2 Do you have any regrets in life? (B2)

Have you lived long enough to have any big regrets? A regret is a feeling of sadness, disappointment, frustration, or sorrow about something that has happened in the past and that cannot be changed now, because it’s too late. If I’m being completely honest with myself, I must admit that I do have several specific regrets about my past decisions. You will notice that I use the word ‘decisions’, and this seems to communicate that I ‘decided’ to be a certain way or that I ‘decided’ to do certain things. In reality, I didn’t actually ‘decide’ anything actively. The truth is that, for many years, I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing in certain areas of my life. Because I wasn’t thinking actively and consciously about some things, I found myself making decisions and choices about those things passively and subconsciously. You could say that I was on a kind of ‘autopilot’ whereby I ‘defaulted’ to behaving in a certain way. These default behaviours became default patterns and the default patterns became lifestyle choices over a number of years.

There is a very clear difference here: the things in my life that were successful, exciting and dynamic were usually deliberate decisions that I made actively and consciously, but the things that I regret were either (1) automatic and unthinking decisions that I made passively and subconsciously or (2) decisions to delay making a decision until later. As you will see, not making a decision or delaying a decision had dramatic consequences later in my life when I discovered that being passive and doing nothing to change certain aspects of my behaviour had a huge cumulative impact on my life over a period of many years.

I’d like to look at some of my biggest regrets and ask you, do you also regret the same things?

Firstly, I regret living in fear of other people. To live in fear of other people is to be afraid of what they think of you. I wish I hadn’t worried so much about what other people thought of me. I never woke up in the morning actively and consciously thinking, ‘Today, I want to be more afraid of other people,’ or ‘Today it’s my intention to worry about what people think of me.’ Of course, that never happened. Instead, I had a mindset and an attitude that caused me to worry in many little daily situations. When I found myself in a situation where I had the choice to be confident and unafraid or worried and afraid, I usually allowed myself to be worried and afraid. It just happened by default without me thinking much about it at all. I allowed it to happen again and again until it became a completely natural part of my life.

The reason that my number one regret is my daily choice, over many years, to live in fear of others is because it caused several other regrets, which are all interconnected. My second regret is that I wanted to be liked by people. If only I hadn’t wanted to be liked by everyone. Do you see that living in fear of people’s opinions and wanting to be liked by people are actually very similar regrets? In some respects, they are two sides of the same coin. If that coin has a name, it is ‘fear of rejection’. To be rejected is to be dismissed or written off as unacceptable, inadequate or simply not good enough. I didn’t ever want to be in a situation where the people around me rejected me. I wanted people to like me and I wanted people to think good things about me. However, I never woke up in the morning thinking, ‘Today I want to be a people pleaser,’ or ‘Today I must do everything possible to ensure that people always think positive things about me.’ If I had thought actively in that way, perhaps I would have realised how very foolish my attitude was. But I didn’t think actively. Instead, when I found myself in a situation where I felt under pressure to please someone – especially an authority figure, an influential person, or a boss – I usually decided to please them, even if it had consequences for me and my family.

Before I go any further, I would like to clarify that there is an enormous difference between, on the one hand, deliberately and consciously deciding to act in kindness because you simply want to bless and help someone and, on the other hand, passively and subconsciously deciding to do something for someone because you are afraid of them or the potential consequences if you don’t do that thing. These approaches are the opposite of each other and they are motivated by entirely different attitudes. I think it is incredibly important to see the difference. If you purposefully choose to act in kindness or do a service for someone because you want to bless them without caring whether or not they acknowledge your kind deed, or even whether or not they like you, then this is motivated by courage, freedom and love. If you passively and grudgingly choose to help someone, even when you don’t want to, because you are afraid of the consequences and worry about your reputation, then this is motivated by fear.

