Join Brooke for a live coaching event. Click here.

“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”
― John Barrymore

A lot of people come to me with many regrets about what they’ve done or haven’t done in the past and the opportunities they have missed. If you’ve been listening to The Life Coach School Podcast for a while, you know that most emotions fall into two categories: useful emotions and indulgent, not useful emotions. So where does regret fall? Is there an upside to regret?

On this episode, I examine the emotion of regret and teach you how to deal (or not to deal) with it. Listen in for some tips for looking at your past without regret as well as how you can use that negative emotion in the way that will serve you in the future.

What you will discover

  • An update about our September training.
  • What regret is all about.
  • Tips for looking at the past without regret.
  • How to use regret in a way that serves you.

Featured on the show

Episode Transcript

Welcome to The Life Coach School podcast where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching and now, your host, master coach instructor Brooke Castillo.

What is going on everyone? Holy cow I've had the craziest day so far. I came into the office and my server, because I have my own servers for my website, was blocking me from accessing it so I was unable to do the webinar from my office so I had to jump in my car, drive home, run the webinar. I do a webinar for my certified coaches once a month, run the webinar and then run back here, get on the phone with my server guy and figure out what was going on with my server. A couple hours of stuff that gets nothing accomplished is how I felt about it. I was working with computers and servers and the server didn't like that I put in the wrong password and so it had blocked my IP and that's why I wasn't able to do it. Anyway, just solved that, that's exciting and I am back here to do some podcasting for y'all. The first thing I want to offer is we have another training coming up here in September.

I know that some of you guys have been thinking about it, you've been on the fence about it, and I just want to say I was talking to Erina, one of the women that was in our recent training and she was hysterical. She said that she was thinking about coming, the podcast has really had an impact on her but she kept saying no, no, no and she didn't want to spend the money and she thought it was expensive for what she was willing to pay for the training. But then she just kept listening and decided to come and she was so absolutely thrilled that she did so if you are like Erina and you're wondering, and thinking, and hoping, and wishing that you could come, one of the things that I told in the class is that, "Hey, just so you know, you're living someone else's dream right now."

I have so many people emailing me wanting to come to the training and here you are living it and it kind of made them all stop and think for a minute because I know there's so many of you out there that really want to come and really want to learn and if that is you and if you're on the fence I want to encourage you to check out our next training. Here's what I want you to remember; the price goes up every time so this time, this will be the last time we offer it at this price and I also want to offer that we are going to do the six months of business support and building is included at this lower price. It's a screaming deal. Let me explain to you what you get. You get eight days, if you get the double certification, you get eight days with me and I just wanted to tell you that those eight days are amazing and then you get the 90 certification practicum and then you get six months of someone building a business with you. Look around, see if there's anyone offering something this bad-ass. They're not.

First of all our training is better than anyone else's in the world, just ask me and you get that 90 day practicum follow up and the six months of business building. Amazing, amazing, amazing. If you're interested go to TheLifeCoachSchool.com, check out our training page, get on the phone with Jody, and let's get you hooked up. We already have a bunch of people signed up, if you're already signed up I'm so excited, I know a lot of you guys had wanted to come in June but just didn't work out with the summer so you're going to come in September and I love the fall. I love getting back to work after the summer's over. If you're with me on that, let's do it. I don't think it's anything you could ever regret doing. Amazing way to start, we start the school year in September. Christian, my oldest will be going into high school. Let's do it. You have any questions you can email [email protected] and she will answer any questions that you have.

We had Dawn come, she came from all the way across the pond, from England and absolutely love and adore her and was absolutely so thrilled that she came and I think she was too. For those of you who say, "Oh my gosh I live so far away," there you go, hop on an airplane and come on. Let's do this. I'm thinking about Rubina who was there, one of the things that I had talked about at the training was it's really important to tell at least one person your secret. Someone that you know will hold this space for you and someone that loves you and if you have a secret that you are holding inside that's keeping you in a shame based place you want to make sure that you're willing to share that secret and that was something that she had done there. Believe me, we all have them sister don't even think ... One of my most, I think comforting thoughts is that we all have shame no matter how amazing, talented, pretty, gorgeous, rich we are. We all have shame.
If you have something that's a secret that you're holding in, telling it to one person, and of course she was able to do that at the training and it was a really powerful experience for her and of course she did it with one of the best coaches I know, Suyin Nichols, master certified coach was there and really powerful experience. I thought about Rubina so much because she was one of the people in the class that didn't volunteer all the time or raise her hand but I kept saying in my head, I see you, I see you there, you can come and show up however you want. You do participate with everybody in the class but you don't necessarily have to raise your hand all the time. It's all good. I still see you. I still got my eye on you and then I'm thinking about Monique who did participate quite a bit and shared some stories with us. She had this inclination that someone in her life could take her sunshine away.

So many of us believe that and we kind of had a good laugh about that that the good news is no one can take your sunshine away. Nobody can, it's yours and you get to keep it and nobody can do anything to you that changes how you feel without your permission. That's a beautiful, wonderful thing to know. Then of course there was Susie there who I think about the most since we left because she was worried about going home and losing all the magic that we have there and that's a common concern that people have. We spend these days together and you get to evolve into the version of yourself that is really processed with the thought work and we work together on really focusing on our goals and our dreams and you get to a really good feeling place and a lot of people are concerned about going home and being able to maintain that. Susie was one of those people and I hope that she's gone home and kicked ass. That's what I hope. If she hasn't, we have a big group of people that are all cheering for her and hopefully she's getting lots of love from all of us.

