Have you ever thought, "What could have happened if I chose something differently"?
Maybe you feel your job is not what you imagined it would be. Perhaps you studied for a degree in college out of your passion for it, but don't really know how to apply the knowledge to a corporate job title or don't know if your skills are "marketable".
I know I've been in that place before and thought: "Why did I choose X instead of Y? Y would make my life much more different than it is now".
The first time it happened to me, I was in college. It was the first semester of my International Relations bachelors course and I thought it was all too easy. I didn't feel challenged enough at that point and was quick to associate that with something almost unethical.
I saw friends in the other "traditional" courses such as Engineering, Law, and Medicine all struggling to keep their heads above the water since day 1. That's what was supposed to be happening to me, right? The more you struggle, the greater the outcome. That was what would be in a constant loop inside my head and what I've been taught.
Fast forward a few years, I was presented with two job offers to work in project management. One would pay me a little bit less but the company was big and the team would be international. The other one was the opportunity to work for the first time with one of my (now) mentors. I wanted to honor the potential my mentor saw in me and took a leap of faith.
Although I didn't make the first full year in the company, due to a severe burnout crisis and lack of investment from the market, that experience taught me so much in both hard and soft skills.
Why is regret such a bad feeling?
Even though I knew how much I had learned, that thought of "I should have done XYZ" quickly came back and rented a room in my mind again. There were several times when I got myself thinking "If I had taken the job at that other company, I would probably not have had all the trouble I had to go through".
Let's take a step back here and analyze this sort of thought pattern, ok? When it happens, this sort of thought comes from a place of already knowing the outcome and how we ended up there. That little voice inside our heads never considered the knowledge we had at the time and how the many opportunities we encountered presented themselves.
That same little voice is also certain that the other possible outcome would be for sure better than the one we actually had and it creates a sense of regret and guilt that's hard to swallow. That's why regret is such a bad feeling.
Turning it around requires time and effort
But how true that actually is? Not very much, right? And it's purely based on guessing.
My former therapist called this thought pattern "the dictatorship of the should've".
First of all, I think this is a genius name, and second of all, she was 100% right.
I can't go back and change anything, so why dwell in guilt and regret when I don't actually know any outcome other than the one I got?
What I started doing to turn this situation around was trying to find peace in knowing I did the best I could with what I had. That's it. And that is a huge mindset change.
Is that the magical answer we all hoped for? No, sorry for the disappointment.
But healing ourselves from dysfunctional thought patterns is not easy and doesn't involve any magical answers, just a lot of internal work.
Hey, we are all doing it together, so stick around!
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