Dealing With Missed Opportunities

Why Learning to Forgive Yourself is the Only Way Forward

Business leaders face a lot of opportunities. Many are obvious wins, others are clear losses, and the majority of the time, hindsight is twenty-twenty.

As one such leader, husband, and father I make a lot of decisions that impact me personally, as well as the lives of others. I do the best I can with the information I have, and make sure that my decision aligns with my core values. But, again, hindsight is twenty-twenty.

My missed opportunity was early in my career. I had the opportunity of being apart of a startup that would turn out to be extremely successful. Instead of working for equity I took a weekly paycheck to cover my living expenses and pursue my dreams outside of the business world. Fast forward five years, and it could easily feel like a wrong decision.

Decisions from the past are always easier to make in the future. You’ve learned new information, seen the acts of God play out, and watched fate direct destiny. There’s nothing like the feeling of looking back on a great decision, one that makes you a ton of money or puts you in the right spot at the right time to meet that man or woman of your dreams. On the other hand, there are the decisions that play out differently than expected.

Most of the time if you are teachable and dedicated, you can call these learning experiences. Then there are the other ones, the life-changing decisions that you can never take back, maybe you could have been on the founding team of Uber, Google, or Facebook, but took another path and stayed in college. These decisions impact us deeply. They stay with us and visit us in our moments of weakness. They tempt us, begging to be meditated on, pulling us into a negative spiral of self-pity and distress.

If you’re breathing and old enough to be reading this post, there’s a good chance you have regrets. Big regrets. The type that keeps you up at night. I don’t want to talk about learning from your mistakes. The simple truth is that sometimes there is nothing to learn from a mistake. You can’t learn to predict hurricanes or read the minds of your business partners. What you can do is move on in a healthy way.

The Challenge of Forgiving Yourself

Most successful leaders know that it’s critical to learn how to forgive others. Being able to forgive and rebuild trust is the only way to grow an organization comprised of more than just you. You will never find a perfect business partner, investor, or employee. You know this. It’s why you’re successful.

Yet, with all our leadership training, we often forget to forgive ourselves.

We hold bad decisions like anchors that hold us back from destiny. We allow them to breed fear in our minds and hearts and focus on what could have been instead of what will be.

Maybe hindsight is not twenty-twenty. Maybe hindsight is a blind attempt at self-justification. It doesn’t account for future or present variables and doesn’t account for how the journey has shaped and molded us.

To move forward in a productive and healthy manner, we have to learn how to forgive ourselves for these missed opportunities. We have to admit that we are not the gods of our own universe and that there are greater forces at work. That we did the best we could at the moment.

In Conclusion

To wrap this post up, I want to challenge you to take some time to explore the areas of regret that are holding you back. The places of regret and defeat, the missed opportunities you wish you could do over. Ask yourself, what’s really keeping you up at night or holding you back from pursuing your dreams fully. Find your center, your place of peace, and silently but confidently forgive yourself. It’s the only way forward.

Practical Exercises

1. Write your regret on a piece of paper and burn it. Visualize your regrets, losses, and frustrations burning away with the paper.

2. Say it out loud. Sometimes we need to literally hear our own voice ask for forgiveness. For me, this is a difficult yet powerful activity.

3. Journal your regrets in the form of a letter. Write to yourself, asking for forgiveness and then granting it.

This post was originally published in the Mindbox Journal.