that almost every time, almost every time, that client will say, Yes, I would have. Because they remember everything that they were and why they made that decision. Right? Because now, of course, now present you knows more. Of course, right? That's how time works. But and that's how growth works. But it's not fair to use, you know, 2026 wisdom to judge 2022 view. And I personally will say, guys, that regret this this topic really speaks to me also because I've done this in my life so like as well. And there's a specific time that I had like brought up one, and this could happen for many people, where it's like one thing that you keep on bringing up over and over for yourself that you regret. And for me, it was this particular house that we saw about 10 years ago or so. And it was a really it's a very special house. It's a great location, it has these like circular windows. It had, I'd kid you not, like 23 blossoming fruit fruit trees in the backyard. And it wasn't like huge and big, it wasn't like, you know, whoa, but it was like a very sweet little house. And it cost at the time, again, 10 years ago, 2 million shekel. Now, now 2 million shekels a joke. You can't find anything in this part of the world for 2 million shekel, like anything that you'd want to live in. Then it also felt like a lot, right? But I kept on having this story of like, oh, we should have done it. What's wrong with us? We're so not responsible adults. We can't adult correctly. That was like my big thing. But when I really walked myself back to that moment, to who I was and what I was juggling, I had just given birth to my fourth babe, my last babe. And I was scared and didn't not have nearly the self-confidence I have now, or clarity and you know, uh or decision-making ability. I didn't have any of those things. And so when I kind of took myself back, I realized like, yeah, I would have made that same decision then also. If I was new me, me 2026 tomorrow, like yes, I would have made a different decision, right? I have self-confidence, clarity, I have more money in the bank, all those kinds of things. And, you know, I'm not like, you know, exhausted from getting up every two hours to nurse a new a new baby. But of course, then that's what happened, right? And that was like the right call for that version of me. And, you know, the moment that you can like see the context in that moment, that's kind of when regret softens. And you have a compassion for yourself and a compassion for that moment and understanding. But, you know, here's a really important piece. And I want you to listen to this. There are really two kinds of regret. There's the regret of doing something. It's like, oh man, I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have, you know, got on a date with that guy. Right? I shouldn't have collaborated with that person. That was a bad idea. And then there's also the regret, the second regret, which is the regret of not doing something. And I think that we overfocus on the first one. That's where we spend about 90% of our time and where we regret. We get so scared of making the wrong move, we picture the embarrassment, the money lost, the awkwardness of it, the whole thing. We think about how bad it would feel if it doesn't go well, right? The failure. That's where we focus, like God forbid, that we should quote unquote fail. But we don't spend nearly as much time asking, well, what will it cost me if I don't? You know, what will I regret of staying exactly where I am, of not trying, not finding out? You know, then what happens? Because there's no version of life where you don't risk regret. You either risk regretting doing it, or you risk regretting not doing it. And I have to tell you guys, I weirdly find this so freeing. It's like everything's got regret, so like, I don't know, let's just go for it. And I also want to just note that I'm not saying regret is useless, because it's not at all. Regret can give us information, right? It can kind of put us on this little high alert to investigate. It can sharpen us, it can help, you know, make a cleaner decisions next time. It can help see patterns that come up, you know, like, oh, I see that like when it has to do with money, I freeze. You know, remember last time how I was like, you know, I'm reg I've been regretting not buying that house, and what happened at that moment is I was I froze and I thought like I couldn't even try to figure out how to make it work. Okay, that's good information. Like if I look at business decisions that didn't go the way I wanted, there's always something in there that I can extract. Maybe I moved too quickly, maybe I ignored some kind of red flag, you know, client or place I booked or something like that. Maybe I undercommunicated something. And all of that is incredibly useful. But there's very different it's that but that's very, very different from sitting there thinking, I'm so friggin' bad at this. I can't trust myself. I will always mess things up. I should stop making decisions. Do you see the difference, guys? Do you see the difference right there? That kind of regret doesn't teach us. In fact, it does the opposite and it makes us smaller and it makes us so afraid to make decisions in the future. And so the moment you stop making decisions is this the moment that you stop moving forward, right? All of our power is in decision making. I always tell, like when I'm in a consult with somebody, somebody who's, you know, booking a c a coaching consult with me, just to look into like potentially working with me. At the end, I say, let's not make this go on forever. Right? If the answer is yes, amazing. Look at you moving forward, right? That's a good thing. Yes, I want to coach with you, and that's a decision. If it's no, just as powerful of a decision, no. I think that like, you know, you're not the coach for me, or whatever the reasons are, yes or no, are both beautiful decisions that help you move forward. It's that, I don't know, maybe I'm not sure. That's where you kind of get stuck. You know, one of the questions I ask my clients a lot, especially when we're transitioning, like wrapping up a year, moving into a new year, or closing out an offer or something that they've done in their businesses, I'll ask them, if you had paid$50,000 for everything you experienced this year in your business, right? Specifically things that didn't quote unquote go your way, right? Or you've might you would have might have marked as a failure, what would make it worth the money? And I love that question because it forces you to extract the value. Like, what did you learn? What did you understand about yourself now? What skills did you build? What resilience did you know did grew you? Right? It's like as if like these, you know, things that didn't go right, it's as if like free tuition to like a certification, a master's program or whatever, and learning a new kind of skill.

