“If Only” Regrets are more Frequents, and Cause More Pain than “At Leasts” If we know what people regret the most, we can reverse that image to reveal what they value the most.” As Pink explains, “The four core regrets operate as a photographic negative of the good life. These four core regrets provide a framework for learning about how regret impacts every area of our lives, while also showing us how we can learn from them. They sound like: If only I’d reached out. They sound like: If only I’d done the right thing.Ĭonnection Regrets: These are regrets about the fractured or unrealized relationships with people in our lives (as Pink puts it: rifts and drifts). Moral Regrets: These are the regrets about taking the “low road” rather than the high one. They sound like: If only I’d taken that risk. They sound like: If only I’d done the work.īoldness Regrets: These are the regrets about the chances that we didn’t take, and the decision we made to play it safe instead.
This can include choices about how we spent our time, money, and energy in the past and whether they contributed to a solid – or flimsy- foundation. He summarizes the four “core” regrets as follows:įoundational Regrets: These are the regrets about not building a more stable foundation for our lives. They are often people who are seriously ill.”īetween the American Regret Project and a sampling of the World Regret Survey, Pink found that four regrets are universal, spanning across life domains such as health, career, education, and relationships. In other words, “people without regrets aren’t paragons of psychological health. Pink explains that the “mental trapeze act” that regret requires – going between past and present, reality and imagination – is possible for everyone except for young children whose brains haven’t fully developed and adults with brain injuries or illnesses. Regret is a unique emotion in that it is created by looking at an action or inaction from the past, and comparing the actual outcome to a potentially different outcome had a different choice been made. (almost) Everyone has Regrets, but These Four are Core Pink’s findings of how the desire to live with “no regrets” is harmful, and potentially even dangerous, gives us a wealth of knowledge about how the power of regret can be harnessed to allow us to live a more intentional, purpose-filled life.
In addition, he launched the World Regret Survey – which so far has been completed by more than 19,000 people in 105 countries. Specifically, Pink and his team completed the largest quantitative analysis of American attitudes toward regret in 2020: the American Regret Project which included 4,489 people comprising a representative sample of Americans. Pink draws on regret research completed by others, as well as his own. Pink, known for his books including Drive and When, dove even deeper into the research of regret in his recent book The Power of Regret: How Moving Backward Moves Us Forward. Specifically, the top regrets that Ware discovered over her years of sitting at the bedsides of dying people included being true to oneself, prioritizing relationships over career, and allowing oneself to be happy.Īuthor Daniel H. Last September, I wrote an article about how the book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by palliative nurse Bronnie Ware provides a roadmap for living a life with no regrets.
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