When A Regret Turns into A Teachable Moment

Today I realized that the idea that has brought me so much fear, has turned out to be a tool that I have been using to get to my future.

Ever since I was of legal age to be considered an adult, I have been fighting tooth and nail to never regret- whatever that looked like at the time. Sometimes it was YOLO and live all the experiences (good and bad) and other times it was to be hyper cautious as to not do something that would mess up my path. Nine years ago I started working on a plan for my life. I didn’t have a finish line in the beginning so I would obsess over every step. Not having an end goal led me down the path of a masters I couldn’t use - or so I told myself. This was a lot of time and money wasted, leading to a massive regret IF I couldn’t figure out some way to make that step part of my plan.

I have been very creative over the past 4 years trying to come up with a path that included utilizing this masters somehow. I eventually decided to abandon the efforts. There was no way I was going to be able to use it and I had to make my peace with it. Now that I have an end goal, 4 years later, I decided to pursue another masters that will assist in helping me achieve that goal.

As I was soaking the day away in the boiling hot bath just now I realized something else… my earned masters got my foot in the door in my chosen career and it also allowed me to complete an associates program and warp ahead to a(nother) masters program! Even though I have not been able to use my masters for what it was supposed to be used for, it has already helped me out so much more than I recognized.

In conclusion….

The lesson I took home today was that I’ve been concentrating on not mis-stepping; calculating all moves as to avoid making a regrettable decision. So much energy has been spent on this obsession. And I still ended up making a questionably regrettable decision. You can’t spend your life so far in the future trying to avoid messing up because it’s gonna happen and sometimes those “mess ups” come in handy. Keep moving forward, even if it is diagonally… it’s still forward.