unknown 13:08

Right?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

When it goes well, it's amazing. But when it doesn't go well, there's also so much amazingness there because you really can't extract value from there. So moving forward, you could be building onto your business. Right? You it's basically like you either win the result that you want or that you wanted, or you win new information that will help you next time. I say yay and yay. There's no nay here. There's no like what? Crap. I didn't get anything. No, either way you get something. Even with something like, you know, for example, my national networking dance party. In the time of recording, this is before this event happens. This is like a week before. But as when you're listening to a guys, the event already happened. So it's like, you know, the past is speaking to you right now. You know more information than I do in this moment, which is crazy. That's a little mind trip right there. But listen, I don't know exactly how it's going to go. I have lots of hopes, I have lots of plans, I have lots of dreams, right? I'm working my butt off to like, you know, bring the right women into the room and to have like the best venue and vendors and vibe and all the everything with a V. But no matter what happens, I'm I've decided ahead of time that I'm going to walk away with more experience and more courage and more, you know, leadership identity flowing through me, more data for next time. And all of that's gonna make it worth it, no matter what happens. And I was like talking, you know, I was talking to my daughter, my 17-year-old daughter the other day. She came into my office after it's done working, and she was weighing a big decision about, you know, she's kind of going back and forth, pros and cons. What is this? What is that? And I told her, listen, there's no scenario where you don't learn. There's no scenario where you don't grow. So the question isn't, you know, will I regret this? Should I do this? I don't know, will I regret this? The question is, who do I want to be in the process? Because that's something we can control. We can decide no matter what. Like the example I gave you about the, you know, National Networking Dance Party, like I decided, okay, like I don't know. I cannot control how many women like, you know, get up and dance and what connections they make, and if, you know, God forbid the Wi-Fi goes out and uh DJ can't play like I can't, there's things I can't control. But what I can say is that either it's gonna go exactly the way I want it to, and that's freaking amazing, and I get to be the person who like led that, or I get to decide that it's also gonna go amazing in terms of that I get to like learn about myself and how I handle obstacles and when things don't go right and all those kinds of things. I get to be a leader. I get to show up as a leader no matter what, and that's gonna be up to me. Because every you know, if every decision you make becomes kind of like a courtroom where you prosecute yourself afterwards, you're going to stop making decisions every single time. You're going to hesitate, you're going to shrink, you're going to hold back, you're going to stay safe because it feels scary to not be safe. And there is no real safety in that. I'd rather a million times over make a bold decision and adjust than sit on the sidelines of my life because I'm afraid of future regret. And that's what I see a lot of. I see a lot of standing on the sidelines and watching and trying to make decisions from there, trying to make the quote unquote right decisions. But of course, we can't do that. We can't make any decision. You can't we can't actually get information if it was the right decision or not while standing on the sidelines. So when I'm in a decision and I'm in them all the time, because I'm an entrepreneur, like many of you, and I'm a mom and I'm a woman and I'm all these things, I'll ask myself a few questions. If both, so these are the few questions you have. So you can, you know, by the way, you can write these down if you want or come back when you're in a place so you can write them, but if both options ended up wildly successful, which one would I choose? It's a good one, right, guys? How will this be the right thing for me no matter what happens? Right? This is kind of what I was talking about, this piece, like no matter what, like I'm I decided, okay, I'm gonna do this event. How can it be the right thing for me no matter what happens, no matter how many people sign up or all that stuff? Why will this be worth it, even if it doesn't look the way I think it will? And what am I absolutely committed to if I make this choice? And you can choose like one of these questions, two of these questions, all of them, whatever it is, to get really clear, like that's the best thing we can do for ourselves, guys. Like not just rely on like, well, I'm either gonna regret it or not regret it. I don't know, we'll see what happens. We're gonna rely on like the actual outcome, right, the circumstance. Then we feel very out of control. But if we prepare ourselves ahead of time with these questions and our responses, then we can like almost, you know, bulletproof ourselves. That's a lack of a better word there, but you know, we can really kind of protect ourselves. We kind of get become prepared, right, with our armor going into these different kinds of situations so that we can minimize regret as much as we can. And then, you know, this is important, you know, I make a deal with myself, by the way. This is a good one that I will not beat myself up afterwards, no matter what. I will evaluate and I will adjust for next time if I need to, and I will learn, but I will not turn myself into this villain that messed up, that sucks. What was she thinking? I can't believe it. No, no matter what, I will not beat myself up. Because regret doesn't have to be this like heavy thing that keeps us stuck in the same place. It can be like a real teacher and really teach us, like, you know, to encourage us to evaluate the situation so that we can do better next time. You know, you are allowed. I gotta tell you guys, you're allowed to be someone who participates fully in your life, who makes decisions, who doesn't hold back, who experiments, who gets curious, who sometimes gets it wrong, and sometimes she gets it right.

