How to Harness Regret's Hidden Power - Daniel Pink LinkedIn live

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:09] So what if our biggest regrets secretly held the keys to unlocking our greatest potential in work in life? What if it was a path to self-improvement, clarified priorities, and more courageous living? That's where we're heading today. In this episode of SPARKED with my guest, best selling author Daniel Pink. So Dan is the author of several influential books on business work and human behavior, including Drive a Whole New Mind and To Sell as Human. His latest work, The Power of Regret, offers a really fascinating look at the psychology and potential benefits of one of life's most common, yet overlooked emotions regret. So in today's SPARKED Hot Take, it's a bit of a special episode. This conversation originally aired as a LinkedIn live, so after we teased out the topic, we were able to also take some listener questions live and answer in real time. If you'd like to join us next time we're going live on LinkedIn, be sure to subscribe to the LinkedIn newsletter to get notified, and you'll find that link in the show notes. In our conversation today, Dan shares insights from extensive research into regret on a global scale. What core life priorities lie embedded in our regrets? How can we shift from regretting our past to harnessing it for the future? Can our work regrets reveal how to bring more meaning and fulfillment to our careers? Turns out, regret lives within all of us.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:34] But do we truly understand its workings? So excited to share this conversation with Dan with you. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. Hello, hello hello everybody! Super excited to be spending some time with you today on this LinkedIn live with an old friend, Dan Pink, somebody who I've really enjoyed having conversations with over the years about a different take on topics that matter to us. And our topic for today is really the truth about work, life and regret. Dan, you seem to spend sort of like a chunk of time latching on to a question or a topic often that is deeply resonant and relevant to you on a personal level, and then saying, what is going on around this topic? Are there things that we all experience universally that aren't explained, and can we take a different look at this and maybe turn it into some sort of a benefit or in some way leverage it to live better lives, to experience work in a better in different way? So excited to dive into this topic with you today and and welcome.

Dan Pink: [00:02:51] Thank you. Thank you. Always a pleasure to hang out with you. And you just did a better job of describing what I try to do than I've ever done. So I might I need to record that and transcribe it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:03:01] We'll just call it a day, right? You know. So regret is an interesting word because it is a word where I would imagine if you asked any given person on the street, is there anything you reread in your life provided your, you know, like past six years old, something's going to pop into their head. And yet it's it's a topic which I feel is also relatively taboo. We don't really talk about it all that much. What's your take on why?

Dan Pink: [00:03:26] I think it's a it's a great insight. Why don't we talk about regret? Why does it have this taboo? I think there are a few reasons. Uh, number one, no one has ever taught us really how to deal with our regrets. Uh, we know from 60 years of science that regret is one of the most common emotions that human beings have. And yet, when no one's really actually taught us what to do, when you feel that spear of regret. So that's one thing. The another thing is that, you know, I think we've been sold a bill of goods. Uh, we've been sold a bill of goods on positivity. We've been told that we should be positive all the time. I'd never be negative, that we should always look forward and never look back. And that is terrible advice. It is. It is. It is not a recipe for good living. So the combination of those those two things makes us, I think, uncertain, uneasy, uh, with dealing with regret, which is a mistake, because if we treat our regrets properly, we don't ignore them. We don't wallow in them. It's actually a transformative emotion. And we have, as I mentioned before, 60 years of evidence in a whole range of scientific fields to support that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:30] Yeah. So you described regret as an emotion. Um, it's interesting because I don't know if anyone or if many people would make that association. It's I feel like very often we, we label it as this cognitive experience. It's a thing that we think about in the past. Yeah. And and we're sorry about it. Um, yeah. But you're describing it as something that's more embodied.

Dan Pink: [00:04:52] That's interesting. That's. I'm not sure. I think it's both, um, you know, and I think that it's, I think it's a really, really interesting question. And, you know, I think at some level, a lot of what we do, what we, uh, the way our brain works doesn't have a fine boundary line between what is cognition and what is emotion. What what regret is is you're right. It is a thought that makes us feel bad. Okay. Um. And the feeling bad is actually really important here. Uh, it is a negative emotion. It makes us feel worse. And that's one reason we shy away with it from it. But that spear of negativity, as I mentioned before, that feeling worse is actually what allows us to do better. And so that's what makes it a little bit of a paradox. And one reason why we've been, why I think so many of us are confused about it. Now, what's interesting is that the religious world is not confused about regret at all. Most religious traditions have rituals, mechanisms for dealing with regret. Uh, Catholicism has confession. Judaism has, uh, a day, a whole day where we're where Jews atone for their sins. Yom Kippur, which just happened earlier this week. And, um, and yet in the secular world, um, we don't know what to do with it.

