The Power Of Subtraction

September 13, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

Richard and Maurice were running a barbeque restaurant in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t doing very well. So they took a brief break to decide what to do.

They audited their sales receipts to see which products were selling more. Once they found out, they wondered: why don’t we focus on these products that are doing well? So, courageously, they slashed their menu from 25 items to a mere 9.

That’s when “McDonald’s Barbeque” actually started growing. The McDonald brothers could improve their food and reduce their costs by reducing their product line. And serve more customers per hour! That’s how Ray Kroc got interested in partnering with the brothers and franchising McDonald’s.

Subtraction is the key to excellence.

Ask a good chef how to make the soup more flavourful, and he’ll tell you to add a few more spices to it. But ask a great chef how to make the soup more flavourful, and he will tell you to boil away excess water.

Ask any Pulitzer prize-winning author, and they will tell you that the art of editing is more important than the art of writing.

Why does subtraction work?

As James Clear says:

There are two paths to improvement”

Option 1: Do more great work.

Option 2: Do less bad work.

Doing less of what is not working intensifies our focus on doing more of what is working. And that is why subtraction helps us succeed faster. By subtracting the inessential, we enable the essential to shine much brighter.

Adding is easier. Subtracting is not.

And that’s because we are hard-wired to add.

Leidy Klotz and his colleagues from the University of Virginia have conducted various experiments that prove that we humans are inclined towards addition.

When an incoming University president asked for ideas to improve things on campus, only 11% of the suggestions involved getting rid of something. Instead, 89% of requests were geared towards adding and doing new things.

In a study where college students were asked to improve their essays and resubmit them, only 17% did so by removing parts of them. 83% of the essays had a higher word count.

Takeaway

Subtract the inessential to intensify your focus on what works best.
Add monthly reminders to your calendar with a prompt question: “What can I subtract from my workload to focus on core projects?”

Don’t Set SMART Goals

August 30, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s. He made a scintillating discovery in a new scientific field of his day — cybernetics. He wrote in the book Psycho-Cybernetics that our “subconscious mind” is not just a mind but a goal-striving servo-mechanism.

He compared it to a torpedo or heat-seeking missile. It needs clear-cut targets to work on. And if you don’t give it one, it will find one.

Then why is it that most people don’t achieve their goals? There is no shortage of goals or goal-setters in the world.

That is because:

“These goals are filtered through the self-image, and if inconsistent, are rejected or modified.” — Maxwell Maltz

For the last five decades, we have been fed to set SMART goals. As you might be aware, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Usually, the kind of goals we would set would be either outcome-based or process-based.

Outcome-based goal — Lose five pounds in three months.

Process-based goal — High-impact exercise for 30 minutes each day for three months.

The trouble is, both don’t work.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has been studying habits and goal setting for more than a decade. Two of his famous quotes are:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

“Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there.”

James reckons your identity holds you back. He recommends setting identity-based goals.

An identity is a self-image chosen by you for you. And when things truly matter to you, you’re truly committed to making them happen. That’s because “the more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it.”

This is in line with Maxwell’s observation that your goals are filtered through your self-image and if they are not in line, they are either rejected or modified.

An identity-based goal is — I’m the type of woman that never misses a workout.

Here are a few more examples

Outcome-based goal — To earn $10,000 from writing by the end of this year.

Process-based goal — To write 200 articles on Medium and publish five e-books by the end of this year.

Identity-based goal — I am a market-savvy writer who can sell her work fair price.

Outcome-based goal — To write 2 to 3 articles a week.

Process-based goal — Write 750 words a day.

Identity-based goal — I am a writer who writes fast and fluently.

When I had outcome-based or process-based goals, I didn’t make much progress with my writing.

Rather I fought my own goals by keep telling myself that I was not a good writer.

As soon as I started seeing myself as a writer, I became a much more fluent writer. I am consistently writing 4 -5 articles a week on Medium and Substack and a post a day on LinkedIn.

In addition, I have written and published four books.

Add Spirituality To Your Goal Setting

Another thing that works is making your goals higher than yourself.

Recently, I came across a three-questions technique by Vishen Lakhiani to find out your end-goal.

End Goals is the term Vishen uses for identity-based goals.

The three questions Vishan Lakhiani poses are:

What are the experiences you want in your life?
How do you need to grow to have those experiences?
How can you contribute to the rest of the world?

