Live a regret-free life

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A life without regret means that every day you are living with intention and presence. It means you know what you want in your life and are you going after it. But when you become a mom, many women find themselves stuck in, “what is really important in life?” or “what do I really want?” or “Is what I’m doing worth it?”. Answering these questions is a vital part of a have-it-all kind of life and in today’s podcast I am sharing 4 steps to living a life without regret, and a lot of my own journey through figuring out what that meant to me and how to go about having it.

Topics in this episode:

  • Watching our kids grow up is a very real reminder about if we are truly living life the way we want.

  • Deciding to have a regret-free life is the first step to going after it, otherwise you are just leaving it up to chance.

  • Our dreams feel real once they are named, which is why we tend to shy away from saying them out loud.

  • Money and time are never the real reasons to not go after your dreams

  • The importance of figuring out how to make your regret-free life work and then deciding if it’s worth the tradeoffs

Show Notes:

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Transcript

Intro

To live a life without regret means that every day you are living a life with intention and presence. It means you know what you want in life and you're going after it. 

When you become a mom, many women find themselves stuck in what's really important in life. What do I really want? Is this worth the time I'm spending away for my kids? And answering these questions is a vital part to having it all in kind of life. 

In today's podcast, I'm sharing four steps to living a life without regret and sharing a lot of my own personal journey through feeling stuck and confused once I became a mom. You ready? Let's get to it. 

Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it. 

Hello, working moms. I have a very important episode today, and I will admit that there is some emotion behind this subject right now, so it feels very vulnerable. But if you follow me at all, you know that I tend to operate with a lot of vulnerability and honesty on this podcast. So expect nothing less today. 

But besides there being some raw emotions behind this topic today, I can also feel a really big fire. So you might hear me preaching a little bit today. So just fair warning. 

As we get into it today, I want to talk about naming and living out a regret free life. This is one of the reasons I hear from my clients on why they decide to invest in coaching. 

Motherhood propels you into reflecting on your life.

There is a fear of regret, and I think motherhood is a moment that a lot of women find themselves reflecting on life and potential regret. It's sort of a moment where we truly examine what's important to us and where we're spending our time and our energy and our resources, and we sort of think about if we're living life the way we really want to or not. 

It's really hard to ignore how much time is passing as you watch a newborn start growing when you are switching out clothes out of their drawers every six to ten weeks because your newborn is now an infant. And then they move into toddler them and so forth. 

It's really hard to ignore the time that you are not spending with your child or your kids, particularly when you're not happy or feeling fulfilled with what you're doing all day. 

So these conversations become very real for us and for a lot of my clients. They reach out and they book a free breakthrough call with me, which is that call where we really dive into their dreams and we talk about what's getting in the way of their dreams and we talk about coaching together and what that looks like. 

And they reach out when this conversation in their head about regret feels like too much. Like when they've been endlessly thinking about it and likely even talking to their partner about it. And they just feel completely stuck and they don't know what to do. They may not know what living a regret free life looks like to them. They might not have a clear picture. 

In fact, most of the women that come to me, they don't they don't exactly know what would be fulfilling to them. They just know that the life that they're living today is not the life that they want to be living, that they're unhappy and they don't want to be any longer. They cannot wake up another day with the same thoughts and the same motivations and in the same confusion and expect anything to be different. 

Because in their experience and pretty much in all of our experiences, unless you win the lottery, it doesn't change. 

I remember this moment so specifically. It has this almost visceral feel. My entire body can actually feel it as I'm talking about it and remembering it right now. 

“…I felt stuck after my daughter was born.”

After my daughter was born, that's almost nine years ago at this point, I remember how stuck I felt. The idea of leaving her every day and going to a job that was over an hour away, that I didn't really want to be at, felt soul crushing to me. And yet, at the same time, I had no idea what I really wanted. 

I knew that I wanted more time with her. I knew I didn't want to waste any more time commuting. And I certainly knew I no longer wanted to waste time in a job that I didn't really like anymore, where I was getting up to do this thing that just wasn't fulfilling. It just felt like a complete waste. But I didn't have any clue what I really wanted. 