Dan Pink: [00:06:00] And so what happens, as I mentioned before, is that some of us ignore it. We put our fingers in our ears, we say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't have any regrets. I'm positive all the time. I don't have any regrets. I always look forward. That's a bad idea. Or we get because we don't know what to do with it. We get debilitated by it. We get brought down by it. Um, we wallow in it, we ruminate on it. We stew in it. That's a terrible idea to what we should do. To your point, Jonathan, is think about our regrets. Use them as data, use them as information, use them as signal. And when we do that, as I said, there's a whole array of evidence. Well, I know we're going to talk about work in a moment. It's very all kinds of evidence that it's useful for it. It helps us become better negotiators, helps us become clearer thinkers, helps us avoid cognitive biases, uh, helps us find more meaning. And so, um, what I'm trying to do is kind of retake, reclaim this emotion because I think it can be a force for good.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:52] Yeah. I mean, it's really interesting. You describe, like, so many, um, religious. Spiritual traditions build in an acknowledgement of the fact that there there are things we're going to regret. And here's a process. Here's a process by which you move through it. And if, if, if it's necessary, make amends and be welcomed back into, you know, like society or your own version of yourself that you'd like to see yourself as exactly and secularly as you described, there isn't really I would almost I would almost even argue that it's worse than that right now. Sort of like with with the rise of cancel culture, that we've now removed a path to redemption for anyone who does anything that they might regret. And it's not even that we don't have a well described path, but we basically said, like, if you do X, which may cause harm and also may cause you to feel the experience of regret, there's no way back from that. Mm.

Dan Pink: [00:07:47] Yeah. I'm not. Yeah. That's an interesting point. I'm not I'm not 100 I'm not 100% sold on that because I think that in many cases regret is a internal experience. It's an experience. You said it very well. It's about sort of you want to welcome yourself back to your own community, to your own, to your own selfhood, in a way. But you also made a great point to two other great points in your question, which is, number one is that you mentioned every religious tradition has a way to deal with this because it's universal. They recognized that this emotion is part of being human. And once again, so that's one thing. The second thing is, is that the way you deal with negative emotions is through a systematic process. You don't just adapt immediately and you don't ignore it. You go through a process. Now, the ubiquity of it, the universality of it is really important. So we can shift from what the religious world intuited. This is universal to what the scientific world has shown, which is that everybody has regrets. Social psychologists who've been again, studying this for 60 years, have found that regret is one of the most common emotions that human beings have. It's arguably the most common negative emotion that human beings have. It is ubiquitous in the human experience. What's more, we know that there are some people who do not have regrets. Okay, there are people out there who don't have regrets. Five year olds don't have regrets because their brains haven't developed the cognitive capacity to do all the kind of mental time travel and counterfactual thinking that regret requires people with certain kinds of brain damage and neurodegenerative diseases. They don't have regrets, and sociopaths don't have regrets. So you know what religion, religious traditions have intuited, science has confirmed, which is that this emotion is universal. Now, if it's universal, and let's just say that it is.

Speaker4: [00:09:36] Why? Why?

Dan Pink: [00:09:38] Because it has some kind of benefit. It's adaptive if we treat it right. And as I said before, we haven't been treating it right. We've either been ignoring or wallowing. What we should be doing is looking it in the eye, learning from it and using it to move forward.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:51] Yeah, it's such an important point, right? You look at almost anything that survives across every population, every demographic, every generation for generations and generations. And it's universal. There's I mean, scientists would look at that and say, like, there is a job for this particular thing. Like it wouldn't keep existing if it didn't serve some purpose, often related to survival and thriving.

Dan Pink: [00:10:14] I'm going to see you and raise you because I think that's a profoundly important point. And that goes back to what we were talking about with positivity and negativity. Now we have been sold a bill of goods on positivity. As I mentioned before, the path to a life well lived is not to be positive all the time. That is not the recipe. And here's the thing positive emotions are really good. They make life worth living. I want to have a lot of positive emotions. I want everyone watching this to have a lot of positive emotions. But you don't want to have only positive emotions because negative emotions exactly as you're suggesting, are there for a reason. Okay, so so just I'll give you I'll give you an example about this. Let's say let's take an emotion like fear. Right. That's a negative emotion. Do you want to eradicate your ability to experience fear? Absolutely not. Because that's what's going to get you out of a burning building. Let's take a negative emotion like grief, terrible emotion. Why do we grieve? Why do human beings grieve? Because when we because grieving reminds us that we love. And so all of these negative emotions are adaptive. And so what you want to do is you don't want to eradicate these negative emotions by saying, I don't have any regrets. I'm positive all the time. What you want to do is recognize that these negative emotions, in particular this kind of keystone, negative emotion of regret, is telling you something. It's a teacher, it instructs. And so the way that when, when, when someone or something is instructing you, you don't put your fingers in your ears, you don't dive under the couch to avoid the instruction. You say, oh, you're trying to teach me something. Let me listen.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:50] Yeah. So speaking of teaching and learning on a broader scale, I mean, we can listen 1 to 1. You talk about actually some, uh, some some bigger research projects, American Regret project, the World Regret survey, some 16,000, I would imagine. It's probably even more than that at this point, where you're really going out and looking on a global scale. When people start to share, what are the things that they're feeling regret around? These serve as a pretty stunning database that lets us see like it's it's like a window into our heads on a more universal level around what are the things that really speak to us on the level of regret?

