Moment 67 - The HIDDEN Power of REGRET: Daniel Pink

00:02I guess my first question is why of all the things that you could write about and you told me you've got some google file of all these book ideas you have why did you have to write a book about regret because um I was dealing with some regrets of my own I'm at a point in my life where I suddenly looked up and I have mileage on me which is kind of shocking but I also have some mileage ahead of me and I want to be able to use it well and when I look backward I've realized that I had some regrets. And what I found is that despite exactly what you're talking about, this idea that we have in culture that, oh, we never talk about regrets. Regrets are bad. They make you weak. No regrets. No regrets. Forward thinking, positive. That when I talk to people about my regrets, they leaned in. They were interested and they wanted to share theirs. And so I'm so glad you pointed that out because I didn't go with a more elliptical side door title. I wanted to put that word regret in big blue letters on the cover to challenge people and try to reclaim this word because regret is our most transformative emotion if we treat it right in the book you talk about various types of regret what were the types of regret that inspired you to write this book you

01:18said you had your regrets there yeah well i mean i had so well it was really reckoning with these regrets. So I'll give you one regret that I had, which is, I mean, I had plenty of them, which was regrets about kindness. When I was younger, when I was in primary school and secondary school and in university and even beyond, a lot of the regrets that I collect, and I collected a huge number of regrets. I had a lot of regrets about bullying, people regretting bullying other people.

01:48I was never a bully. But there were many, many times when I was younger where I saw people being excluded, not being treated right, being left out. And I knew. I saw it and I knew it was wrong and I didn't do anything. And that bugs me to this day. It bugs me to this day. Really? Hell yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have, yeah, it still bothers me. Even talking to you about right now, kind of my cortisol level has spiked a little bit. And here's the thing about regret. So I could say, I could take that and say, no regrets, no regrets, no, look backward, always look forward, okay?

02:26That's a really bad idea. Or I could say, oh my God, I am the worst person in the world. I am just horrible. And that's debilitating. That's an even worse idea. What I want to do is actually listen to those regrets because regret does two things for us. It clarifies and it instructs. So the fact that those regrets stuck with me for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, that's telling me something. It's telling me what I value. It's telling me I actually value kindness, something that's important to me. And as I think about that, I think, well, who are the people I admire? A lot of the people I admire are kind people, people who treat others well. So it's clarifying and it's also instructing me what to do next. Now, this is mundane, but here's the thing.

03:12If I'm ever at a social gathering or any kind of gathering and I see, you know, sometimes there are people like clumped together talking and every once in a while you see people sort of left out on an island of their own. I always reach out, pull that person in. And that is a consequence of being embarrassed and regretful about letting people be left out earlier in my life. So regrets clarify what matters to us and they instruct us on how to do better.

03:42Why use a couple of examples in the book, like, you know, Angela, Angela Jolie, her quotes and stuff like that. Why don't, why are we living in a culture where we don't ever want to admit we have regrets? What is it about humans where the idea of having a regret is such a negative thing? it's several things. I mean, part of it is that regrets aren't fun. They're aversive, right? They don't feel good. They clarify and instruct. And we might want the clarification and the instruction, but you got to have a little bit of the pain to begin with. So that's one thing.

04:18Second thing is that no one ever teaches us how to deal with negative emotions. That's the big problem, I think, is that. And so what happens is, is when people, especially younger people, feel a negative emotion. They think, oh my gosh, there's something wrong. There's something wrong with me. I'm broken. Everybody else is so positive. There must be something wrong with me when in fact they're just human beings. And the third thing I think is that, you alluded to this earlier, is that we have become a very performative culture.

04:50We have a culture where we're performing all the time rather than being authentic. and we like to perform courage. So when we say no regrets, that is play acting courage. Real courage is staring your regrets in the eye and doing something about them. Interesting. And there's something about, I guess, this is like a wider point I wanted to ask you about the book, which was people don't seem to, and I talk about this a lot in this podcast because it's something that I know.

05:21One reason I talk about it is because I know it's kind of slightly triggering, but I also think it's kind of true. which is people really don't like taking responsibility for their outcomes in life. Interesting point. And now this, sometimes this gets a little bit political or whatever. I'm really not a political person. But I've noticed this trend of people not liking responsibility, they're not liking to be attached to their outcomes unless they're good outcomes, right?

05:42So if it's success, we achieve something great, that was me. If something goes wrong, that is the political party in charge, that is someone else's fault, et cetera, et cetera. And as I was reading through this new book of yours, that theme kind of felt like much of the reason people don't like to own their regrets is because then they have to own the responsibility. And we're like shitty at that. It's a good point, because here's the thing. Regret requires agency. OK, it's a difference between regret and disappointment. Disappointment is, hey, things didn't happen and it wasn't my fault. Regret is your fault and you have to face that. Now, here's the thing. But when you do that, this is the thing that bugs me is that when you do that, when you face it, first of all, it's a lot easier than people think. Second, it's a lot more beneficial than people think. Let's go back to some research again. There's 70 years of research on this question about regret. What it shows us is this.

06:35I'll give you a small example. Let's say you're negotiating. You're negotiating and you're in negotiation. And let's say you make a first offer and it's not a great first offer. If you then And think about that negotiation and consciously think about what you regret in that negotiation. You invite the negative feeling. Remember, regret doesn't feel good. You invite it. You do better in the next negotiation. You see this in problem solving. I'm trying to solve a problem.