unknown 19:42

Right?

SPEAKER_00 19:43

You get to do that. That's like what being alive is. That's what feels so it allows you to feel so alive. And that is really an important thing, because we don't want to get ourselves stuck in regret over and over. And let me tell you guys, if you're in a decision right now and your brain is spinning, which I know for many people that's the case, you absolutely do not have to do this alone. You know, I don't know if you know about this, but I host a free monthly group coaching call where we literally take one of these things and we get clear on it, and we really process it, and then we ask these kinds of questions and others. And it's a free call with other entrepreneurs sitting in a room together, untangling all of this. And you can just hop on the you can hop on my website to find out when the next call is at tomarcoaching.com slash group and be a part of that group communal group co group coaching call. And if you are more of a kind of want to do a like, yeah, I'm a more of a one-on-one kind of gal, you can also do that with me one-on-one on a free consult, which again is tomorrowcoaching.com slash consult. And either way, you can sign up on both of those things. So I hope you guys can like take your own, like one particular thing that maybe you keep on spinning on and something you regret in your life, and take some of these questions and start to free yourselves from that regret that's really been holding you back and allowing you to move and take steps forward. It is really one of the most kindest, most self-loving things you can do for yourself. All right, guys, that's it. That's what I got for you today. I'm sending you so much love, and I will see you next week, where we're gonna be talking about it's gonna be like a bit of a continuation of this conversation in a whole different kind of way, and we're talking about the worst case scenario. So I hope you join me then. Love you all.