Dan Pink: [00:12:25] Yeah. Well, I mean, thank you for mentioning that. So I did two big research projects, as you said. One is the American Regret Project, which is a large public opinion survey of US attitudes about regret. And then the other one, which actually ended up which is a more qualitative piece of research, but ended up being just fascinating, was the World Regret project, which is a which where I collected regrets. Now, exactly as you say, we now have over 25,000 regrets from people in 100 and I think 11 countries at this point. Uh, and what's remarkable about that, going back to your point about universality, especially when you look at that giant database where I just asked people tell me about a big regret that you have, and people responded in, you know, literally in the thousands, like we're now, as I said, over 25,000. Uh, and what we found is that around the world, people seem to have the same four core regrets. It doesn't matter whether you're in Kuala Lumpur or whether you're in Brooklyn or whether you're in Amarillo, Texas. Um, the regrets were remarkably similar around the world.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:27] Yeah, let's walk through that. I mean, and you're sort of like describing these four categories of regrets. Not not like precise regrets, right? Foundation regrets. Boldness. Regrets. Moral regrets. Connection. Regrets. Exactly. Give me like this. The shorthand for what are. What are these four different things?

Dan Pink: [00:13:42] Foundation regrets. Foundation regrets are small decisions early that accumulate in bad consequences later. So I regret spending too much and saving too little because now I'm broke. All right. So bad decisions not cataclysmic on their own, but the cumulative force of it is, um, a disaster. Boldness. Regrets, right. You're at a juncture in your life. You can play it safe, or you can take a chance, play it safe or take the chance. And overwhelmingly again, not all the time, but but most of the time, people regret not taking the chance. And it doesn't matter whether it's in a career, whether it's in dating, whether it's in travel, whether it's speaking up that people regret not shooting their shot, not taking their chance, moral regrets again, another one. At a juncture you can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing. You can take the high road. You can take the low road. And most of us, most of the time when we take the low road and do the. Wrong thing. We end up regretting it because most of us are good people and want to be good people. And finally, number four connection regrets. They're all about relationships. And what's interesting here, at least what these 25,000 people told me. It's not only romantic relationships, it's just the whole suite of relationships we have in our life. So you have a relationship with somebody that was intact or should have been intact. It comes apart. Usually undramatically just sort of drifts. You want to reach out, you say it's going to be awkward. If I reach out, they're not going to care. So you don't. It widens even more and then you regret it. And so these four regrets foundation, boldness, moral and connection are they seem to be universal. I mean, they are they are everywhere. I mean, most of these regrets around the world fit, you know, some more snugly than others in one of these four categories.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:26] Yeah. Curious. Of those four different categories, are they equally weighted? I mean, now you've got this giant database around the world. It's 25,000 or so of these regrets. Do you see, is it like 25%, 25%, 25 or is there a really big difference in weighting?

Dan Pink: [00:15:41] Uh, biggest category is connection regrets. Uh, second biggest is boldness regrets. And then the more regrets are the smallest category. But if you look at the tone of the people that contributing them, they're they're in some ways the most anguished about those moral regrets. You know, I cheated on so many, so much adultery. It's unbelievable. So many regrets about bullying. Uh, earlier in life, I was blown away by both of those two things. So more regrets are the smallest. But in some ways the most, I think, intensely felt. But connection. Regrets. Uh, number one, boldness. Regrets a short second. And that tells us something. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:18] I mean, the fact that connection regrets are sort of like the broadest one. That's the most common across like, so many different people. Not surprising, given the sort of like the state of the world that we live in, the pace of acceleration that we live in, where it feels like we have less and less time to actually, like, not just create, but then sustain those connections to deepen those relationships and as they fall off. And like you said, it's not always because there was some big dramatic, you know, like blow up. It's just sometimes life gets really busy. You forget your best friend from here. You're like, whoever it may be. And five years later you're like, wait, I haven't talked to that person. And but I really dearly love and appreciate them and my life is worse because of that. I would imagine that experience is so common. And that's what you're describing.

