“Everybody has regrets, the only people without regrets are five year olds … and sociopaths”, says Daniel Pink, author of The Power of Regret.
Pink believes that regret is a “key part of our cognitive machinery” and that it can be extremely useful, particularly in the workplace.
In 2020, Pink and a team ran the World Regret Project, the largest quantitative analysis of international attitudes about regret ever conducted. More than 15,000 regrets were shared from people from more than 100 different countries.
Participants were asked a range of questions including, ‘how often do you look back on your life and wish you had done something differently?’
The project found that over 80 per cent of participants claimed to have experienced regret at least occasionally.
“[That makes] Americans more likely to experience regret than they are to floss their teeth,” Pink tells ABC RN’s This Working Life.
“So it’s a very common emotion.”
Regret can provide clarity, instruction and an opportunity to learn, Pink says, if we can “take that negative feeling and convert it into a lesson for living”.
We regret losing touch with colleagues
While regret can manifest in many different forms, the results of the project highlighted five different types of core regrets. The most common one was in regards to the loss of connection in relationships.
“There were huge numbers of regrets in this domain … in terms of work,” Pink says.
Many participants described feeling regret about not reaching out to colleagues and inevitably losing contact. This was a common regret among the several hundred Australians who participated in the American survey.
“From an American perspective, Australians [are] quite gregarious, but the Australian regrets were not wildly different from the regrets in the UK or the regrets in Japan or the regrets in the United States of America,” Pink observed.
Pink had simple advice for those who do feel this regret: “Always reach out.”
Be bold and do the right thing
Another common regret that the study identified was a lack of boldness.
“In the world of work … [sometimes] you’re at a juncture in your life [where] you can play it safe [or] you can take the chance — and people play it safe,” he said. “And then they regret it”.
By focusing on avoiding failure rather than achieving success, participants often lamented not “taking the chance in their careers”, Pink says.
He says the study also found that many employees regretted not speaking up in the workplace when the need arose.
“That suggests that organisations need to learn from these regrets,” Pink said. “All of these regrets are giving organisations signals about how to make work worthwhile”.
Another common regret was something called ‘foundation regrets’. He described these as lifestyle decisions such as smoking, not exercising or not saving enough money.
“So, small decisions early in life that lead to bad consequences later in life.”
Regrets surrounding moral decision making were also common. He offered an example: “You’re at a juncture, you can do the right thing or the wrong thing — and you do the wrong thing”.
For many, that decision brought deep regret.
“The biggest regret in my career is that I didn’t really spend much time actually driving my own career, I didn’t really seek out opportunities, or really identify any real specific goals. You could really say I really wasn’t very deliberate about it,” Janelle Delaney, partner in IBM Consulting.
“So my biggest work regret … now as a 45-year-old is just working so so hard in the media, especially as a much younger journalist …There’s a Dolly Parton quote I keep thinking of, and she says, ‘never get so busy making your living that you forget to make a life’,” Ginger Gorman, author and social justice journalist.
“My biggest regret around work might sound a bit strange, but it was probably when I grew my business too big because … it actually took me away from what I love doing. So it took me towards spending a lot more time running the business and dealing with accountants and lawyers and all sorts of people and not actually helping people,” Dr. Tim Sharp, Chief Happiness Officer at The Happiness Institute
How do we learn from our regret?
Pink says the first step is to “reframe regret” in a compassionate way.
“Basically treat yourself with kindness, rather than contempt,” he suggests.
Disclosure is also important as, according to Pink, that helps to reduce the burden and kickstart the “sense-making process” of regret.
Commonly these regrets can be very emotional. “The very use of language converts these blobby abstractions into concrete, less fearsome words”.
Plus, Pink says “regret hinges on storytelling”. When you feel regret, you often tell yourself a new version of the story each time you go over the event in your mind.
By verbalising this regret, we can hopefully break that loop and identify where we had “control and agency” in that situation.
Pink says we are often apprehensive to reveal our regrets as they indicate failure. But he says, “research shows pretty clearly that people actually like us more [if we do reveal regrets], because they admire courage and they empathise with us”.
Finally, Pink says, “having regrets is normal … that’s a good sign, it means your brain is functioning”.
Ultimately individuals need to think about those regrets and what lesson that experience is providing.
“What people regret the most … is what they value the most,” he says.
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