Episode 65: "NO REGERTS!" for Fools and Monsters

We've convinced ourselves that claiming a life of no regrets signals strength, confidence, and capability. But what if the opposite is true? What if an avoidance of regrets ensures weakness, ignorance, and stagnation? 

"There's gold in them thar hills!"

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to The Sovereign Guide. I'm your host, Alistair MacDonald. Let's get started.

Speaker 3 0:08

What if I told you that the idea of living without regrets is to aspire to being a monster? What if I told you that your desire to either live or signal living a life with no regrets was not only one of the strangest things to do, not only one of the weakest things you could do, but also one of the easiest, fastest, and most obvious ways to obstruct real growth and progress in yourself, your business, your relationships, your family, your lives? What follows here is a short excerpt taken from a live training done just a week ago with a group of individuals that I meet with every week. It is a small, curated, private community of individuals that are managers and leaders inside businesses. These are office managers, regional leads. These are people that sit directly behind the owner, and they are the ones there who sit in the role of one of the toughest jobs in any industry, being the person that the CEO or the, the owner turns to to make manifest their ambitions. These individuals are the ones that sit right between these two critical things. They are the hinge on which a door swings between the owner's ambition and the team's capabilities The owners of these businesses have invested in having these leads be a part of this group because they understand that their problem set is defined by the capabilities of those they lead. And they want a more interesting, more consequential, higher caliber of problem sets. And so to get that, they are choosing to invest in these individuals and their personal and professional growth and expansion. It's the only way that scaled growth actually happens. Uh, while everybody else could tell you all it takes is a system, I'm here to remind you that while systems have their value, they are all run by people. It's not your systems breaking down that's bothering you, it's the people not following them. It's the people breaking your systems that lets you down. So these individuals get together with me every week, and we work on exactly that, improving and increasing their capabilities and capacity. Essentially, I bypass the owners to get the doctrine, philosophy, and ideas into the hands of the people that are there on the front lines, dealing with the consumers, the patients, the buyers, and the team members that are making manifest the ambitions and dreams of the owners Let's jump in

Audio Only - All Participants 3:03

I have something that you might not like, but it's, it's incredibly valuable and powerful. So I'm gonna ask you to play along for a moment, and we're gonna keep this in the professional channel. Okay? We all have someone in our life, and we've heard this said many times, no regrets. I don't regret anything. Anybody know someone that has said that to you in the past? That's it. If you really think about this, it's pretty monstrous. I mean, I think it's accidentally monstrous. And here's what I mean. Somebody will say, you know, we all said, you know, no regrets. You know the famous tattoos, no re regrets. Is that really true? Is it true that you don't even regret that time, that you hurt somebody unnecessarily, which you did? You remember that time? I remember that time. I don't even regret that. It's either dishonest by omission, it's, it's a mistake, or it's kind of monstrous. It's kind of monstrous. But what it does is it reveals a societal aversion to actually looking at the things we regret. I mean, you don't even have to raise your hand. I know that you don't like the idea of revisiting your regrets. Uh, if you're a human, they, they find you, uh, they come to you probably at 5:00 AM uh, in the morning, or when you're driving home in traffic or you're alone for a moment. Those regrets sneak into your mind and you lie there with brain damage. Everybody has this. We avoid visiting our regrets for all the obvious reasons, because we feel bad about it. I am here to suggest that regrets are an unbelievably valuable gift from your heart to your future. Why? Because regret is a signal of growth. Regrets are evidence of progress. Remember that thing you did that time with your loved one and the way you behaved and so forth, and you think of it now and you're like, man. Shouldn't have said that to my kid. I didn't mean to say that to my dad, or I did whatever it was. Even that employee, remember that time you treated that person not as well as you could have. The fact that you look back on it with judgment and with discomfort is a signal of your growth and progress in that time. But how can we expand that growth if we can't even allow ourselves to visit? This is crazy. It's crazy. It is a goldmine. Why? Because why do we avoid it? Because of the moral overlay. I did this statement of fact. I took this action, therefore I am a bad person. Well, hang on a second. You are not. What you do yourself is not identified by what you do. That's just what you chose in the moment and the choice you made. Yeah, I'll be honest, that was a crappy choice. You shouldn't have done that. I've got thousands of them myself. You shouldn't have. But the you, it's actually the you that is separate from that action is here waiting to make better choices in the future. But we can't do it if we don't update our database, if we don't gather those data points and say, oh, I remember when I used to do that. I'm not doing that anymore, or, I'm so glad I don't. So with that said, I want you to, and this is the trippy stuff I want you to consider for a moment, go back in your working history. Now, of course, what I'm gonna share with you is an exercise that is immensely valuable for me personally and professionally, but we'll just keep it professional for now. I want you to think about a time that you did something that you regret. Maybe it was at another working environment, maybe it was in a different role. Maybe it was a big deal 10 years ago. Maybe it was a small thing that you did this morning. So I want you to think about that for a moment, and if you can go back to that moment in time and ask yourself, what was it you were trying to achieve? What were you trying to achieve versus what actually happened? The second question is what was the energy behind that? Was it lust, greed, resentment, anger, desire, laziness? What was behind it? You know, that time that you took the shortcut because you were feeling tired. What was the energy behind that choice? Was it desperation? Was it maybe thinking I can, uh, take advantage of this person's shortcoming and report to the big boss by gossip? What they've done in the hooks that I get, their role or position or status. I'm making up examples. Your choice, you know, your mileage may vary if you think about this. So what was it, what was I trying to achieve? What was the energy that I brought to it? What was missing? Was I missing any information? Because if you were missing information, that changes it. The next question becomes, or, or a skill, was I missing information or a skill? Was there a skill that I, I didn't have? Do I have that information and skill? Now, the next question is, what was I ignoring? What did you ignore? You know, that giant red flag on the way into that meeting what was that? The last question is, who did you ignore? Who did you ignore? There was that person that was like, bro, do not do this. And that person might have just been your gut. Every one of us has gone against our gut. Our gut's never let us down who we've let it down. I've certainly let my gut down didn't go well. Do not recommend one star. What are the choices that we face now? Those regrets are opportunities for us to radically upgrade how we show up in all of those future versions of that, there's the future version of you that ends up in exactly the same circumstance, but you feel so good about how you showed up. You go home and you're like, I killed it. Totally different outcome. Totally different outcome, and that's what I wish for all of us. To take a step back, if you were to consider regrets as a signal from the future, you to the present, you advising you based on your experience of worse and better outcomes, you are significantly wiser, significantly happier, more capable. Here it is in a sentence, most failures, most regrets are simply a version of future self neglect. You are neglecting your future self. This is, uh, the, you know, I turn to the, the great, uh, famous American philosopher, Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson, who in that famous scene. Goes home or whatever, goes to the kitchen, comes back to the living room, and eats an entire tub of mayonnaise. And as he wraps it up, he says, whew, that was terrible. He says, but I tell you, it's not great for future Homer. But that's a problem for future Homer. Man. I don't envy that guy. Uh, this is what all of us are doing at some level, unless we're brave enough to go back and say, okay, what did I do that I regret? And how can I improve it? And if you're anything like me, this is brutal, but brutally valuable because you realize, oh, I regret that. But I did it again this morning. I did it again this morning. And I think I did it because I'm not actually sitting with the weight of, I like, you know, I regret it, meaning, I don't wanna repeat it, but because I don't like facing my regrets, I'm not bringing these signals into the present moment to be able to recognize this pattern. This is pattern spotting. Oh, every time the toddler has not slept and they haven't eaten, they are a cranky little tyrant pattern. Easy to spot every time that the schedule falls apart. And the diva version of our associates or hygienist, uh, is we know what's gonna happen. We can anticipate and predict future regrets. Can you think of one now? Can you think of something that there's a high probability of you repeating something you, you previously do that you say you regret but you don't visit? That's an open question.

Speaker 12:08

I end the excerpt there because what followed was what always follows with this incredible tribe of people that I have the privilege of working with, is a flurry of conversations and dynamic exchange and case studies and examples and personal anecdotes and collective breakthroughs. This is what happens when you are in a room that has been, whether digital or actual, where you are sitting in amongst a core group of curated, qualified individuals. Qualified by their humility, their authenticity, their results, their enthusiasm for learning, and their enthusiasm for giving. This is what happens. You end up with this beautiful environment of cross-pollination, of wisdom and contribution, and that's what followed. And I truncate the recording there just because it gets into more, uh, personal stuff, and I wanna protect the anonymity and confidence and respect of those that are in that community. At its core, to ignore our regrets, is To completely delete, avoid, or bypass some of the most critical data that is gonna show up in our life to advance our growth. That's what it is. After all, if you don't pay attention to the things you want to not do again, what are the chances of you doing it again? Very high. Very high. When we think about it from a biological perspective- The human brain is an incredibly complex, but also very efficient and somewhat simple mechanism. And yes, dare I say that. I'm hesitant to use the term computer because I think it's overused, and I don't think the brain is a computer. But when we consider what goes on in the human brain, the human brain operates with prediction models. We're constantly running scenarios, predictive scenarios of the day in front of us, our lives ahead, using the data that's around us, largely to affirm our predictive bias than it is to disconfirm it. We talk about this as confirmation bias. So we bring expectations to circumstances all the time, and we do this because it's cheaper. It's energetically cheaper. The cognitive load of taking in all of the data around us is just overwhelming. If you think about, for example, the amount of data that is just pouring through your eyeballs alone right now is overwhelming, and the human brain cannot possibly process all of it and prioritize all of it. So in a way, it's very much like an efficient, uh, signal-seeking mechanism, like some computer systems, of course. And it is. It's taxing. It's cognitively taxing. The human brain accounts for 2% of the average weight of a human being, but it consumes 20% of the energy that your body uses. Cognitive load, it's heavy. It's expensive, and so it needs to be made efficient. And so we prune out the things that we don't consider important. We also prune out the stuff that makes us feel bad, and it sneaks up on you, as I say, at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. There's nothing to fix here. We know this. We bring predictive models and kind of data sets, and we look, as I say, to affirm those beliefs, suspicions, prediction models at all time. Oddly enough, the human brain seems to care more about being right in its prediction than even being safe. In fact, it hopes that the accuracy of its prediction will make it safe. So it prioritizes accuracy over safety or benefit. It considers the model the highest probability filter to identify success or avoidance of failure. What has this got to do with regret? Regret that is ignored, which is to say not analyzed, not deconstructed, not taken apart and spliced apart, is the most valuable or some of the most valuable data that should show up in our predictive models. It should be baked into that algorithm, but we deny it simply because we feel bad thinking about it. As I said, we associate bad choices with bad character. And there's that person in your family that helped you believe that. You are a bad kid. Actually, no, I just threw a rock through a window. It was a stupid choice, and I regret it. And if I can sit with that regret and think about the energy, the kind of animus behind it, I can probably figure out a way or data, I can identify data to improve my predictive model going forward. What I'm getting at is there is a neurological reason to embrace your regrets here. If you truly are on the path to mastery, which I define as the ability to produce the same or better outcomes for less cost. Spend some time with your regrets. Ask yourself these questions that I shared with this leadership team. What was the energy behind it? What did you really hope to gain? How conscious and in touch were you with the outcome you wanted versus the choice you made? There was a moment there, that whole Viktor Frankl stimulus and response and the gap between what you set out to do and how you responded to the data you received betrayed you. And you just decided to put that in the spam folder. I'm here to tell you it's a goldmine. And not only should it be moved back into your inbox, but it should be a core piece of the extractions that you can pull out of your own journal. Friends, there is gold there. In fact, the best version of you in myriad different circumstances and situations is waiting for you in that hidden file in your mind. All you have to do is let go of the idea that a bad choice or a bad series of choices makes you a bad person. Save that script for that cranky old person who put that in your mind as a kid. And if you need help with that, just ask yourself how happy, joyful, connected, and successful are they? Mine your regrets. There's so much to learn.

18:58

And the future you can't wait to be upgraded by it

Speaker 4 19:03

That's it for this episode. Thanks for being here. Hey, there's only two things that you have in your life, your time and your attention. That you've given both to me for these few minutes of today means everything. Cheers.