Dan Pink: [00:17:02] Uh, that is the quintessential kind of connection, regret. And it is a it's an error that we make. And now the good news in all of this is that at least for me, and I'm hoping other people who absorb this material is that I no longer make that mistake. So typically what happens is, is like, okay, let's say that you and I were, were friends, you know, from 20 years ago, maybe we work together, something like that. And we were actually pretty close. But for whatever reason, you moved our lives moved in different directions, and we didn't have a row. We didn't have any kind of great calamitous blow up of our relationship. We just drifted apart. And I might be sitting here in my office in Washington, DC and say, hey, you know what? I should really reach out to Jonathan. And then I say, oh, but you know what? I haven't talked to him for a several years. It's really awkward if I reach out. And besides, he probably doesn't give a hoot about hearing from me, right? Those are two colossal forecasting errors. Number one, when people do that, it's way less awkward than we think.

Dan Pink: [00:18:02] And the second thing is that the recipient is almost always glad to hear, um, and so for me, there's a, there's a, there's a very, very strong lesson here in the connection regrets, which is if you're at a juncture and you're saying, should I reach out or should I not reach out? Being at that juncture has answered the question always reach out, always reach out, always reach out, always reach out, always reach out. And I have too many stories in the book and from readers subsequently. Um, I mean, I mean very just tragic stories where they want to reach out and then they do reach out and the person has passed away. Um, and when that door is closed, I mean, you feel awful about it your whole life. There's one in the book who that happened to, and it essentially transformed the way she dealt with her. She dealt with her friends. So, um, so, again, this this feeling that we have when you feel that sense of regret, use that negative feeling as a signal, and that signal is telling you what to do. And in this case, it's telling you reach out. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:01] You know, it's interesting also what you mentioned about moral regrets as the smallest category, but maybe the most deeply felt in the very early days of Facebook, one of the early messages, private messages that I got was from a kid who was my bully in elementary school, reaching out to basically say, I'm so sorry. Yeah. And, you know, I'm I'm in my 40s at that point probably, or late, late 40s. Uh, this was long, uh, you know, a historical part of my life that I had no frame of reference for it as, like, I'm good. And yet this person. Had been carrying that weight for some 40 or so years. And so it is amazing to me how like you described, more grits may be the much smaller bucket, but the depth of how they affect people who carry that, it seems like it's just it can be just stunningly stifling in so many different ways. Yep.

Dan Pink: [00:19:54] And I think it's healthy when people do go back and try to make and try to make amends. And the stories that I have when people have done that are similar to yours, where the person on the receiving end of the bullying is like, no, that's cool, I'm good. You know, I mean, they're not, they're not, you know, they weren't happy to be bullied, but they're less traumatized than than the person who's who is bullied. And, you know, and I think, again, if we zoom out just a little bit, these regrets are telling us something that, you know, and this is actually the core of regret as a teacher, because and when people tell you what they regret the most, they're telling you what they value the most. Right? And this is actually really important if you think about all the decisions and actions you've taken, you know, this week or let's say, or last week, you made hundreds, perhaps thousands of decisions and actions last week. And most of them you don't even remember this week. Okay. And that's okay because, I mean, our brains have, you know, don't want to have too much of a cognitive load. Most of them you don't even remember. But there are certain kinds of decisions and decisions and actions and inactions that not only do you remember one year later, five years later, 40 years later, they bug you. That's telling you that's a very strong signal. That's a very clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk. It's a very strong knock at the door.

Dan Pink: [00:21:06] And so I think you have to I think you have to answer it. And all of these four regrets are telling us what we value in life. Foundation regrets tell us that we value stability for ourselves and for our family. Boulders regrets tell us that we value learning and growth and trying stuff more. Regrets tell us that we value goodness, that when we say, I want to lead a good life, it means actually being good, that most of us are good and we feel crappy when we're not good. And then connection regrets. And I think it's why it's the largest category is connection. Regrets are ultimately about love and not only about romantic love, which is obviously extraordinarily important. But there's also I just think that we sometimes give short shrift to other dimensions of love, the love we have for other people in our lives. And so these regrets tell us what do we want out of life? We want some stability. We want a chance to learn and grow. We want to be good and we want love. Yeah. And so, so, so again, this emotion that we say, as you said at the very, at the very top of the show, there's a taboo about we don't want to deal with it is actually this kind of almost like this, you know, this, um, this, this almost sage like professor or teacher telling us how to fashion a life well lived.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:18] Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. So if we start to look at the information contained in regret and now we shift a little bit and we say, what happens when we point the lens and the insight of regret into the domain of work? Because, as you described earlier in our conversation, not only does regret contain information which may be helpful to us on a very personal level, but I would imagine also that in the context of like us showing up at work, which for most of us is actually makes up the majority of our waking hours for our entire adult lives. This is the domain where we connect. This is the domain where we contribute, where we create, where we seek significance and meaning. Do you have a sense for how regret tends to show up in work? And what I mean of those four different categories? Actually, I'm curious, do you feel like when you looked at all the data that was coming in, all the quantitative and qualitative stuff, were you able to tease out at all sort of how those four different domains show up in the context of work versus more broadly in life, or even get a general sense of this?

