Use Hindsight 20/20 for Growth, but not for Regret
Life is nothing but a collection of choices.
Small choices. Big choices. Life changing choices. From when you wake up in the morning, get dressed for work, to choosing your dinner in the night and tv show before bed. The major you choose in college. The person you decide to have children with. Where you decide to live.
In order to make choices and decisions, we have subconscious neural pathways that automate many of our choices, in addition to conscious processing that enables us to feel in more control and more deliberate. Humans make about 10,000 choices per day, many of them so small you don’t even notice. If you’re like most people (or me), when facing a bigger, more costly and impactful choice, you weigh pros and cons, possibly obsess, avoid, resist, engage in internal conflict, review your past decisions, and play out every possible scenario, until you have exhausted yourself out completely or finally come to a decision.
Once you decide on a bigger choice — you move forward and play out the decision or consequence. You are a real life test case for your own experiment. You get to then see how your scenario played out. Was it how you expected? Did it blow up? Or what is the “right” choice for you?
Decisions that go well — just bleed into your life. You’re able to look back and say, “I’m so happy I did x or chose y, I feel great.” Decisions that do not — become grounds for discomfort, challenge, struggle, and learning.
This is when hindsight 2020 comes knocking on your door to say, “I told you so.”
But really?
Why let your inner critic come in and wash you over with feeling of regret? You did everything possible to make the best decision at the time with what you knew (unless you drunkenly got married in Vegas with a stranger!). You made a choice with your subconscious and conscious self and that led you to this point in life. Even with the struggle, pain, and wide range of emotions that you can experience as a result, it led you to this point.
This point of reflection and becoming more conscious of who you are.
It’s easy to look back with clarity. It’s impossible to look forward with absolute clarity. Life isn’t perfect and you will never know the outcome of your choices and decisions, even as much as you calculate things and proceed with caution. So you have to make choices and keep moving.
Instead of allowing that negative voice inside of you grow a sense of regret, can you shift your focus to what you learned about the situation? What did you learn about yourself? Or what would you do differently next time? We always have more clarity looking back, but never looking forward. Life is like taking a jump off a diving board into a unknown depth and body of water everyday. It’s a free fall.
Without mistakes (or negative outcomes, struggle, etc.) we would not have opportunities for learning and growth.
Imagine if every single one of your choices turned out perfectly. How humanly possible does that sound?
Instead of avoiding choices and decisions to avoid failure, or berating yourself with certain outcomes, what if you used self-compassion and let yourself off the hook if things don’t go as planned? What if you could accept that 20/20 vision gave you better clarity but won’t prevent mistakes or life going perfectly?
We will never have full clarity or understanding of the future, but we will certainly be more armed each time with our personal and lived insights and perspective.
Here are 5 things that I've learned from my own reflections from the last decade
1. Double and triple check your thoughts and ideas about yourself, others, and your present situation. Is it grounded in reality or your own distortions? Sometimes we need to step away from a situation to get clarity. If you have negative repeating thoughts about yourself, people, or situations, they are more likely subconscious patterns and your inner critic, rather than who you really are today or who you want to be.
2. Without mistakes, struggle, or veering off your path, you would never learn anything about who you are. So keep making choices and then assess afterwards, rather than trying to live a perfect life avoiding decisions and change. A life without "mistakes" is impossible and also boring.
3. Self-awareness is great, introspection is amazing, but unless you actually commit to behavior management (or making changes in the moment), nothing will change. Changing your behavior is fucking hard. Be easy on yourself but also just do it and stop making excuses.
4. Now that we're "adults", the idea that life is a collection of choices becomes more real. Late nights, sugar & alcohol binges, hangovers, starving yourself, berating yourself, frivolously spending -- all in our 20s and early 30s doesn't hit as hard as it does later on. Your daily choices are now who you are and who you will become. It will never be perfect, but something to consider more.
5. Nobody really cares about what's going on in your life (in the best possible way). If you could have spent less time worrying about what people think, you would free mental room for more magic and do what you really want to do. No more wasting energy on this.
I want to leave you with a quote that I love from author Neil Gaiman
I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.
So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.
Be kind to yourself in the year ahead.
Happy 2020!
Amanda