This is a tough issue a lot of people face. If you really think about it, SO MANY choices to make in life. SO MANY. And with that comes so many regrets. So many “If only”s.

How do we deal with all that?

Well, if you break down what makes people unhappy about the choices they make, you can put it into 3 broad categories.

The first is:

How do I know if this is the right choice to make?

It’s not regret but more of apprehension type prelude to unhappiness. You have so many choices to choose from, that you feel like if you stick to one, you’re missing out on all the rest and on top of all that, you can’t even know for sure if the choice you make is the right choice or not because you haven’t tried them all.

The second is what I call “present regret”.

You make a choice and it turns out to be pretty obvious it’s not the right one.

That leads to the third category which is long term regret, the one people most struggle with.

Let’s tackle each issue.

The first is you have so many choices in front of you that you don’t know which to pick and you’re hesitant because there might be something “better”.

The question you ask yourself is - What is the best one?

We all want the best one.

That’s our usual decision making process.

But best is all relative.

What’s best for one is not best for another. One may want to live in NYC. The other might hate that kind of atmosphere and want the rural lifestyle.

We therefore use our values as filters to choose what is the best “choice” for us. If values are not clarified, it’s easy to get trapped into indecision.

Here’s an easy way to see what your values are.

What do you want in life?

Just write. Just empty your thoughts onto paper. It’ll usually start off with the usual possessions – I want a house, nice car, clothes, lot of money, etc., then it goes to what you want to do, pretty superficial stuff at first but as you keep writing and writing, you’ll get to some deeper, core type ideas. You’re going to find recurring themes come up. You’re going to see a hierarchy soon come into play. You want this more than that.

After you’ve emptied your mind, go back to your list, start seeing what the broad strokes are, what the major “categories” are that you can establish to subsume a lot of the ideas on your list and those turn out to be your values.

Use that to help guide you to make the best “choice” for you.

The second issue is you make a choice and you feel initial regret. It’s not the right one.

Here’s the thing.

Life is a figuring out process. Nobody makes the exact right choices all the time. Acknowledge that. Respect the exploration. Appreciate the journey. Give yourself the freedom to experiment.

It’s only by making these types of choices that we get good at making the “right” ones for us later on.

Then we come to long term regret.

Never should’ve gone into this, married this person, did this and that. Here’s the thing.

Reality is all in our mind. You change the programming in your mind, you change your reality. If we replaced the code in our brain that identifies brown and makes it look brown to us, and we said that what was previously identified and perceived as brown is now really green so we perceive brown as green, that’s our reality.

Same thing here.

Exercise your choice to change how you view reality.

A ton of people have always said the best thing that ever happened to them was because of this huge mistake they made. Still, a ton of other people say they just made the worst mistake of their life and leave it at that.

Both groups made the same mistakes with two different viewpoints that altered their lives forever.

Those who say it’s the best thing to happen to them say it’s really clarified a lot of things, gave them a fresh start, gave them the push they needed, etc.

Those who say it’s the worst thing just get caught up in this cycle of regret and playing the victim and can’t get out of that pit of despair.

Rewrite history.

Rewrite reality.

It’s all in your head.

You can choose to look to see how that “bad” choice you made benefited you and operate from there.

Put all three of the actions we discussed into play, chances are, you’ll be pretty happy with the choices you made and will make.