Overcoming Regret and Moving On with Your Life
Posted on July 20, 2016 by Gail Showalter, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
How Regret Is Sabotaging Your Life. Move past the past and on to the future.
I often hear the women I coach voice regrets. If you are a woman and find yourself living with regret I hope you know you are not alone, but you do not have to continue thinking about your life with regret. The Shriver Report polled 3,500 adults in 2013 to learn: “Low-income women are more likely to live with regret.”
When asked what they wished they had done differently, they were more likely to:
• Regret not investing more time and money in school,
• Regret not delaying marriage,
• Regret not leaving a bad relationship sooner,
• Regret not delaying having kids, and even
• Regret having kids at all.
According to Psychology Today “regret is a negative cognitive/emotional state that involves blaming ourselves for a bad outcome, feeling a sense of loss or sorrow at what might have been or wishing we could undo a previous choice that we made.”
If you are living with regret-look ahead, not back. Make plans for your future. Think forward, not backward.
You may be saying, “But Gail, You don’t know what I’ve been through, you don’t know what he did to me, you don’t know what I’ve lost. How can I possibly not think about those things?”
That may be true. However, thinking about them is one thing; dwelling on them, letting them take-over your life is another.
As a woman you may experience regret over the loss of a marriage, for whatever reason. You might regret your choices of men in your life. You could simply regret staying too long in an abusive situation. These regrets can help you make better decisions in the future. You can learn from regret to have better insight and make better choices. Prolonged self-judgment does not make your life better.
There is an old Chinese proverb that states, “You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.” If you are spending precious energy regretting you will not have the energy you need to build a future for yourself. Several women I’ve coached have gone to college and earned a degree. Not only did this give them a stronger sense of self worth, it also erased regrets.
I knew someone who used the acronym FIDO—Forget It and Drive On. Keep looking forward so you don’t miss the opportunities that are in store for you.