I miss you guys and what was cool is Julie from the March group came to the June group so she got to meet everybody in both groups to get her weight coach certification. If you're listening to this Julie, it's time to get certified, let's make it happen. The one last person I want to mention, I had such an amazing experience with her, Erin. She owns her own yoga studio in Florida and she flew such a long way to come and learn all of these tools to take back to her crew and her people and all the lives she's going to touch. I took her to my yoga studio. We had talked on the phone and she had said that she didn't really like hot yoga so I took her to one of my hot yoga classes and we had such an amazing time Ashley, and Erin, and I doing yoga together. I think that there's something very bonding about doing a practice together so I absolutely loved doing that and I told that I'm going to have to come to Florida and do a little bit more yoga.

Hopefully she'll come to San Diego for the mastermind coming up and we will do some yoga there. I gave a shout out to every single person that was in that class over the past episodes and some of you more than once and if I didn't mention you it's because you didn't listen to that podcast, so you go back and listen to it. I've been thinking about all of you. I love you guys so much, and I miss you already. It's only been a couple days since you've been here but it's amazing how I have my own abandonment issues when you guys all leave. Anyway, let's get to the session. I usually don't take a lot of time before I start but today it was an exception and hey, it's my podcast. I shall do what I want.

We are going to talk about dealing with regret and I want to talk about this because a lot of people are dealing with regret. A lot of people are coming to me and they have so many regrets and I want to teach you how to deal with it and I want to teach you how to, I should say more accurately not deal with it.

The question is, is there an upside to regret? Is it a useful emotion? You guys know if you've been listening to the podcast that I like to think about emotions as either being indulgent and not useful or as useful and many of our useful emotions don't feel awesome, they don't feel great, but they help us get what we want in our lives. So I wondered about regret when I started looking at that emotion. Is it a valued, negative emotion? Is it one that's useful? I came up with I think yes and no. I think our regret, if we can use it, if we look at something we wished we wouldn't have done or something that we didn't do that we wished we would have done or something that we wish we would have gotten started on earlier and we use that emotion to change our life now, then yes, I think it's useful. But the problem is most of us spend way too much time blaming, using regret to blame ourselves for something that happened in the past. One of the modules that I teach at Life Coach School is the difference between past focus and future focus.

When you are focused on your past, when you are constantly thinking about your past and arguing with it, that is regret. Wishing you would have done something different, believing if something would have been different then you would be different I think is a complete waste of time. I think regret is only useful for a temporary flash of a moment where you see, hey, I could have done that in a different way and I'm going to do that now. That's when it's useful. Otherwise I don't think it has an upside. I read this quote when I was researching this topic and it said, "A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams." What? Isn't that true? We start looking backwards and we start regretting instead of looking forward and creating. If you look back and you regret something and you're going to use that regret to make your future better, do it. If you're going to look back and regret something and pine over it and wish it were different you're not going to be serving yourself.

One of the most powerful thoughts I use in my life, all of the time is what's meant to happen does. What was meant to happen did, it was always meant to happen that way. When I can look back and see that the choices that I made I was supposed to make it makes me feel more free and I don't need to feel regret in order to make a different choice now. I started to think would I ever use regret and here's how I want to recommend that you use that emotion; you can use it to say I'm going to do this so I don't regret not doing it. Here's what I mean by that, I want you to imagine yourself ten years from now. If you are ... I think I'm 43, if you're 43 I would be 53 so when I'm 53 what might I look back on with regret if I don't do it now.

I think that's a useful way of using that emotion and here's what I came up with. I think I would regret spending more time at work than I do with my kids. I think would regret not taking care of my body. I would regret not going to yoga. I would regret not putting a lot of time in with my husband. I might regret not saving money. I might regret not working on my business and building it and touching more lives. I might regret not spending more time with my friends. I think that's a useful exercise is to go into my future and prevent the regret, think about what can I do now so I won't regret later. I probably won't regret anyway because I don't see that as a very useful emotion after the fact but I do think it's a way that you can utilize that emotion in your future.

If you are in a lot of regret right now, if you are looking at your life and you are punishing yourself with regret because you wish you would have lived your life different, shown up different, been different, I want you to ask yourself this: is there an upside to doing that? Have you found a purpose to doing that? Is it serving you in any way? If it isn't, how could you think about your past in a way that would serve you? How could you think about your past in a way where you don't blame yourself but you use your past as a way to create a better future for yourself? Then fast forward into your future and prevent the regret you might feel in the future. Do not let your regrets take the place of your dreams. Regret doesn't have to be present for you to desire change for you to want to get better. You don't have to beat yourself up about your past in order to create a better future. You can look back, you don't have to blame, but then you can use it as a way of taking risks and showing up in your life now.

I think that's the only thing I might regret, I wonder on my deathbed, not showing up and not taking the risk, not being willing to be afraid, not being willing to make a mistake or to fail. I know for sure I'll never regret the chances I took. I'll only regret not believing in myself and not showing up for myself and so that's how I'm going to use that emotion for me. I'm going to bet on myself for myself in the future because I'll look back with a little bit of a wink to myself and go, "Yeah, nice. Good stuff, so glad you did it." I hope that you'll do the same for yourself. Deal with your regret in a way that serves you and if it's not serving you, let it go and I'll talk to you about the opposite of regret in the next episode. Talk to you next week. Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School podcast. It would be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments, or coaching issues
you would like to hear on the show, please visit us at www.TheLifeCoachSchool.com.

Get Coached in Self Coaching Scholars Today