There is a lot of merit in looking at goal-setting in this way.

When you think about experiencing the life of a lean and fit person, the motivation is much deeper and long-standing.

And since experience is embedded at the emotional level, the desire to achieve it is much stronger.

The second question is even more magical.

It makes you concentrate on the skills for the experience you want.

I realized I needed to put more of my work “out there” to grow as a writer.

So I started a Substack newsletter and started publishing short-form posts on social media and increased the frequency of article writing on Medium. Within months, I have become my “desired identity.”

The third question adds the spiritual element to the goal-setting.

When you make your goal bigger than your personal achievement, when there is an element of contributing to the universe, then the force of the universe clears the path for you (I wrote about it in Four Levels of Consciousness and How To Make Sure You Listen To Inspiration When It Whispers)

Here is the link to the video about the 3 Question Technique. And here is the format to use the 3 Question Technique:

How To Turn Minor Frustrations Into Opportunities

August 2, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

This new age that we live in provides us with medicines, mobile phones, streaming services and much more.

But with all these advances in technology can come a whole range of problems — and problems mean frustrations.

Modern life is frustrating, and it’s usually the small, seemingly insignificant things that, over time, all add up to an even bigger frustration.

These small things have a knock-on effect for the day ahead — another reason they can be so annoying.

A late train might make you late for a meeting, or your phone running out of battery could mean you can’t reply to an important message.

We all cope with many little frustrations every day.

A new study has revealed the 40 things we find most annoying about modern life.

They range from:

advertisements without a ‘skip’ button
tangled earphones
calls from unknown numbers
running out of phone battery or data
a cracked screen
intermittent Wifi connection
forgetting passwords
late trains
paying extra for luggage on flights
autocorrect on your phone
speed cameras
not being able to fast forward the live TV and
someone nabbing the social media username you wanted.

Not having enough leg room on a journey, a crying baby on the plane, websites with contact forms instead of email addresses and bars or shops which no longer accept cash payments are also featured on the list.

How many times do you complain on a typical day?

The study also found that during a typical day, adults will complain an average of three times.

Not only that, they almost half admitted to enjoying a whine or moan over the inconveniences modern life throws at them.

Nearly a quarter reckon complaints come from those who enjoy the attention.

Some said it is their national trait to moan and groan. While the study was done in Britain and three in four thought, it’s a typically British trait to have a moan or a groan about things. I am sure if you are an American or an Australian, you are a moaner and groaner too.

People like to whine because it’s easier to whine than find solutions.

It seems like some people have a low frustration tolerance.

What is Low Frustration Tolerance?

Low frustration tolerance (LFT), is a concept used to describe the inability to tolerate unpleasant feelings or stressful situations.

It stems from the feeling that reality should be as wished and that any frustration should be resolved quickly and easily.

People with low frustration tolerance experience emotional disturbance when frustrations are not quickly resolved. Their behavior is then directed towards avoiding frustrating events, which, paradoxically, leads to increased frustration and even greater mental stress.

There could be many reasons for LFT, such as one’s mental makeup. ADHD has been closely linked to low frustration tolerance.

Your expectation levels are also a contributor. But it is the slow build-up that causes the scale to tip.

You can tolerate your partner’s phone notification going off at full volume a few times, but when it goes on day after day, late in the night, and your loved one refuses to do something about it, can get on your nerves.

Low frustration tolerance manifests differently in different people:

Habitual procrastination of tasks or activities that cause frustration.
Impatience
Need for immediate gratification
Easily gives up when challenged
Easily irritated by everyday stressors.

How To Build Frustration Tolerance

Accept them. Things will go wrong, even those that shouldn’t go wrong. Life won’t always be easy. “Shit happens!” Forrest Gump rightly concluded. So suck it up.
Take a few deep breaths. Breathing helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system — the calming part of the nervous system. It slows down emotional reactions to the triggers and helps you calm down.
Frustration is the emotional reaction to thoughts. Change your thoughts and manage your reaction.
Turn them into opportunities. Take action. Fix the source of frustration, as Malcolm McLean did.

Malcolm Mclean owned a trucking company in the early nineteenth century. His job was to transport goods to the shipping yard for shipping abroad. Once, he got the contract to transport cotton bales to the port of Hoboken.

He brought the cotton bales but had to wait almost an entire day till dockworkers could load the crates full of cotton onto the ship.

