How regrets can help you make better resolutions

Rethinking Regrets & Resolutions: Fixing misalignment between regrets and resolutions

Last year, many Rethinkers bought gift subscriptions for colleagues, friends, and family. If you know someone who would enjoy the gift of Rethink, I’ve applied a 20% discount on gift subscriptions this Christmas. Here’s the link:

---

Dear Rethinkers,

We are told to live life without regrets. But why? Regret can be a constructive emotion if tapped into it in the right way. It can be used to guide our choices and instruct us on what we want to change. With the holidays and New Year approaching, I find it’s a useful time to pair the past year’s regrets with next year’s resolutions. To ask ourselves: what is something I did or did not do this year that I feel regret around?

We often think of regrets and New Year’s resolutions as a path to personal goals – making more time for relationships, exercise, and hobbies (the list always feels similar, right?). However, they can be just as powerful for shaping career and business resolutions.

The Big Six Life Regrets

A third of Americans say they regret career-related choices including their profession, university choice, and where they work. Indeed, research shows that our biggest regrets in life (in order of frequency) are:

1. Education

2. Career

3. Romance

4. Parenting

5. Self-improvement

6. Leisure (how we spend or fail to spend our free time.)

I’m struck by how education is number one, yet the top New Year’s resolution is…yes, you guessed it ‘Doing more exercise or improving my fitness.’  Let’s look at how we can fix this misalignment between regrets and resolutions – and understand how to apply this new way of thinking to real situations. (More below)