Don’t let regret limit your retirement happiness.

To regret the past is to forfeit the future.

~ Chinese Proverb

Getting older piles on the regrets

It is certainly a truism that the longer you live, the less future you have. Also you have more past and more possibilities that you have done things you regret. Hindsight is wonderful in showing you mistakes. In my past I acted (or didn’t act) based upon what I knew at the time. I did the best I could to use good judgment but looking back there is plenty that I could have done better. There are the things that I knew I should do but didn’t for one reason or another and there are the things about which I was clueless and took the wrong action. By now, at my advanced age those regrets start taking up a big part of my brain and eating into my diminishing future.

I have two kinds of regret

There are two kinds of regret that I deal with – regret for actions I took when I should have done something else (or maybe nothing at all) and regret for things I should have done but didn’t. Sometimes there is a lesson that goes with the regret. Maybe it tells me to set aside an emergency fund or maybe I learn more effective ways to deal with people. In those cases I use the regret to change my life and prevent ever having the regret again. Many more cases are regrets for actions about which I had no good information- like investment decisions. They looked (and were) risky at the time but hindsight has made them appear to be sure things. Don’t you regret not buying Microsoft stock? My head is full of those regrets; regrets about property I could have bought, investments I could have made, personal and family decisions that might have made my life better. By now in my life, I could spend days on coulda, shoulda, woulda moments, indulging myself in what might have been if only I had…..

Don’t indulge Regret

Bottom line, those regrets are life killers. If there was a lesson to learn from a wrong action, then learn it and move on. There is nothing gained from indulging yourself by reliving the moments. If there is no lesson then just forget them and eliminate regret. I like the analogy from business between regrets and sunk costs. In business you might have spent big bucks yesterday for a widget that you thought would help your business and discover today that it doesn’t. You can’t get the money back. You are stuck with the expense. Since you can’t change the balance sheet for that expense, your only path is to develop a business plan to move forward. If you can’t use the widget, beating yourself up for making a bad decision just keeps you from moving forward and making good ones. It is the same with regret.

It is a daily fight

It isn’t easy letting go of regret. Something inside me want to make me feel bad about the past and keep me from moving forward. I think its the fear of making more mistakes that blocks me from taking charge and living my life adventure boldly. I struggle with this daily. The weight of everything in my life to date that I regret is massive and hard to hard to ignore. I have to continually tell myself to block those feelings because there is nothing I can do about them and they prevent me from paying attention to my future. I can’t change the past and my future is diminishing with every passing second.

What about you?

Do you get diverted from you future with regrets? If you struggle, have you learned any tricks to put regret behind you? If so, please share.