Dockworkers and longshoremen would load and unload crates and barrels by hand. It was a slow, slow process.

So out of frustration, McLean asked himself: why can’t they load entire trucks onto the ships themselves?

And he realized why.

Because it was impractical for a truck owner to lose his truck for weeks at a time while the ship was sailing the seas.

Also, the trucks were heavy and would lead to unnecessary weight being added to the ships.

But McLean didn’t want to keep on putting up with the wait.

He wanted to find a solution.

Not long after, a solution came to him — divide the truck. Break the container from the wheels.

That was it. McLean invented the shipping containers that changed the face of world trade.

What is frustrating you at the moment?

How can you turn it into an opportunity to invent a solution?

Is it not being able to write every day? How can you turn that into an opportunity?

Is it calls from unknown numbers? How can you address it so that they don’t annoy you or waste your time?

Is it the amount of data on your phone? What can you do to keep it under check?

Once you find the solution, you can help several people who are frustrated by the same problem.

You might change the way things are done.

One of my sources of frustration is digital clutter. Here is what I have been doing to tackle it.

Folders and Documents: Once a week, I will spend half an hour deleting old files and documents.
Emails: Delete the ones I don’t want, archive the ones I want to keep, and act. Although I would love to have a zero-email inbox, we all know that strategy doesn’t work. The next best strategy is to organize them in folders. That is what I have been doing. I do them by the sender’s name. This way, I can mass delete emails from Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and sources like that.
Newsletters: Like everybody these days, I subscribe to several newsletters. But I have unsubscribed, most of them only keeping the ones I read regularly.
Images: I have removed all duplicated images, made physical photo albums of travel pictures, and saved the ones I want to keep in cloud storage.
Social Media: I have restricted social media to once a day, usually at night, while my energy levels are low.
Phone Apps: Each quarter, I go through phone apps and delete any I am not using anymore.
Backup: All my files are backed up on cloud storage.

All these measures have helped me save time, reduce stress, and improve productivity.

60 Lessons Learnt In 60 Years

September 18, 2021September 18, 2021 Neera

This week I turned sixty.

While there weren’t many options to celebrate amongst the six-week-long lockdown where I live, there was plenty of time to reflect on the six decades that I have spent on this planet.

While God’s Human Creation department forgot some ingredients while making me, his Good Fortune department compensated for those errors by giving me a good set of parents and a stable upbringing.

Both my parents were teachers who gave me a solid foundation to face life’s trials and tribulations. Of course, I had my fair share of those. But, what they did most was to install in me a passion for written words. So, ever since I was a little girl, I have been collecting quotes which over time, guided me, comforted me, and became the inspiration to try my hands at writing myself.

Some of them became life lessons.

I see no better way to celebrate my sixtieth birthday than to revise those and remind myself that, life is beautiful, and then you die.

Here are my handpicked 60 lessons learned in 60 years.

