Making decisions you won’t regret
It’s important to make the right decision about what your next chapter is. But you can’t know what the right decision is until you’ve already made it and have seen what happens. And because you can’t know what the right decision is beforehand, you can’t decide. But not deciding is also a decision. (And you could also regret not deciding.)
That’s the problem. That’s the catch-22 of regret: you have to make the right decision but you can’t know if it’s right until after you’ve decided.
To solve for regret, you have to understand it first.
Regret is a feeling that we experience when we decide that things aren’t happening the way we think they should.
We make a decision, we get a different outcome than what we wanted, and we make it mean that we made the wrong decision. And because we’ve made the wrong decision, we’ve messed up our lives, people are laughing at us, we’ve embarrassed ourselves, we should’ve known better…
That’s regret.
Regret isn’t something that just happens to us like the weather happens to us. Regret is something that we create.
We don’t guess about what’s next, burn bridges, and then beat ourselves up for getting it wrong. We methodically apply a process. We make the next best decision based on what we know right now. And we learn, without beating ourselves up.
If we create it, we can choose not to create it.
There’s both a process and a mindset to figuring out the next chapter. You need both. The process tells you what to do to get clarity. The mindset changes how you think, so you’ll stop beating yourself up. When you have both, it’s impossible to make a decision you’ll regret. And it’s impossible to stay stuck.
We don’t guess about what’s next, burn bridges, and then beat ourselves up for getting it wrong. We methodically apply a process to gain more clarity and information. We make the next best decision based on what we know right now. And we learn, without beating ourselves up.
There is no right decision.
And there is no one really important decision.
There are just millions of tiny, everyday decisions that lead you to the next chapter.
Regret is a choice. It is the byproduct of your mindset. It’s not something that happens to you. It’s something you create.
This May, I’ll be teaching both the mindset and the process of figuring out the next chapter. It’s the first time I’ve taught this publicly, outside of the 1:1 coaching container. You’ll be invited. If you already know you want to be there, mark your calendar for May 13-15. Registration coming soon.