On the appropriate response to failure and regret

There will always be reasons to criticize yourself for your lack of fortune. For your mistakes. For your failings. For your bad days and bad decisions.

I think everyone is intimately familiar with this narrative: “I’m not smart enough, brave enough, good looking enough, interesting enough, productive enough…I am not enough.” Put conversely, “I’m so stupid, so afraid, so ugly, so boring, so lazy, so indecisive…I have so so many regrets. There are so many stupid things I’ve said or done or thought…and I somehow I keep making the same mistakes, over and over…something is inherently wrong with me…I don’t deserve to be happy.”

Of course, everyone makes mistakes. As Pema Chödrön points out in her masterful audio program Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better, the only way to live is with “no notecards.” Somehow we learn how to walk and talk as toddlers but are never given a roadmap to navigate us through the bewildering world that is our lives. And so we inevitably fail. Life as we know it is a collision course with mistakes of all kinds. Everyone of us experiences regret; what might have been if we had the foresight we have now, if we were (insert your adjective) enough then.

Certainly, you can rehearse your shortcomings and numb yourself to oblivion every single time you experience that pain. Deceiving yourself (over and over) into thinking that the downward spiral is the only way to feel better about your station in life.

Or, as Pema points out, you can simply experience it. Open yourself up to the raw psychological pain of regret and failure. Learn to become intimately familiar with the narrative that spins your unavoidable blunders into reasons as to why you’re not enough. To separate the story of “I made a mistake,” from, “I’m a bad person.”

And further, to acknowledge these feelings are universal, shared by all, coded into our psyches over millions of years of evolution, not to debilitate us. But rather to enable us to learn from our mistakes, and therefore become better, happier people moving onward.

The discomfort of the experience of regret is there to remind us of our mistakes and to hold ourselves accountable for making better decisions in similar contexts in the future. The story we rehearse (and the actions we take) to make ourselves feel bad about our apparent inadequacies is simply adding insult to an already unavoidable injury. If the end goal is to be happy, there’s no sense in beating yourself up or numbing yourself to avoid the short-lived emotional pain that comes up every time we reflect on our mistakes.

The only way to truly live is with no notecards. Which is to say the best way to live is to fail early and to fail often. If you hold a small grudge against yourself for every misstep you’ve made, multiplied by every mistake you’ll ever make, you’ll find that it can very difficult to create the equanimity you’re looking for. Downward cycles combined with repeated patterns are how addictions (of all kinds) begin. A shortcut to the pleasure-driven, hedonic-treadmill that never really gives you the happiness you seek.

Conversely, if you can create a space for the pain you’ll inevitably experience looking back on all your shortcomings, to separate the emotional discomfort from the narrative of, “I’m not enough,” you’ll find that it’s remarkably easier to create the kind of life where present setbacks and past failures encourage you to reflect on how far you’ve come, and revitalize your motivation to continue moving forward.