Dan Pink: [00:23:19] Yeah, I think, I think it is a general sense. I don't have a specific kind of quantitative sense of this, but I think that there are I mean, the I'm hesitant sometimes to draw like definitive conclusions entirely from quantitative from qualitative data. On the other hand, I have 25,000 fricking regrets. And they all like sound alike. And so so there is I mean, there is a truth embedded in there. And when it comes to work, I think it's a few things. Number one, boldness. It's incredible. So many people, uh, I regret that I stayed in this lackluster job instead of doing something that I really wanted to do. I regret that I stayed in this lackluster job instead of starting a business, which is what I really wanted to do. Um, I focused one there. You have a language like, um, I focus my career on on not failing rather than succeeding. So boldness, regrets at work are profound boldness regrets, particularly in this one, this one other domain. So so just general boldness is really important. Another one is, um, I was surprised by I mean, maybe I'm naive, but I probably am naive. But I was surprised at this one. Is the number of people who have regrets, often at work. About not speaking up. I wanted to say something, but I didn't want to rock the boat. And I wish I had spoken up so many of these.

Dan Pink: [00:24:35] And again on that one, I have a slightly nuanced view in that those people shouldn't only put the onus on themselves that a lot of that is being in an environment where they didn't have the psychological safety right to speak up, but speaking up is a big one. There are some when it comes to foundation regrets. Um, in careers. I was surprised by this too. People saying I wish I had worked harder in school because when I got to the workplace and even now in the workplace, I actually don't have the skills that I needed, and I'm actually always playing catch up because of that. That surprised me. Um, and then, um, connection regrets because as you were saying earlier, you know, the workplace is a is a is a locus of relationships. And especially now when people bop from job to job, they do build relationships that where they they go from seeing people in this very intense way every day to not seeing them. And those are meaningful. Many of them were meaningful relationships. And if you don't make affirmative steps to continue to connect, people end up regretting it. It's like, God, like, I saw that guy every day. And like, we were totally hanging out every day for like five years. And I haven't talked to him for five years. That's crazy. Like, I should really reach out.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:50] Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense to me. Um, and these are things that I would imagine most people really just don't give a lot of thought to. And yet they show up all the time. And the boldness, regret, I would imagine, is just so. I can't imagine anybody who is, like, alive, like more than a couple of years into the workforce, not feeling in some way, shape or form. Or there was that moment, there was that opportunity. There was that, you know, like it was scary. It was uncertain. The stakes were kind of high. I didn't know, but I said no, or I just let it pass by or I just watched it roll on. Yeah. Um, and now, five years later, ten years later, I wonder what my life would be like. I wonder how my work life would have been different. I wonder how everything would have changed had I said yes to that. And you can't turn back the clock on something like that with a boldness regret. Um, in that way, I mean, but you can and I think this is maybe where the conversation, um, wants to go right now. You can't turn the clock back, but you can harness the intelligence that's built into regrets to say, okay, so but now that I actually realize this is what's happening, now that I can identify, like, this is what I'm feeling, and this is sort of like the category of it, and I can look and say like, what is the information contained in this regret? How can I then harness this experience to be better at X, Y, and Z moving forward? Some of the benefits that you had started talking about earlier in the conversation, I think really ignore, especially to the world of work 100%.

Dan Pink: [00:27:18] And but we have to know, again, it goes back to your earlier point about process. We have to go through a process. It's not going to happen immediately, organically. Uh, so so the first step there. So let's take, let's say the case of um, the example that you just gave where you had an opportunity to, um, go on maybe to do an assignment overseas or something like that, and you were too scared to do it, and now you regret not having taking that shot. So what do you do with that? So you feel bad. So, um, which is again, a signal. Feeling bad is a signal. It's telling. It's adaptive. It's telling you something. The first thing that you should do is how you process it is inward. A lot of times the way that we talk to ourselves is brutal. We talked our self-talk for ourselves. The way we treat ourselves is far more harsh. It's almost it's, uh, it's it's so profoundly unkind compared to how we treat others. And what the research tells us is, don't do that. Okay? Instead, um, and this is, I think, a powerful line of research. I was relatively new to it. So, so like many converts, I'm, you know, an adherent, a strong adherent of it, which is the research on self-compassion.

Dan Pink: [00:28:23] And essentially what it says is, is treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. So instead of saying, you know, like, if I were in that situation, I'd be likely to say, you fucking idiot, what's wrong with you? You're so chicken, you don't ever do it, you know? And so you lacerate yourself. Don't do that. Instead, treat yourself with kindness. Say, you know what? A lot of times people are skittish about new experiences. When we're younger, we're we sometimes don't know how the world works. And, you know, everybody, everybody makes these kinds of blunders and you're not that special, that mistakes are part of the human condition. So get over yourself and recognize that that no mistake is ruinous and that you're having you're having a very human experience. You're not having some kind of singular screw up experience. You're having a very human experience. And that the self-compassion treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt can go a long way. Another thing to do about it, to your taboo point at the top of the show, talk about your regrets. That is, there's a lot to be said for disclosing. Uh, when we disclose, we lift a weight. But even more important than that, and I found this research, some of this research from Jamie Pennebaker at.

