Dealing with Regrets

Confidence is not built via easy ways.

It’s built through pain.

And one of the facets of pain includes regret.

Yes.

What is painful now, leads to joy later.

Hopefully.

Regrets can cause someone into a downward spiral.

Or allow the bow to be pulled back before it is propelled forward.

Are there any frameworks to deal with regrets?

Sure.

But more importantly, it comes down to going past dealing with regrets.

And the only way to do that is by having a target for your life.

A vision that forces regrets into making sense.

Getting the Most Out of Regrets

Intellectually dealing with regrets is time-consuming.

And you can make the argument that it leads to more dissatisfaction.

To hit the heart of the issue, let’s make it simple.

An empowering vision is a must.

Without the vision, the mind is not compelled to do much.

It’s more so walking around in circles.

And has no clue what to look out for.

If I point you to the forest, would you know where to go?

‘Not really.’

Why not?

‘Because you didn’t give me anything. You just pointed at the forest.’

Okay. But what if I pointed at the forest and told you to go get me a rock.

Now would you have more clarity?

‘Yes, I  will.’

This showed that staring at the forest doesn’t mean much.

Likewise, looking at regrets for the sake of looking at them does not mean much.

Need to find the rock.

Why Regrets Lead to Lessons

I hate the question:

What would you tell your younger self?

Actually, no, I don’t hate the question in itself.

I hate the flaw it brings up about my younger self.

I’m a stubborn guy who doesn’t always like to listen.

I rather learn on my own.

Who knows when I’ll grow out of this.

Younger me was even more stubborn.

All I know is that younger Armani would not listen to shit the present Armani had to say.

‘How are you so sure?’

Because younger Armani was stacking up his regrets.

Regrets lead to stickier lessons because the body gets involved.

I’m sure you’ve heard that it’s not wise to speed on the road.

Intellectually, the lesson was understood.

Then you sped.

The body didn’t understand.

And you got caught by a cop.

This is a regret, yes.

But this regret primes the mind AND body to listen next time.

Regrets cause lessons to become supercharged.

And now there is a beauty to the pain.

Viewing Losses as Lessons

A loss is only a loss when the lesson has not been extracted.

Regardless of how dark it is.

This is tough to imagine when someone close to us passes away & we didn’t talk to them enough.

Mainly because we were grinding.

This requires reframing.

The ego can temporarily fool you and be like:

‘The other person passing away was a lesson? Get out of here.’

This situation has the ego passing off blame.

No, the lesson was that you should call people while they are here.

It’s unfortunate that this lesson needed to be learned in such harsh circumstances.

But now, you’re prone to learning it.

Dealing with regrets is not always pretty.

Add a vision to your life, and past lessons begin to make more sense.

Add a vision to your life, and past losses morph before your eyes.

Why Mistakes get Repeated

‘All this sounds good man.’

Appreciate you, bro.

‘Let me finish…But what if I don’t want to learn from the regrets?’

Then you are living through past programs.

Knowledge and awareness are twins.

Both have 9 letters.

Without knowledge of regrets, the internal world remains dim.

Awareness is lacking.

And mistakes are bound to repeat in a different scenario.

This leads to a rat race in terms of life.

Normally, when the phrase, ‘rat race’ is pictured, it’s viewed in terms of money.

This ridicule is given to someone who gets a job, gets a mortgage, and settles down early.

That’s not fully fair.

The rat race is for the entirety of life.

When a loop is constantly being repeated.

Different day, same jaded paradigm.

Life Irony:

The more you run away from the regrets, the more the regrets stack up.

Creating a New Chapter: Dealing with Regrets

Okay, enough with all the dark talk.

Time to bring some light.

‘I was going to say man lol.’

Ey, without scaring someone, they never learn.

Need to milk it while I can.

In reality, there are tons of regrets that everyone has.

Even the most ‘perfect’ person you know.

This makes it much more difficult to spot which regret to begin learning from.

Let me save you some time.

Anyone may have 500 moments they hate from their life.

Yet, they remember 5 of them the most.

And it’s 1-2 which take up the most mental bandwidth.

Start with those.

How you learn from it is up to you.

Journaling helps.

Trying to make amends with it by forcefully articulating at least 5 lessons from that dark moment helps as well.

Either way, the name of the game is to turn the:

• loss into a w.

An example is Johnson.

He cheated on his high school sweetheart of 10 years after getting drunk at a party.

She was the love of his life.

And she was never able to forgive him.

She dumped him, rebuilt herself & found someone new to settle down with.

Johnson’s ex now is settled down with a family.

Meanwhile, Johnson is a fat, alcoholic, slob who still cannot forget his error.

That’s his regret.

He can seek therapy. He can seek the process of articulation.

Johnson is hopefully different now.

And by having one of those ‘the one who got away’ stories…

Hopefully, he learned the lesson to not cheat in the future.

Or who knows…

If he doesn’t learn, he is bound to repeat it.

Accountability at its Finest

As the world builds tools, people get softer.

They get softer because they don’t know the value of work ethic.

That’s why accountability is down.

And finger-pointing is on the rise.

Nature balances this out.

A person can run away from taking accountability in the external world.

But not in the internal.

Regrets are programmed in the mind for a reason.

It’s nature’s way of showing that you don’t run away from accountability.

Run towards it buddy.

Articulate your past.

Learn from your past.

Memories become memories and no longer realities when the lesson has clicked.

Till then, history is bound to repeat itself.

Or at the bare minimum, rhyme.

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– ArmaniTalks