In May 2024, we met to discuss Daniel Pink’s book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. The discussions over this breakfast meeting were some of the most focussed that I can recall during the lifetime of the Leaders Are Readers book club. 

The book highlights several key concepts which sparked interesting philosophical and values driven discussions, venturing to our individual approaches toward life situations and our own application of the emotional term “regret”.

Daniel Pink opens with research centred around the sense of regret felt by silver medallists for having not reached the ultimate gold medal outcome, compared with the emotions felt by bronze medallists often feeling relief and gratitude for the opportunity to be awarded for their efforts.

One of the key takeouts from the book for several of our book club members was the view that regret leads to feeling and a positive view is that “Feeling is for Thinking, Thinking is for Doing”. The power of regret as motivation to make different choices next time that lead to the outcomes you value. The alternative views being that “Feeling is for Ignoring, leading to Delusion” or that “Feeling is for Feeling, leading to Despair”.

This leads into one of the core concepts which I felt most aligned with and have since used the terminology on multiple occasions. Rephrasing moments where you feel a sense of regret to change the thought from “If only…” to “At least…”. This seemingly small adjustment leads to a calmer and more mindful acceptance of your current life situation and leaves opportunity to strive for more. Turning a negative sensation into a positive.

Pink outlines the research undertaken through his World Regret Survey. At the time of writing this blog, 19,000 people from 105 countries had responded to the survey. The responses were then analysed by Pink and his team to eventually categorise the respondents regrets into four foundational regret areas. I have since undertaken the survey and while I am not a qualified researcher, I do wonder if there are gaps in the survey process. It is very hard to interrogate the foundation of each response without deeper dialogue around the “why” of the regret for that individual but perhaps Pink applies greater emphasis on the respondents who provided detailed interviews for this reason. Regardless, the four foundational categories seem reasonable and practical. These are:

• Foundation regrets – “If only I’d done the work” includes taking care of your health, applying yourself to study or career.
• Boldness regrets – “If only I’d taken that risk” Speaking up, starting a business, travelling more.
• Moral regrets – “If only I’d done the right thing” making decisions against moral foundations theory such as being involved in bullying, not serving your country or a volunteer organisation, being unfaithful. These five moral foundations are Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Disloyalty, Authority/subversion and Purity/desecration.
• Connection regrets – “If only I’d reached out” not acting to enhance or continue a relationship such as not spending enough time with your family, letting a friendship fade, not asking that person on a date, not telling someone how much you care about them and value them.

Pink highlights that the core regrets “operate as a photographic negative of the good life. If we know what people regret the most, we can reverse that image to reveal what they value the most.”

One of the quotes that resonated with me came from the section on connection regrets. Harvard psychiatrist, George Vaillant, summarised eight decades of research with millions of data points focussed on human flourishing as “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

Rather than leaving the reader to sit alone with their life regrets, Pink also shares with us some techniques for processing regret which are creative and useful.

Our leadership group spent time discussing elements of the readings which we can apply to our lives and within our leadership. A very special discussion with a special group of people. I look forward to discussing our next book to see where this takes us; Leadership On The Line. If you are keen to find out more and get involved, check out the details here.