Avoiding Remorse

Remorse is lasting. It is the culmination of an emotional journey that begins with apprehension, then fear, emptiness, and ultimately remorse. This emotional pathway is launched in several ways, including:

• Taking an action you believe is unproductive or detrimental
• Standing on the sidelines and watching something fall short of expectations
• Failing to follow through on a strong, intuitive thought
• Supporting or taking an action that compromises your integrity.

The timing of the journey to remorse can progress quickly or take many months. However, each story ends the same way, with an emotional burden that isn’t easily discarded.

The good news is that wisely addressing questionable situations can spare you from having to traverse this unhappy pathway.

Interestingly enough, the action you choose doesn’t have to succeed to avoid this emotional trap. Positive intent is the antidote to remorse. People rarely express remorse over actions they undertook with positive intent, even if those actions failed to provide the desired result. Falling short of achieving the right outcome might create regrets, but those are temporary and something we can quickly learn from. You can take solace from “trying to do what was right.”

There are four elements to ensuring your remorse squashing activity works as planned:

Trust your intuition – Your intuitive thoughts should be translated into meaningful action, the rationale for which you can explain to others. To follow through on your intuition, start by validating assumptions. If you can validate, activate!

Accepting short-term discomfort for long-term results – Taking action to avoid remorse often makes things uncomfortable. After all, avoiding remorse might mean bending rules, breaking rules, or performing unusual acts against the grain of expected behavior. When avoiding remorse, you must be prepared to accept short-term scrutiny.

Exchange information to guide your outcome – Share your views and explore why you feel as you do. Ask questions and listen intensely. Information breeds understanding, and understanding is paramount to navigating issues wisely and generating the intended outcomes.

Tap into your moral compass – Taking action you don’t believe in or not acting when you feel something needs to change is the seed for remorse. Explore your gut for ethics triggers -and, like intuition, follow what your body and mind tell you.

You can vanquish remorse from your work life if you recognize the start of the remorse journey, and act intently to change outcomes you may otherwise carry as a long-term burden.

This article is based on my LinkedIn Learning course entitled Strategic Leadership: Deploying Intelligent Disobedience