How to Use the Power of Regret for Good

Welcome back once again to my LinkedIn Newsletter! To put it plainly, you will not regret reading this week’s edition with wisdom from Daniel Pink! And don’t forget - coming up at 12 pm EST / 9 am PST/5 pm GMT for my Newsweek interview series, Better, we have Debbie Millman, the author of Why Design Matters. Make sure you set yourself a reminder here and join in on today’s discussion.

I’d like to share something special this week - my friend Rahaf Harfoush is offering a free LinkedIn Learning course called Humane Productivity. It focuses on working less to get more work done and debunks common productivity myths. She’ll teach you how to rethink productivity and support your well-being. You can check out the entire course for free here.

Nobody likes experiencing regret. So why does it exist? Because used correctly, it can help us make better decisions, deepen our sense of meaning, and help us solve problems down the road. So how do we deal with it? This is the focus of Dan Pink’s new book, The Power of Regret. Today’s newsletter features a three-step process that Daniel has identified to manage regrets effectively, and he calls it “Inward, outward, forward.” If you’d like to hear the rest of our interview, you can watch the entire conversation here.

Inward

“How do we deal with that negative feeling? I like to look at it as a process called inward outward forward. You begin with how you think about yourself. The way that we talk to ourselves is typically so cruel, so mean, so vicious. We would never talk that way to anybody else, but we talk that way to ourselves. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Recognize that your regrets are actually not that special. They are very common. They're part of the whole human experience, and that any misstep that you make is a moment in your life, not definitional of your life.”

Outward

“Disclose. If you're comfortable disclosing to other people, that's powerful. Even if you simply write about your negative emotions, that is helpful, too. What happens is, these negative emotions, this pain, this bad feeling, is very amorphous. When we convert it into language, either by talking about it or by writing about it, we make it less menacing.”?

Forward

“We tend to be terrible at solving our own problems and pretty good at solving other people's problems. So what you have to do is essentially convert yourself into somebody else. You can do that by goofy things like talking to yourself in the third person. Then there’s time travel, which I think is really useful with regret. You say, ‘I’m going to place a phone call to me of 2026. What does me in 2026 want me of 2022 to do right now?’ Perhaps my favorite decision-making tool, when you're at a decision point and you're not sure what to do, is to ask yourself: What would you tell your best friend to do?”

Thanks so much for reading this week’s newsletter - and don’t miss today’s talk with Debbie Millman!

And as an additional reminder, in case you aren’t part of my email list, which has completely different content than this newsletter, sign up here - it features advice about personal branding, strategies to grow your business, and how to lead a more fulfilling life.

Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie