You Are Not That Special: Regret Edition

Brené Brown asked, “True or false: regret is difficult when you struggle with a fragile ego?”

Dan Pink responded with, 

Okay, so I think that the fragile ego is something that self-compassion can address, because here’s the thing, I just want to clarify this for everybody whose feelings are about to get hurt, you’re all very special, alright? However… You’re not that special. 

Alright, your experiences often are not wildly different from other people’s experiences, and so sometimes when we think about our regret, we say, “Oh my God, I must be the only one who has ever had a failure of kindness, I must be the only one, I’m so unique and special, I’m the only one who had a failure of courage, a failure of kindness,” and that’s such a threat to our ego, we just bat it away, when in fact, if you say, “You know what, maybe being unkind is part of the human condition occasionally, maybe it’s part of the broader human experience,” maybe you’re kind of like other people, and what you should do is just treat yourself with kindness and try to extract a lesson from it rather than protect your ego.

It’s hard to face our regrets head-on. It takes a lot of resiliency to be able to do it, dust ourselves off, and get going forward again. And we’re all capable of it, if we want to allow regret to be a teacher. 

Read Dan’s answer a few times and then do check out the full interview with Brené Brown it’s quoted from here.