She that loveth books will never want a faithful friend. Books are wholesome counselors, cheerful companions, and effectual comforters. Also, they don’t reveal your secrets.
Education is the training that will help you get on without intelligence. If you have figured that out, you are intelligent enough and hence don’t need a college degree.
You will escape from school only to find that the world is a bigger school and that you are back again in the first grade. The only drawback is that there is no second grade.
Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they don’t know just as much as you do. Online teaching is prompting students that there is a better and more expensive course than the one they just bought.
Examinations are formidable to even the best prepared, for the greatest fool can ask more than the wisest can answer.
A secret is what you tell someone else not to tell because you can’t keep it to yourself. This is also a great way to create fake news.
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however. Alternatively, you can try praying.
Don’t waste your time collecting other people’s autographs. Devote it to make your autograph worth collecting. While you are doing that, practice your signatures.
If at first, you don’t succeed, then marriage is not for you.
We are all mad; only the degree varies.
He who rides the tiger cannot dismount. Try a donkey instead. They are more prevalent anyway.
Rabbits jump, and they live for 8 years, dogs run, and they live for 15, turtles do nothing and live for 150. They also win the race.
The road to success is always under repair. Mind the potholes.
Living is the art of getting used to what we didn’t expect.
What you are afraid of doing is a clear indicator of what to do next.
People who are late to the parties are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them. (It is because they have a husband who doesn’t confuse parties with work meetings.)
When you have to put up with mean people, think of them as sandpaper. They may scratch you, rub you the wrong way. But eventually, you end up smooth and polished. And the sandpaper? It will be worn out and ugly.
We all boil at different degrees.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Do what you feel is right. You will be damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves yet make them know that you are lying.
Those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them — then they destroy you.
It is important to know when to stop arguing with people and give them the pleasure of being wrong.
Be a good person, but don’t waste time trying to prove it to others.
Every next level of your life will demand a different version of you.
There’s no rule that says I have to live life like everyone else.
When a student is ready, the teacher appears. When a student is truly ready, the teacher disappears.
You’ll have good days, bad days, overwhelming days, too tired days, I-can’t-go-on days. And every day you’ll still show up.
Life is about how you handle plan B.
Grow through what you go through.
A woman is unstoppable after she realizes she deserves better.
When you can’t control what is happening around you, challenge yourself to control the way in which you respond. That is where your true power lies.
Money is just a concept. It has no real value. The day you understand that, you will understand how to make your own money.
If you don’t get on to build your own dreams, someone will hire you to build their dreams.
Life is like an elevator on the way up, sometimes you have to stop and let some people off.
Keep smiling… One day life will get tired of upsetting you.
Nothing ever goes away until it teaches you what you need to learn.
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
As long as you know who you are and what makes you happy it doesn’t matter how others see you.
Make yourself a priority. At the end of the day, you are your longest commitment.
It is up to you to see the beauty of everyday things.
Energy flows, where focus goes.
There’s no need to rush. What’s meant for you is always to arrive on time.
A bad attitude is like a flat tyre, you can’t get very far until you change it.
You can’t change the people around you. But you can change who you choose to be around.
If it is important to you, you will find a way. If not, you will find an excuse.
Being negative only makes a difficult journey more difficult. you make be given a cactus, but you don’t have to sit on it.
When you’re not sure, flip a coin because while the coin is in the air, you realize which one you’re actually hoping for.
One year = 365 opportunities.
You either say how you feel and f*ck it up, or say nothing and let it f*ck you up instead.
The smarter you get, the less you speak. You grow to realize that not everyone is worth confrontation. Your time is valuable, your energy is priceless and you don’t want to waste either on people who don’t deserve it.
Every time you are able to find humor in a difficult situation, you win.
Be careful who you trust. Salt and sugar look the same.
You are the best project you will ever work on.
Stop setting new year resolutions. Stop raising the bar each year. Stop under-promising and over-delivering. You are not a Fortune 500 company that has to show more profit each year. You are a living being like any other. You have the right to be in this universe. A cat never has to set a new year resolution. Free yourself of any expectations, especially your own.
There is a trick to a graceful exit. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over — and let it go. It means leaving what is over without denying its validity or its past importance in our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving on, rather than out. The trick to retiring well is the trick to living well. Life isn’t a holding action but a process. We don’t leave the best parts of ourselves behind, back in the sports field or the office. We own what we learned back there. The experience and the growth are grafted onto our lives. And when we exit, we can take ourselves along quite gracefully.
Beautiful young people are due to makeup, but beautiful old people are works of art.
We do not necessarily improve with age; for better or worse, we become more like ourselves.
In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It is the years that you don’t have to spend in the nursing home.
When you get to the age when your thinking goes from “you probably shouldn’t say that” to “what the heck, let’s see what happens,” you are in the sixth decade of your life. At that age everything is fun.

What Is Frustrating You Right Now

August 13, 2021August 13, 2021 Neera

Removing little frustrations can lead to big gains

We all cope with many little frustrations every day.

The fridge needs cleaning. “I will do it when I have a bit of time,” you tell yourself. Days pass by, and you don’t get around to clean the damn thing. But every time you open it, you feel frustrated.

Rosebush needs pruning. It is about time. In 2 – 3 weeks, it will be too late. “I will do them when I have a free hour.” But, of course, you never get the free hour. You keep putting up with its long protruding tentacles every time you walk past it.

Little frustrations like that suck energy and make you feel clogged.

The fact is it takes much less energy and time to remove them than to keep putting up with them. And you feel good at a result. Just as a plunger unclogs your sink, cleaning out little irritations unclogs you.

When our physical surroundings are cluttered, we feel clogged and uncomfortable both in our physical space and consciousness. We feel constantly frustrated. Our energy is blocked. Our creativity is squelched.