07:06I didn't do it that right. Let me actually think about what I regret in that problem solving exercise. Invite the negative feeling. You do better in the next one. Strategy. Same thing. Over and over again, what you see is that when we deal with regret properly, when we think about it, when we think about regret as a message, as a signal, it is a powerful force in doing better, in making better decisions, in being better problem solvers, in finding greater meaning in our life.

07:36It is a powerful, it's an elixir if we deal with it right. The problem is we don't know how to deal with it right. So some of us ignore our regrets. we put our fingers in our ears, we go blah, blah, blah, all right? Then others of us, when we can't do that any longer, become debilitated by it. We wallow in it. Those are bad ideas both. What we want to do is we want to think about our regrets. We want to confront them and do something about them. And there's a systematic way to do that. And if we learn how to do that, teach people how to do that, they're going to be way better off.

08:07Well, I was thinking about a particular friend of mine when you were saying that specifically on the point of regrets debilitating somebody. And I was thinking about this one friend I have, and I know the prospect of them really ever taking responsibility or admitting their regrets. I feel like they're a little bit too fragile in the, I don't know, the self-esteem, whatever it might be, to invite negativity. You call it like inviting the negative feelings.

08:28So what they do is like a self-defense mechanism is constantly obfuscate their sort of responsibilities in any situation. And the prospect of like thinking about things they regret, I know they would put their fingers in their ear and run off. so tell me what is the systematic sort of process for me having a conversation with that person to get them to not be crippled by the prospect of inviting negative feelings because i think they would fall into the trap of wallowing in their own uh yeah deficiencies yeah as opposed to being motivated by it yep uh because they haven't been they haven't been taught how to do it well right okay so so so let's think about three broad steps think of it as inward outward forward, inward, out, forward. So inward. And this goes to exactly where you're talking about.

09:12How do we think about ourselves and our regret? So a lot of people, like the people you're talking about, just want to boost their self-esteem. The evidence, again, on self-esteem, it's pretty good. Self-esteem is totally overrated, especially when it's unhinged from any real accomplishment. Now, self-criticism. I love self-criticism. There's just not a lot of evidence that it's very effective, right? The middle way is something known as self-compassion. Self-compassion. It's a term pioneered by Kristen Neff, who's a psychologist at the University of Texas in the U.S.

09:45It sounds a little gooey, self-compassion, but here's what it says. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. The reason your friends want to boost their self-esteem is that if they actually heard their self-talk, it would be lacerating and vicious. The way we talk to ourselves is so brutal and so cruel, we would never talk to anybody that way, right? And so here's the thing. It's like that old joke where a guy goes to a doctor's office and he says, doctor, it hurts when I do this. And the doctor says, don't do that, all right? Don't do that.

10:16Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Treat yourself with the same kindness you treat somebody else. Recognize that your mistakes and missteps are part of the human condition, all right? Think about my regrets about kindness. I've collected regrets from thousands of people around the world, believe me, I'm not that special. There are plenty of people with regrets about kindness and also recognize that any single mistake or misstep is a moment in your life. It doesn't fully define your life. So that's the reframing inward. Now, what else you can do, and here's the thing, we're totally wrong on this. Talk about it. Disclose it. Disclosing isn't unburdening. I'll give you, I mean, I, as you know, from reading the book, I put up a website called the World Regret Survey. With two tweets, I got 15,000 regrets from people in 100 countries.

11:01It's crazy. Why? Because they want to talk about it. Disclosing isn't unburdening. The other thing, again, let's go back to negative emotions and how we deal with them. Emotions are blobby. They're amorphous. They're abstract. That's why positive emotions feel so good and negative emotions feel so bad. So with negative emotions, writing about your regret or talking about your regret converts that blobby abstraction into concrete words, which are much less menacing. So that's the second. So express outward. And then finally, you got to draw a lesson from it. Okay. And here's the thing about us human beings. We stink at solving our own problems. We're terrible because we're too close. We're too enmeshed in the details. So what you should do is actually get, do some techniques known as self-distancing. And so for that, you can do things like it sounds goofy talk to yourself in the third person you're deciding what to do how to respond to a regret don't say what should i do say what should steven do um some good evidence of that other kinds of things and talk to yourself out loud uh either way either way any kind of self-talk like talking to yourself in the third person is actually advantageous there are other things you can do

12:12you can imagine having a conversation with yourself 10 years from now because i have a pretty good sense from analyzing all these regrets what I'm going to be concerned about 10 years from now. And it's not going to be whether I bought a blue car or a gray car. It's not going to be whether I had pizza at a night for dinner or a hamburger. It's going to be other things. And then another way to draw a lesson is the single best decision-making tool that I know, which is if you're faced with a decision about what to do, ask yourself, what would I tell my best friend to do?

12:42when people you give people people come to me saying oh dan i don't know what to do i know and well what would you tell your best friend to do oh that's easy i you got the answer right there so express inward treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt express outward make sense of it through disclosure and language and extract a lesson from it by getting some removed and it's very simple it's very it can be very habitual and it is a way to transform these negative emotions into positive forces I can do the now-n ish, I have a right, the hea, the