So, if my first two regrets were both connected to a fear of being rejected by the people in my life, I think you can probably imagine what my other big regrets are. My third regret is the decision I made to give too much time and energy to my career. I wish I hadn’t given so much to my job. When I worked as a teacher in a secondary school, I chose to go into school early in the mornings and come home late. I sometimes chose to work during the holidays. I wasn’t paid any extra money for the overtime work that I did and I didn’t enjoy doing it either. So why did I do it? I did it because I was afraid of what some of my colleagues and line managers might think about me. You can see that there is a direct connection between my overwork and my fear of being rejected. If I hadn’t been so concerned about people’s opinions, I would have worked less and gone home earlier.

My fourth regret is also connected to the other three. It is, perhaps, the biggest cause of sadness in my life. If only I had spent more time with my children. Not only that, but I also wish that I’d been more patient and loving towards them when they were young. Here is a very strange fact. I dedicated a lot of time and energy to doing things for people who were not my family or friends and who are no longer in my life. My choices to serve those people often directly prevented me from dedicating time and energy to my children who are my family and who are still very much in my life. In the past, I never woke up in the morning thinking, ‘Today I am going to prioritise people who are not my friends or family and who probably don’t care very much for me’. Nor did I ever think, ‘Today, I’m going to make sure that my children are my lowest priority,’ or, ‘Today, instead of courageously challenging people who try to take advantage of me, I’m going to do exactly what they ask without complaining but then project my guilt and frustration onto my children by getting angry with them when they want my attention, just because they would like to spend some more time with me.’ Obviously, I never thought like that, but I did behave that way.

I think you can see the pattern here. A fear of rejection led me to be a people pleaser, which led me to work too hard, which led me to spend too little time with my children. We call this a domino effect. Dominoes are small rectangular blocks that can be placed close to one another upright in lines. When the first domino is knocked down, it falls against the next domino in the line and that one is knocked down too. Each domino falls against the next domino until all of the dominoes have been knocked down. So, a domino effect is a situation in which one problem creates another problem and then another and another.

What should I have done to prevent this domino effect? Many years ago, when these regrets were daily lifestyle choices and patterns of behaviour, I could have done something about them. If only I had. The problem was that I was not actively thinking about the causes and long-term consequences of the frustrations that I had. I also believed that I was powerless to change the situations that frustrated me and that I had no control over them. That is ridiculous. I did have agency in those situations; I simply chose not to focus on my thoughts and analyse them. ‘Agency’ means the capacity, freedom and the power to do something.

Now, it seems very easy and uncomplicated to see the solutions that I could not see when I was younger. There’s a saying in English: ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but foresight is better’. Hindsight is the ability to see clearly things that are in the past and foresight is the ability to see things that are likely to happen in the future. The saying ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but foresight is better’ therefore means that it is great to be able to identify a problem after it has happened, so that you can learn from the mistake you made, but it is even better if you can identify the problem before it happens. That way, you can prevent it from happening in the first place.

So, what could I have done differently?

I believe that I should have faced, listened to, analysed and dealt with my feelings. In the past, when I felt negative feelings such as anger, frustration, disappointment or sadness, I often accepted those feelings and allowed them to affect me. I wish I had chosen to face, listen to, analyse and deal with my feelings. Let’s look at the order of those actions. To face something is to make a deliberate decision to look directly at something and recognise it. Another synonym for ‘face’ is ‘acknowledge’. To acknowledge something is to recognise it and accept its existence. How could I listen to my feelings unless I had first recognised and acknowledged them? And how could I analyse them unless I had listened carefully to them? Only by facing, listening to and analysing those negative feelings would it be possible to deal with them. To deal with something is to resolve it. A resolution is a solution that I have decided to commit to completing.

Allow me to give an example. Perhaps this example will resonate with you. Imagine this scenario: I went to a staff meeting at work in which a senior colleague asked me and the other teachers in the meeting to do some extra work. It was clear that the extra work would be time-consuming and difficult and would require many hours of commitment. Nobody warned me that this request to do extra work would come up at the meeting. It was an unpleasant surprise and it happened very quickly; so quickly, in fact, that I did not have time to process it. None of the other teachers challenged the request. After the meeting, I got into my car and drove home feeling angry and frustrated. By the time I arrived home, my feelings of frustration had turned into resentment. I externalised that resentment by being bad-tempered with my family. The children, who had not seen me all day, just wanted to spend a little time with me, but I was distant and grumpy. After dinner, still feeling resentful, I went into my office and started doing the extra work that I had been asked to do. At no point did I face, listen to, analyse or deal with my emotions. I just ignored and buried them, and then grudgingly started the work.