Now think about the time when you took the pile of stuff gathered in your garage to the tip. Or when you donated clothes from your closet that you hadn’t worn in years.

How did you feel after you finished those tasks? I’ll bet you felt a rush of adrenaline and a true sense of accomplishment.

You walked away from the job feeling more positive about yourself. You felt as if you had accomplished something big.

Roll up your sleeves and start reducing the physical clutter.

Physical clutter is not the only thing that can clog our system.

Pent-up emotions clog our system too. We don’t realize it, but anger, resentment, and grudges are the constant sources of frustration. We remain emotionally and spiritually clogged when we hang on to negative emotions.

Are you holding any resentment toward anyone right now? If so, your emotional and spiritual system is clogged. You’re devoting energy to that resentment, which “steals” energy you could be applying to more productive things.

Forgive those who you feel have wronged you. Why hang on to something that makes you feel angry and miserable?

What about the digital clutter.

At the moment, my biggest frustration is digital clutter.

Ever since I started using personal computers, I developed a habit of collecting ‘stuff.’ The ‘stuff’ could be self-help articles, free books, images, emails, PowerPoint presentations (remember we used to get many of those via emails), animations. You name it; I have it.

Digital clutter not only takes up significant space on my devices but in my head as well. It distracts me, demands my attention, and is mentally taxing.

This week I decided to get rid of digital clutter. However, since digital clutter keeps accumulating, I made myself a strategy to deal with it regularly.

Take Away

We all get frustrated from time to time with little things. Instead of keep on putting up with them, work on removing them.

Pay attention to inefficiencies. What wastes your time and money right now? Solving those problems could be more beneficial than you think.

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Do You Have Any Regrets

May 18, 2021May 18, 2021 Neera

In 2009, Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse wrote the second article for her newly formed blog, Inspiration and Chai.

The article was called Regrets of the Dying.

After too many years of unfulfilling work, Bronnie Ware began searching for a job with heart. Despite having no formal qualifications or previous experience in the field, she found work in palliative care.

For eight years she tended to the dying. Rather than feeling depressed and drained, Bronnie’s life was transformed. She was repeatedly offered lessons and life-changing insights while sitting by the bedsides of dying people as their carer and listener.

In her blog post, she outlined the most common regrets of the people she had cared for. The post flowed completely of its own accord, without hesitation, simply drawing upon powerful, clear memories.

That post went viral and was viewed by more than three million readers worldwide in its first year.

But something else happened in parallel.

By applying the lessons of those nearing their death to her own life, she developed an understanding that it is possible for every one of us to live a regret-free life if we make the right choices.

Regret is not all bad news.

We all have regrets. Some are little regrets like, not taking an opportunity when it presented itself or making a mistake with our eyes open. But then there are bigger regrets.

Regrets that can make our lives a living hell, taking us through a whole spectrum of emotional states.

One side of the spectrum is the dark lament we feel when we’re reminded of how fucked up and flawed we are. But the other side of regret, the side that makes it all worth it, is the light it shines in. That light guides us to a better understanding of ourselves — and ultimately to a place of acceptance of how fucked up and flawed we are. — Mark Mason

Regret is a sign that we are engaged with life. Without regret, we cannot learn from our mistakes, and we are destined to repeat them. The anxiety and the feeling of dissatisfaction are the messages from our souls saying something is wrong and needs addressing.
Addressing regret leads to a better life. Leaving regret unidentified can lead to self-hatred. We can see around us people who can’t forgive themselves after they had done something wrong. They constantly blame themselves. They can’t find happiness until they address the regret of their lives. There is life after regret. One can recover.
Identifying regret leads to remorse. And in remorse is the nirvana. Remorse involves insight into what one has done to others. It is the beginning of becoming aware of how one behaves and wanting to do something differently. When you can begin to experience genuine remorse for what you’ve done, something authentic starts to happen.
Regret is an opportunity to do things differently next time. Though very painful regret can be a gift. It can be a doorway to a better way of living. A right kind of regret which can be understood and worked through can lead to remorse and repair is the strongest sign of life meaningfully lived.

Three kinds of Regrets

Simply put, regrets are the choices we made.

We think we should have done something better but didn’t. We should have chosen a better life partner, but didn’t. We should have not said those harsh words but we did. We should have taken that more exciting but risky job, but didn’t. We should have been more disciplined, but weren’t.

