Wisdom & Sol
Posts
Regret Sucks. But Here Are 4 Ways to Grow From It

Regret Sucks. But Here Are 4 Ways to Grow From It

How to skip the self-pity party — plus the #1 key to forgiving yourself and how to reframe your mindset to grow from it.

Sol TV
October 12, 2023

This Newsletter at a Glance:

🌹 Regret vs. Guilt

🌠 TL/DR: What You Resist Persists

🔍 Sol Bites: 4 Ways to Handle Regrets

📺 Video Bite: Omanisa Ross on Moving Past Regrets

📖 Words of Wisdom

Two feelings that often get confused are regret and guilt. Regret refers to a persistent sadness or disappointment about a choice that you made in the past. It stems from the idea that your decision seemed right at the time, even though it’s wrong now. On the other hand, guilt has to do with feeling bad about causing harm to someone else.

TL/DR: What You Resist Persists

As long as you have a working memory, it’s hard to eliminate feelings of regret entirely.

So whether you have occasional or constant regret, how you respond to those feelings is important to help you move forward. When you try to avoid, eliminate, or resist regret, you teach your mind to fear that feeling. And what your mind fears, it becomes super attuned to that feeling. So if you're afraid to make decisions that you might regret in the future, you could end up stuck in a state of resistance, stuck in a rut, and afraid of making changes in your life.

Sol Bites: 4 Ways to Handle Regrets

🦋 Accept that feeling regret is human.

When regret emerges, remind yourself that just because it feels bad doesn’t mean you are bad. Or you’re even bad for feeling like you made a wrong decision. Practice feeling regret and move forward with life anyway.

💫 Avoid self-pity.

Pity is an emotion you can’t control, but self-pitying is a behavior you can. Consider this scenario: Someone asks you on a date IRL, and you’re caught off guard. Acting on impulse, you say no, only to regret it later. You start telling yourself that if the person had asked you over text or DM, you would have had time to consider their invitation and say yes.

That type of thinking is an attempt to feel less regret about what happened by shifting the responsibility for a decision onto someone else. The problem is that whenever that story pops into your head, you feel worse about what happened.

Make sure you have internal boundaries set for yourself so when self-pity arises, you’re prepared to stop that thought from snowballing into something bigger than it needs to be.

💖 Forgive yourself.

Moving past regret means you have to be forgiving. Most people think forgiveness is a single act (“I forgive myself”) that brings relief—but it’s more than that. Forgiveness is a commitment to consistently letting go of hurt, refocusing your attention on moving forward, and building a better relationship with yourself.

🌙 Reframe your talk track.

Coping with regret is not about dwelling on your past but rather how you want to live your life in the future. You should view regret as helpful because it gets you closer to what you value.

So when you feel a pang of regret, instead of saying: “I should have . . .,” say, “I want to . . .

Video Bite

We all have regrets, but how do we move beyond them? Sol TV Creator, Omanisa Ross gets real about a painful experience and shares her "Three Ways" technique to handle regrets.

She looks at three ways it could've gone better and three ways worse - not to torture herself but to find perspective. Learn how validating your feelings without getting stuck in them can help you grow. Her vulnerable wisdom will give you a new approach to processing the past.