Dan Pink: [00:29:25] University of Texas and others shows that when we take that, when we take negative emotions, particularly negative emotions, which are amorphous, I'm just feeling generally bad and we write about them, talk about them, label them, we make them concrete. And when they're concrete, they're less menacing. So treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Disclose, write about, talk about to defang them. But then finally, the most important thing is draw a lesson from it. Like stop and say, okay, what? What is this teaching me? What is the lesson to extract from this? And a way to do that is often through a form of self distancing where you say, okay, we tend to be pretty good at solving problems, but pretty bad at solving our own problems. So say okay, if I if my best friend were in this situation, what would I tell her to do? And um, and when we do that, this regret is a very useful teacher. But what we have to do is, again, recognize the universality of it, but also recognize there's a process. Treat yourself with compassion, disclose and talk about it. Draw a lesson from it that can allow us to harness this negative emotion and use it as a force for good.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:36] Yeah, I mean, I love that process. And and I feel like where it's leading us is that it's, it's that last step that reveals the information that then can be transmuted into fuel for benefit. Right, right. Because if you don't get to that point, then you're just sort of like you're spinning in your head and you're partway there, but it's just it's emotion and it's regret and it's and you're trying to untangle it. But if you push it to the point of and what is it telling me? Yeah, it's it's that insight that then says, okay, now I feel better equipped to make better decisions, to perform at a higher level, to explore a sense of purpose and meaning differently informed because I've gone through the process of not just acknowledging it, but also really, like you said, like standing in a place of self-compassion and then asking, what is it telling me? Because that makes me smarter and better at being a human being. But also when we show up at work and all the things that we tend to both get measured by and measure ourself, by.

Dan Pink: [00:31:36] I mean Amen. And again, it is, you know, it's something that we get better at as we as we do it and, and, and inevitably we're going to feel clumsy doing this in the same way you would feel clumsy doing anything that you haven't been taught to do. So if you say, go play the drums and you've never played drums before, you're going to sound terrible. If you say, go play tennis, you've never picked up a tennis racket before. You're not going to be a very good player. But you have. But the first step is to say this. You know, I'm going to now treat my regrets. I'm going to treat my regrets differently. Um, there are other some there are some other like like there's another really good workplace technique that that I love that I've done myself. I can give your viewers a slightly more abbreviated form of it, and it's something called a failure resume. It's an idea from Tina Seelig at Stanford where what you do is so you all have everybody has these resumes and you know, on, you know, or LinkedIn profiles. And so, um, this list of our accomplishments and our accolades and everything like that, a failure resume is the opposite of that, um, where you list your failures, your screw ups, your setbacks, your mistakes, and but you don't stop there. Okay? This is really this is really the key. It's not about wallowing that negativity. It's about harnessing it so you can list your failures. So so imagine like a three columns of a spreadsheet in one column. List your failures, screw ups, mistakes, um, blunders.

Dan Pink: [00:33:03] In the next column, list what you learn from it. And in the third column, list what you're going to do about it. Now, I did this in an exhaustive way. It which was time consuming and painful, but you can do it truly instructive, big time, hugely instructive. But the truncated version of it is is start with five. Think about five mistakes screw ups, blunders, failures, setbacks. List those. Now list what lesson you learned and then in the next column, list what you're going to do about it. It's a very useful exercise. It's a very useful team exercise too. And one of the things that's useful, I'll tell you about my experience in this, uh, Jonathan, because there were two big things that I learned from this. Doing this in an exhaustive way is that when I went through that second column, what's the lesson I learned from it in some cases? There wasn't a lesson. Shit happens. Stuff doesn't work. You know, it's like you're not in control of everything. And that's actually very helpful to know. It's sort of. It's like a huge weight off your shoulders. For me, what happened was, is that when I looked at that second column, uh, there were two mistakes I was making over and over and over and over and over and over and over. And this helped me avoid those mistakes in the future. So I really, really like this exercise. Start small five failures. What what lessons did you learn and what are you going to do about it? And if you're comfortable, um, do it in a group.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:29] Yeah. I mean, I think it's fascinating invitation to do it in a group because to a certain extent it what it does is it normalizes failure, you know, so it makes you feel like, okay, so I'm not the only one who's the weirdo who's like, tripped up here, here, here and here and who's got these regrets around it inside it's like, oh, we actually probably have to, you know, like really cull down the number of things to get down to five, you know, and every person is like, how do I even boil it down to five? Like I'll start with like 500 and there we go. But it normalizes it where all of a sudden it's like, oh, so this is a common experience that we actually it's not a source of shame. That's just about me. It's actually something that's universal that we share together. It's a source of connection actually, which for a team in a work context could be incredibly powerful. That, of course, like working on the assumption that there's a phrase that you describe very early in our conversation that the context also is built in psychological safety. Yeah. You know, because without that, then this becomes a terrifying and potentially like experience, potentially source of retribution. So like if you can create that context, you know, if you have the agency to actually do that, if you're a leader of a team and you can create, that could be really interesting experience for the team to actually move through together and connect them in a way that maybe they hadn't been connected before.