We regret these choices, which happened in the past and can’t be changed. We compare them to an ideal path that we think we should have taken. We can’t shake the idea from our heads of what could have been if only we had made a different choice.

And since we cannot change those choices we start regretting them.

I would divide regrets into three kinds.

Something you did wrong.

We all have done something we shouldn’t have. We are humans after all. We make mistakes. But carrying that mistake to your grave is a bigger mistake.

Opening yourself up to the possibility of making mistakes and learning from the experience is a better way to deal with this kind of regret rather than beating yourself over it for years to come.

It’s not an easy thing to do but with practice, it does get easier, because the more we can allow ourselves to make mistakes and learn from them, the fewer mistakes we make.

Yet, strange as it sounds, there are people for whom this kind of regret can become a safe haven, because it can protect them from the pain and risks of living a full life.

Two out of the five regrets of the dying who confided in Bronnie Ware fell in this category.

Something you want to do all your life and didn’t do it.

The number one regret of the dying that they admitted to Bronnie Ware was:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

It is not unusual for people to keep living the life that others expected from them rather than gather enough courage to live the life they want to live.

Unlived life also becomes that cause of unfulfillment, anxiety, self-loathing. Many people seeking therapy because they feel paralyzed by regret and yet unable to live a full life. We hate our work, our relationship suffers and our self-confidence suffers too. ‘I’m so terrible. I’m dreadful.’ It is self-flagellation, and it can be incredibly damaging to our mental health.

When we are trapped in a cycle of dissatisfaction and inability to live the life we truly want to live, we blame others for our fulfillment. This when the regret becomes toxic.

The grass is greener on the other side.

There is a tendency with regret to see the pathway you didn’t take as inevitably better than the pathway you did.

It may well be that this other pathway would indeed have worked out better but the point is that we cannot know for sure.

It is that certainty, that transformation into the knowledge of what can only ever really be a supposition, that is the hallmark of toxic regret.

It is the ability to accept yourself, to recognize that there was a wider context to your actions and to understand that you made the decisions you made based on the values and the information you had at the time, that leads to remorse and self-knowledge.

What regrets do you have?

Are you living the life you wanted to live or the others prescribed for you?

Are you spending enough time with your loved ones?

Do you have plenty of time to enjoy life or you are always rushed?

Are you in contact with your friends and loved ones?

Do you express your feelings?

Do you allow yourself to be happy?

Are you keeping up with the Johns or do you have the courage to walk your own walk?

Is there any space for creativity or your life?

Two years ago my biggest regret was that I was not able to spend much time writing.

I tackled it head-on. I took early retirement and started concentrating on writing. Now I am a full-time writer.

Here are a few things you can do to tackle your regrets.

Whether your regrets are large — like choosing to turn down a job or not trying hard enough for a medical school entrance exam or unkind things you said to someone, letting go of regret is beneficial.

Here are a few things you can do to create a little space between you and your regrets:

Make a list of your regrets and try to understand the rationale behind your choice.

It might seem counterintuitive, but if you find yourself thinking about your regrets it can help to write about them. Did you really make the wrong choice? Can it be corrected? If yes, what measures can you take to correct it. If not, what can you do to let it go. What lesson you can learn from it so that you don’t make the same mistake.

Forgive yourself.

If you have done something wrong and you have realized, and feel remorse it is time to forgive yourself. If you have fallen short of your expectation, it too is the time to forgive yourself. There’s no magic solution to make you feel okay immediately with whatever you regret, but by processing and forgiving yourself you can begin to let go.

It is not the mistake that counts, it is the lesson it teaches you.

This is just another way of gaining context and perspective because hanging on to mistakes means you are not paying attention to the lesson it carries. And you are not moving ahead. Even if you have made the wrong choice repeatedly, it is time you learn the lesson because now the stakes are even higher. It is time to change the course.

Make amends.

If your regret involves other people, it is time to forget and forgive them as well. If appropriate apologize and make amends. Sometimes it is just a matter of reaching out.

If you suspect that someone will genuinely benefit from your delayed apology, it is better to reach out, rather than regret it at your death bed.

Your Takeaway

View regret as an opportunity to do things differently next time, rather than a signal that you should give up trying altogether.

If you have caused hurt or harm, instead of beating yourself up, do what you can to repair the damage.

Tackle your regret head-on while there is still time.

Be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to “get it wrong.” Forgive yourself and others. Life is too short to keep grudges.

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