The first thing to do would be to stop and face the feelings. What exactly were they? Could I name them? In this first stage I would probably identify and name anger, frustration, helplessness, injustice and disappointment. I would write these words down on a piece of paper, in any order, as they came to mind.

The second thing to do would be to listen to those feelings. Which one was the strongest? Could I separate and rank the feelings in some kind of order from the strongest to the weakest? In order to listen to the feelings, I would probably need to go to a quiet place without distractions where I could be alone and speak aloud each word that I had written on the piece of paper. For me, listening to my feelings is the same as being curious about my feelings. When I say aloud the word ‘frustration’, I choose to be curious and interested in that frustration. If I listen by being curious and interested in the feeling of frustration, it helps me to understand that the feeling is not me. I am not the feeling. The feeling is something separate that has come into my reality and affected me. So, listening to my feelings helps me to see that I am distinct from them. They do not own me. This helps me to be calm and kind to myself and to see that, by naming and separating myself from the negative feelings, I create distance between myself and those feelings. If there is distance between myself and the feelings, I am already better placed to analyse them.

The third thing to do would be to analyse those feelings. Why did I feel angry and why was anger the strongest feeling? At this stage, it can be hard to stay focused because the feelings can seem overwhelming, so I would tell myself, ‘I am not my anger. I am curious to know where this anger comes from’. If I could be patient with myself and not allow myself to be overwhelmed, I would probably analyse the following things: I was angry with the senior colleague for taking advantage of his position to ask the staff to do something unreasonable. Perhaps I was angry with him because he had done this before on several occasions. I was frustrated with the general situation, because this kind of thing had happened before and I had experience of how much time would be needed to complete the extra work. I was also frustrated with myself and the other members of staff for not having the courage to challenge the decision. I was also helpless, which meant that I felt I had no power to affect the situation. Perhaps I felt helpless because I was afraid of the consequences of questioning the decision. I felt injustice, too, because the senior colleague who had asked the staff to do the extra work had probably not thought about the many hours that each person would have to dedicate to completing the work. Fundamentally, the situation was not fair or right. Finally, I felt disappointed because I knew that accepting the extra work would affect my relationship with my wife and children and would embed and perpetuate a pattern of behaviour in myself that I did not like. Perhaps I also felt disappointed with myself for allowing fear of other people to control my actions.

The fourth and final thing to do would be to deal with those feelings. When I say ‘deal with’, I mean ‘resolve’. As I have said previously, a resolution is a solution that I have decided to implement. For me, there are three parts to resolving the feelings. Part one is to consider what choices I actually have available to me in that situation. Part two is to allow myself to consider the absolute worst-case scenarios of making each choice. Part three is a commitment with myself to choose certain things, being certain of why I chose them and being at peace with myself about the resolutions I have decided to implement.

The challenging situation about being asked to do extra work as a teacher was fairly typical but my approach to dealing with it was totally dysfunctional. I felt negative emotions. I allowed these feelings to control me and affect my behaviour without ever identifying or analysing them. I simply accepted the challenging situation and did the work. Nothing changed and nothing improved. Instead of becoming more resilient, more courageous and more confident, I became weaker, more cowardly and more uncertain.