Dan Pink: [00:35:45] This is something that I didn't write about, but that readers told me almost exactly what you're saying is, is that literally from the first week, first week after this book came out, I got emails from people, uh, from business folks who said, hey, I read this thing. I was skeptical, but I read it. And what I decided to do is I decided to tell my team about a regret that I have now. Again, I'm not beating myself up over it. I'm telling them, you know, what I learned from it and what I'm going to do about it. And they said, like, this is one of the most fruitful conversations we've had. And so what it does is that it does two things. Number one, it exactly as you say, it normalizes it. Number two, that move itself can establish psychological safety. And so when leaders lead by saying, let me tell you about a regret that I have, let me tell you what I learned from it. And let me tell you what I'm going to do about it. That can that is a that is extraordinarily helpful.

Dan Pink: [00:36:34] It's also true with, um, with parents. Um, you know, if you say, you know, I mean, my kids are my kids. Stop listening to me years ago. But but if you are a if you're a parent and you know, you want to, you want to instruct or you love your kids so much, you want to protect them from from the vicissitudes of life, and you want to give them things that you learn. And one way that we tend to do that is very kind of rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah, bad idea. Um, but if you say to your kids, oh, let me tell you, can I tell you something that I really screwed up? Almost every kid will lean in if their parents starts like that. And but again, you don't. It's not an exercise in self-flagellation. It's an exercise in extracting lessons from mistakes, normalizing them, using them as data, using them as signal, and then using them as a means where you sort of draw that lesson out and use that lesson to pilot yourself forward.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:26] Yeah, I love that. So I think we're going to open it up. Um, we've got a couple minutes left here, and if you have been sitting on questions, um, let us know. And here we go. So Nora shares, did you see any patterns in how people are able to forgive themselves for the various regrets?

Dan Pink: [00:37:44] Um, that's an interesting question. Uh, there's not so much a pattern as it is, uh, teaching people how to do it. And and I think what self-compassion tells us is that there are three things that you can do. As I mentioned before, one of them is treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. That is, don't. Here's a mistake that we make. You don't want to treat yourself better than, than, than everybody than you treat other people. No way. But there's no advantage in treating yourself worse, right? There's no evidence that's effective. It really isn't. If you look at the work of Kristin Neff at especially, who was one of the pioneers of the self-compassion. Treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt. Number two recognize that mistakes are part of the human experience. Any regret that Nora gives, any regret that anybody here gives? Truly. I mean, we should we should be a fun little game here. Somebody gives me a regret. You give me 90s. I'll find the exact same regret in the database. Okay, so it's part of the human experience. But the another thing is that when we make a mistake, when we have a regret, when we do something we're not proud of, it's a moment in our life. It's not the full measure of our life. You have to look at sort of the the temporal scale, too. It's a moment in our life we don't define ourselves by what you know, this one, you think about the stretch of time we don't define ourselves fully by any one little. Moment in there. So when you do that can that can actually reduce its burden and clear the way for the sense making and less of an extraction that I'm talking about.

Speaker4: [00:39:07] Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:08] Love that. So, Nora, hopefully that is valuable to you. Um, we got a couple other questions that we can speak to here. Tamara or Tamara. Um, however you pronounce it. Apologies if I got it wrong. How do you manage? Um. Grass is greener syndrome when you choose between two positive choices but still mourn the loss of the choice not taking. This happens to moms who stay home versus work all the time.

Dan Pink: [00:39:33] Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I think that is in one of the things that we know from a whole array of, of social psychology or psychology, not only social psychology, but personality psychology and cognitive psychology, is that social comparison is a thief of well-being. And so what we're doing there is that I think in many cases, what people are doing is that they're comparing themselves to not necessarily a different scenario, but a different set of people. So I chose to stay home with my kids. Look at her. She's so successful. I could have been that I'm not that successful because I made this choice or the reverse. I'm successful in my career, but I don't have a family or I'm miserable. My family and look at her, she decided to stay home and she so, so one of the things that in first of all, in social comparison don't do, it's like one of those a lot of this stuff comes back to like that old joke where a guy goes into a doctor's office and he says, doctor, it hurts when I do this. And the doctor says, don't do that. Okay, so social comparison, don't do that. Um, treating yourself, uh, sort of treating yourself with lacerating self-criticism. Don't do that. And one of the ways to avoid social comparison is that you, um, you have to you have to recognize that you're only you're comparing essentially everything you know about yourself to one tiny dimension of somebody else. So, um, so, so don't make that kind of don't make that kind of cognitive error.

