Mind Noise – Curing Regret

The Pain of Regret outweighs the pain of discipline. There is a cure for regret and regret is one of the most toxic things we can carry. Let’s explore.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00 Okay. Hey, well, this is the third and final episode today of our mind noise. I’m probably giving you mind noise by helping you eliminate my noise. 0:12 I would like today on this one to talk about regret. You know truthfully, if you look at the scars and the bruises on my face and my body, there’s a lot of things that I’ve done in my life that I probably could have done a bit better. 0:33 I you know, hurt people. I made business decisions that I think could have been made differently. The question’s going to end up being at the end of all this is, do I regret them? 0:55 I guess I could honestly say that I don’t want to hurt people, but what I’ve learned from my work within a wealth over 40 years now is that you can’t hurt somebody without helping somebody. 1:13 You can’t give somebody pain without them actually receiving pleasure. You can’t do to a person more than they do to themselves. 1:23 Is that rationalization? Maybe, however, I do know one thing, and that is to live with any level of regret is to end your life deliberately. 1:40 Regret is slow suicide. Therefore, whether it’s rationalization of what we do and what we accidentally or deliberately do to another person, whether it’s rationalization and justification, or whether it’s simply the appetite to live long, it means that anything that’s happened has happened, events or events until we judge them otherwise. 2:06 And it’s only our judgments that would keep us locked into some level of regret. Let’s just go through it. Firstly, religion Wills talk about there being an event that took place that has no benefit. 2:25 And the reason it does that is because it wants to be very polarized and very black and white in what’s good behavior and what’s bad. 2:33 And religion doesn’t ask you, the listener or the observer to make educated decisions about whether you should move to the left or right. 2:43 It gives you a script. And I think that’s very, very important in the world because if you think about the population of the planet, you only have to go to Midwest America or not far out of London, or down to where I live in Bondi. 3:02 You don’t have to go far to realize that there are some people who ha lack consciousness and they need strict rules to live by. 3:16 And so the purpose of religion is to polarize rules so people don’t have to be making up their own mind about things like hurting people. 3:28 However, there are those of us who live on purpose, who want to be evolved and don’t wanna live in a state of regret or guilt or anxiety or whatever. 3:38 And we look for a way to do that. That’s absolutely a hundred percent authentic. The way we do it is we try to understand the reality of life. 3:49 We don’t live by rule books. We don’t live by other people’s books, but we do accept the need for them. 3:54 For others. Every business decision I ever made that was inverted commerce wrong, ended up having a benefit. And every right business decision I ever made ended up having a drawback. 4:12 And if we look at it this way over a long period of time, what we can see is to hurt somebody deliberately is, is, is, is, is really bad. 4:25 But having done it, there’s no use. Regretting it. There’s a need to learn from it, but there’s no use regretting it. 4:32 It happened. And whether it was deliberate or accidental becomes inconsequential. They got hurt. Our behavior can change. We can adapt and modify and learn from our mistakes and be forgiving on ourselves and understand that sometimes we operate unconsciously and we need to learn. 4:54 We learn the hard way called experience, most expensive education on the planet, but to what we did to others. If we walk around regretting and wishing them forgi to forgive us, we are making a really big mistake that what whatever we did to somebody, there was pain, but they also benefited what we did to somebody might have caused them hardship, but what there also was, was good ship. 5:27 And to that end, the universe continues to go around and wars take place and earthquakes happen, and airplanes crash and goodness knows what, which are all horrible things, but the world continues to function. 5:42 And so in that way, we can function as nature functions. We don’t need to carry emotional baggage along the way. 5:51 With us, one of the heaviest burdens that we can carry is regret. One of the heaviest luggages, one of the biggest backpacks and wishing the past was different is, is only comes from a person who hasn’t seen and become aware of gratitude. 6:13 So the enemy of regret is gratitude. Recently I was asked to do a keynote speech for a group, and they asked me to talk about gratitude. 6:22 And I said, there’s pros and cons. If we are grateful for the things we that are, that are not good, we will do more of what’s not good. 6:31 So gratitude can stop us learning. So if we fess up and say, I did something that’s not good. I’m not grateful for what I did. 6:41 I wanna learn from what I did and become and make sure that I don’t have to go through that learning again and again. 6:48 We can be grateful for the learning, but not necessarily grateful for the event, grateful for things that are not I’m grateful for having a bottle of wine, but does that make me drink more? 7:03 And the answer, of course it would. Am I grateful for being for the parking spot that I stole from somebody? 7:10 Of course I am. But does that make me a good citizen in a community? Of course not. So gratitude as a silver bullet, as a, as a blanket over everything is inappropriate. 7:22 There are two sides to everything, and we need to own the two sides to everything. And the group that hired me to, to do a talk on gratitude, were ungrateful for the talk <laugh> about gratitude, Which, which I love. 7:37 <laugh>. I think that’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard. So, because they didn’t hear what they wanted To hear, So <laugh>, But gratitude is the antidote to regret that fact. 7:59 We know we can take the power back from regret by finding gratitude for what took place. This is Chris. You have a great day. 8:10 And remember all these things add up to quietness in the mind. I hope you’re getting there. Bye for now.