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Receptivity and offering: Some options for reframing regrets

Lynne Baab • Friday February 25 2022

I regret that I disciplined my kids too harshly when they were toddlers and preschoolers. That regret has motivated me to be gentle with them as adults. I still grieve that harsh discipline, and I still sometimes feel shame about it, but I can now see that those regrets have made me a better mother of adult sons.

Before I wrote last week’s blog post about reframing regrets, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I have felt ashamed, but I hadn’t realized how deeply my regrets have shaped my behavior in good ways for the past two decades as my sons reached...

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Receptivity and offering: Reframing regrets

Lynne Baab • Saturday February 19 2022

I wrote last week about a fascinating book about regret by Daniel H. Pink. Here’s a summary of his argument, referencing academic research on regret and a survey of 16,000 people who responded online to his questions about regret:

“The conclusion from both the science and the survey is clear: Regret is not dangerous or abnormal. It is healthy and universal, an integral part of being human. Equally important, regret is valuable. It clarifies. It instructs. Done right, it needn’t drag us down; it can lift us up.” [1] In last week’s post, I gave a longer summary of his main point.

Pink...

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Receptivity and offering: Regret

Lynne Baab • Thursday February 10 2022

“No regrets” is a quintessentially American approach to life, emphasized by famous Americans as diverse as Norman Vincent Peale and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and immortalized in song by musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and Eminem. However, this “no regrets” approach to life is an “unsustainable blueprint for living,” according to Daniel H. Pink, author of The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves us Forward.

An excerpt from Pink’s book was published recently in the Wall Street Journal, and I have pored over that excerpt because it spoke to me so strongly. Pink argues that “no regrets” is particularly inappropriate as we enter...

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