Dan Pink: [00:41:00] The other thing is that if you really are bugged by that other path, recognize that your life is finite, but it's not, we hope, ending tomorrow. So if if it's sticking with you saying, oh, if only I had stayed home with my kids rather than going out and work. And that's a really nagging regret, then that's telling you something. So maybe what it suggests is that when your kids are teenagers, maybe taking time to go part time, uh, if you're a grandparent, spend some time with your grandchildren. Um, and so you so, so recognize number one, social comparison will destroy you. Don't compare your full self to someone else's. Imagine what you imagine someone else's self to be. If it's persistent, use it as a use it as a lesson. Ask yourself, what's it telling me? I'll give you one other thing here. Which is which is which is super useful. It's basically the single best decision making tool that I know, which is to ask yourself when you can't decide what to do is what would you tell your best friend to do? What would you tell your best friend to do? As I said, it's called Solomon's paradox. We're terrible at solving our own problems, but good at solving other people's problems. So you want to take you want to take a step back. And so, so in this case, if you feel like the grass is greener, ask yourself, well, what would you tell your best friend to do in this circumstance? And you probably know what to do for yourself.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:14] Yeah. Um, I think when we can get that sort of zoomed out perspective, it it gives us an immediate shift. You had a couple minutes. Stick around for one final question here. Of course. Awesome. So the question is about the five failures exercise. Does it work the same way in each group? I mean, would it equally work if your group comprises only close and intimate friends? Or if your group has only coworkers, including your boss? We kind of talked about this.

Dan Pink: [00:42:40] Yeah, I think it's I think it's a really good question. And I think that in some ways, um, Alexandria is your answer. You're sort of the answer to your question is embedded in the question itself is that it's going to be different. So maybe do the five failures with a group of friends and maybe around the, uh, if you're a boss around the workplace, you say, I'm going to tell you about a regret, a mistake that I made. I'll tell you what I learned from it, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do about it, and then invite other people if you're comfortable to do the same thing. Uh, I don't think that every workplace setting is right for to say, come on, everybody, we're going to have a robust conversation about all of our screw ups. That's that's not necessarily the right. So I think that you're you you intuited the answer to it in the question itself is that it's going to depend on the it's going to depend on the context. That said, my experience has been it's in some ways, the impetus of the book was that people are much more willing to talk about their mistakes and their failures than you, than we believe there's a kind of pluralistic ignorance in a lot of the stuff you're saying. Well, no, I'm I don't love talking about my mistakes, but I'm open to doing it. Um, but we think that no one else is. And I think that people are, you know, um, assume that people are similar to you and that. They're good people. They want to do the right thing. They are compassionate toward others and start with that assumption. And and some people will disprove you, but most people will show that you're right. And when we begin with that kind of assumption of of sort of positive intent, I think that can lead to richer conversations.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:12] Yeah, I completely agree with that. And and like you said, um, a lot of the answer was embedded in the question there, sort of like he kind of knew.

Speaker4: [00:44:20] Yeah, but that's good. I mean, but but, you know, 100%. Yeah.

Dan Pink: [00:44:23] And here's the thing. It's like, you know, a lot of times, you know, when we when we when we wonder what to do, simply putting it into words. Yeah. Allows us to see our thinking in action and help us understand what we mean and what we want to do.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:37] Yeah, completely. Um, well, Dan, I think we're going to wrap it up from here. Everybody who has joined in today, thank you so much. Thanks for your thoughtful questions. Thanks for joining the conversation. Um, the latest book, The Power of Regret. Dan, I know you're working on all sorts of other fun projects, which I'm sure we will be talking about down the road one day, but thanks for joining me today and we will see everybody else here again soon on our next Lincoln Live. Take care everyone. Hey, so I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Learned a little something about your own quest to come alive and work in life, and maybe feel a little bit less alone along this journey to find and do what sparks you. And remember, if you're at a moment of exploration, looking to find and do or even create work that makes you come more fully alive, that brings more meaning and purpose and joy into your life, take the time to discover your own personal Sparketype for free at sparketype.com. It'll open your eyes to a deeper understanding of yourself and open the door to possibility like never before. And hey, if you're finding value in these conversations, please just take an extra second right now to follow and rate SPARKED in your favorite podcast app. This is so helpful in helping others find the show and growing our community so that we can all come alive and work in life together. This episode of SPARKED was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and Me, Jonathan Fields. Production and editing by Sarah Harney. Special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. Until next time. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED.