Issue #45: Unvoiced Beliefs & the Power of Regret

 "The ideas and beliefs that exist in our heads but aren't voiced or investigated are running our lives."

Mike, the above are a couple of the lessons from some of my 1:1 coaching calls this week.

Let’s start with the bottom and work up

#1. What runs your life

 "The ideas and beliefs that exist in our heads that aren't voiced or investigated are running our lives."

This came up in a conversation with Steve while we discussed his home situation.

He and his partner have a baby who is approaching 15 months old. They are considering some kind of childcare to help their current situation.

They know they can’t really maintain how things have been going with him working full time running a large business and her solely looking after their son and running their household.

Mum is at a point where she has little time to energise herself, to fill her cup. Always pouring into their daughters. On the weekend and at night, he takes over. Just as full.

Regularly, they are both exhausted.

Sure, it’s a common tale. An old one.

But just because it’s common, that doesn’t mean they should accept it and push suffer on through.

Yet, when they explore this idea of putting their daughter into daycare a couple of days a week so mum can create some space to, well, be a human, they hit a block.

Intellectually, they know how important it is for her to have space to look after herself. To take care of other household things. Go for a walk on her own. Workout without having to be vigilant. Have her own social connections and adult conversations. Read a book uninterrupted. Go to the fucking toilet on her own schedule 😅

They understand that to nourish their daughter, she needs to have nourished herself.

Yet… this block appears - this idea that sits beneath the surface for both of them. This huge cockblock of a belief:

“Putting your child in daycare a couple of days a week without returning to work is LAZY.”

They judge others for doing it. They know they need it. Yet, this belief, if left unexamined, will cost them. It is running a significant part of their lives right now.

They’re young, it’s new, they’ll learn - if they pay attention and challenge the idea.

This one might not land for you. But it doesn’t matter the context, if you have unexamined beliefs, they are running your life.

Think about it: You believe resting is lazy and low-value, so you never allow yourself to rest. You’re tense all the time, can’t enjoy holidays, making others feel uneasy, always having to be doing something to have some value or worth.

Or you  do relax, and you judge the shit out of yourself for it.

Maybe you have a belief that you don’t deserve happiness and success and a joy-filled life.

So you make life hard for yourself. You never allow yourself to succeed. You sabotage relationships. You keep people at arm’s length, all while desiring to be loved by them.

No matter what happens, you seem to keep creating situations and outcomes in your life that perpetuate the idea and the same results.

Maybe it’s a little more innocuous - you have this idea that you’re “no good with names” - so you never remember names.

At least, you never have to remember names because you keep telling yourself that is who you are. So it never encourages a different action. You have to fulfil the destiny you keep telling yourself.

Bottom line lesson: be aware of the ideas, stories, and beliefs you hold and tell yourself, because they play a huge part in what your life will be.

For clarity - my job in this situation is not to tell them what to do or how to parent. it is simply to invite him to look at where they might be stuck or adding unhelpful stories, and to investigate and challenge them so they can make better decisions.

#2 What to do with regret

“Regret is a wasted emotion.” 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard this more times than I care to count.

First off, I think it’s a load of absolute shite. Seeing regret as a waste is a waste. Even guilt, for that matter - as this often gets the same treatment.

Second, the answer isn’t to wallow in regret or guilt. Pack your bags and move there permanently.

Like so many things, this requires nuance.

I get what people mean when they say this. In essence, the idea is something like:

“Don’t spend your time floundering in regret. It’s in the past. Focus on the present and move forward.”

There’s a great point in this. But the risk of this approach is that we try so desperately to move past regret or guilt that we miss the crucial lesson it has for us.

Living in the past won’t do much help, but learning from it will help me take an appropriate action now in the present and plan better for the future.

Chatting with another client who missed an important call, we uncovered that he had been beating himself up a bit for not communicating it beforehand.

He was frustrated at himself. Some guilt for letting us down. The ingredients of some regret about how he acted in that moment.

Regardless of the details, remaining in the place of punishing himself for an action he did or didn’t do, is simply that: punishing himself.

It speaks to a mindset that says, “If I fucked up, I have to suffer for it - so I will create that myself in this mind prison.”

But guilt, regret, and disappointment are there to teach us something. They have a message.

His job in this situation was to get curious about these emotions and ask what they were here to teach him.

Again, regardless of the context, it is likely something like “I didn’t act how I would like to have acted. So, what do I need to do now to rectify or perhaps apologise? And how can I learn from this to act differently in future?”

If he can be kind enough to himself he can get the lesson and take the appropriate action.

That might be a conversation, apologising for something, owning his behaviour and then committing to a different course of action in future.

If we let regret go without getting its lesson - we lose.

If we set up camp in guilt, we get stuck in the boggy campsite that it is.

Do not let a good ‘negative emotion’ go to waste.

Out of this session with my client, one of his biggest work-on’s was to go away and practise being kind to myself in moments like this.

Instead of labelling himself as bad, telling himself he has no integrity, or generally beating up on himself, he is to get curious and ask:

“How can I be kind to myself in this moment (while still respecting myself)?”

And to be clear - being kind to yourself in moments like this is not letting yourself off the hook. It is about being effective in moving through and forward from it - with self-respect.

This helps build a standard to live to.

A common attachment

My client - like many guys (me too for a long time) - can struggle with having tough expectations of himself and looping in the self-beat-up cycle when they aren’t met.

That played out in this scenario where he expected better from himself, leading him into the ‘I need to feel bad, sit in this and punish myself’ mode.

But this kind of mode doesn’t work. It doesn’t take us to a place of self-respect.

Instead, what is being asked of him is to have a standard for himself that can coexist with grace, patience, and kindness.

You must detach having a standard from being hard on yourself - otherwise, you’ll never truly meet a high standard and feel at peace there.