If I had actually considered my choices I would have felt empowered. To have choices is to have agency and power. But what could I have chosen to do? Well, there were a variety of choices with a variety of outcomes. Let’s consider them from the most extreme and visible to the most innocuous and invisible. Perhaps the most extreme choice would be to quit my job without another job to go to, or to start looking for another job that enabled a better work-life balance. Another extreme decision would be to email the senior leader and simply inform him that I refused to do the work. That would be a foolish and pointless decision and would create unnecessary problems for me. Alternatively, I could simply decide not to do the work without telling anyone, then wait and hope that nobody would notice. That would be a viable alternative if there was a real likelihood that no senior colleague would check I had completed the work, but not such a great alternative if it was certain that my work would be checked or if my input was part of a group project. If my work was certainly going to be seen or reviewed then I could have chosen to do it, but with a commitment to give it very low priority or to limit the number of hours I chose to dedicate to it. In this connection, I could also choose to give the work more time but instead cut out other jobs that I would normally do as part of my work remit. Finally, I had the choice not to allow any negative emotions to take up thinking space in my head.

After considering my choices, I needed to allow myself to imagine and consider the absolute worst-case scenarios of making each choice. The term we use in English to describe thinking about the worst-case scenario is ‘to catastrophise’. It’s a verb that comes from the noun ‘catastrophe’, which means a terrible situation, a disaster or a calamity. It is not good to catastrophise unless we acknowledge and accept the unlikely future disaster calmly and resolutely as a possible outcome. If we look directly at the worst-case scenario and accept all that it may be, then it has much less power over us. I can confirm that this is true and I have the experience to prove it. Before deciding to quit my teaching job in 2023, I was terrified of what might happen; I catastrophised in a vague and general way about possible consequences. But when I decided to face those consequences directly, they lost a lot of their power. It was a relief to face the fear of not having enough money to pay the mortgage and the bills or even to lose our house. Once I had named the worst possible outcomes, I was able to be rational and see that even if we had no money and lost the house, there would still be options because we had family and friends who cared and who would not allow us to be destitute and live in the street.

In my example about the meeting and the extra work, the worst-case scenarios were only as extreme as the decisions I made. If I chose to email the senior colleague and refuse to do the work, my job may have been in danger. If I chose to do the extra work but give it minimal time and minimum effort the worst-case scenario would probably have been slight disappointment from senior leadership about the quality of my work.

If I had taken all the steps I have described above whenever I was put into a difficult or intractable situation at work, I would probably be a different person now. I would probably be less exhausted, more decisive and more able to support others. Looking at those steps makes it very easy to see that there were always practical and workable solutions through which I could have avoided a lot of stress and negativity.

So, if I were placed in a similar situation now, what would I do? I would probably decide to do the work but give it as little time and energy as humanly possible. I would probably cut out other ‘necessary’ tasks that were part of my remit in order to save time that I could then spend with my family. Because I would have done the head work and thought everything through carefully, I would recognise that talking to the senior leaders was a pointless waste of time because, after all, they had chosen to implement the ‘extra work’ initiative without consulting the teachers, so why would they change their minds when faced with complaints? I wouldn’t be afraid of being criticised in a review because I would have made peace with myself that I was not overly concerned about what my line managers thought of me. Finally, every time I felt frustration, anger, disappointment, injustice, helplessness or any other negative feeling, I would take authority over the feeling and shut it down, refusing to allow myself to think about it and instead channelling the energy that I would have given the negativity towards finishing the task as quickly as possible.

Earlier, I mentioned a saying in English: ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but foresight is better’. Everything in the resolution process that I have just described relates to hindsight about things I wish I had done, but did not do, in the past. Yes, I have regrets about things that I can’t change now, but at least I face those regrets, accept them and own them. It was a lack of active, deliberate thinking that caused me to be passive and repeatedly make mistakes, which became lifestyle choices and then regrets. Now, however, I can harness those regrets and turn them into foresight.

For example, nowadays whenever I have a strong negative feeling, I acknowledge to myself that something is wrong. I set aside time to sit down quietly with a pen and paper so that I can write down the name of the feeling, face it, listen to it, analyse it and deal with it. Because I know that my biggest regrets relate to fear of what other people think of me and my tendency, therefore, to be a people pleaser, I am especially careful not to make any decisions out of fear. I also recognise that the best solutions are those that create minimum friction and have few – if any – big consequences. I feel much happier about deliberately choosing certain paths and not others. I am much more deliberate about what I do.