“…I was consumed by feeling like I was wasting life…”

I didn't know what that perfect combination was between work and time spent with family and activities and so forth. It was consumed by the amount of time and energy I was not putting into my daughter. I was consumed by feeling like I was wasting life, and yet I was watching her every single day grow and change and reach all sorts of milestones that I felt like I was missing out on. 

I didn't have a plan beyond this moment in my life. I did everything I was supposed to do.

  • I graduated from college with good grades. 

  • I went straight into the workforce in my field. 

  • I followed a job up to Seattle. 

  • I met and married my husband. 

  • We waited to have kids until after he was done getting his master's degree. I got a job. 

  • I carried the benefits for the family, I was the breadwinner. 

  • We had to work hard to get pregnant because we struggled a little bit with infertility. 

But it finally happened and then my daughter was born and I quite literally didn't know what was next. 

I didn't know what I wanted in my career. I didn't know what success looked like in either my job or my life as a mom and certainly not together. 

I have a very deep value of intentionality and I felt like I was floundering in life, no direction. All I knew, I was just unhappy and confused with what I wanted and what was next. 

Becoming a mom and having kids is often a pinnacle moment where we evaluate what's really important to us.

And I know this story is not dissimilar to a lot of you out there. Becoming a mom and having kids is often a pinnacle moment where we evaluate what's really important to us. 

I think another reason why this conversation about living without regret and living like every day has purpose and intention is because some of the people I love most in my life, my parents, mentors, I'm becoming very keenly aware of their age. 

There is some real conversations happening about these people that I love and their final seasons of life. These are super difficult conversations for me to swallow. And my brain just wants to focus on how there just isn't enough time and it brings up all this emotion. 

And it's not that anyone is even sick or going anywhere anytime soon, but the reality is that they're getting older, that I'm getting older, my kids are getting older. Time is passing. I can see it every single day. And it feels very real to me right now. 

I know these are some of the reasons why this topic of living regret free is sort of top of mind for me. And I want to spend the rest of our time here on this podcast talking about some steps for you to take. If you find yourself contemplating life or mulling over life, or just finding yourself completely unhappy in life and trying to just sort out what is next for you, what will it take to live that all in kind of life? 

Realizing and accepting that something in life isn’t in alignment.

And I'm going to be honest, the first step is really just the decision that something isn't working for you right now, you're not achieving the life that you want. 

The life where you get to be 90 plus years old and you look back and you think about the life that you lived and you think, I lived everything exactly the way I want. I lived life prioritizing all of the things that were most important to me. 

Commit to taking a step towards figuring it out.

You don't need to know what that life is. You don't need to know how you're going to get there. You don't have to have a plan yet. You just need to be committed to taking a step towards figuring it out, deciding that something needs to change and you're going to figure it out. 

That is the first step. And that's one of the huge benefits of coaching. By deciding to invest in yourself and in coaching, you're making a decision to be committed to the life that you want regret free, all in, purpose-driven life. 

Making a decision to invest in your dreams.

That's exactly why I think the breakthrough call that I offer to anyone that's interested in coaching with me is so powerful. Because on this call, we're going to talk about making a decision to invest in your dreams in that regret-free life through coaching. 

The goal is to actually make a decision right there on our call together, on whether we really want to work together towards these dreams or not. 

And the reason I think that's such a powerful breakthrough moment is because it's when things get real. 

It's no longer about complaining about how life is not exactly what you want. 

It's no longer about sitting in confusion about what's next. 

It's no longer being in fear around going after it. 

It is time to decide if you are going to put money that's the investment in coaching to making this life happen. And how much money are you willing to put towards it. 

The investment in coaching with me one on one for six months is $8,000. Some women decide that they're not willing to put that money towards their dreams, towards their goals. And that's okay, as long as you love your reasons. 

Because if you believe that working with me in coaching is actually going to help you get out of confusion and start living a regret-free life, why wouldn't you spend that kind of money on it? What else are you going to do with that money that is more important? 

And there could be a lot of good, very legitimate reasons to not invest at this time. I just want to make sure that you know them and you feel really good about them. 

Investing is deciding this is how I'm going to go about creating the life that I want.

Now, for other women investing $8000 in a life that they don't regret, a life where they feel like they spent enough time in all of the places that they want, where they are making enough of an impact and experiencing success in their career the way they want to, that investment feels worth it to them. 

And it's a moment where they get to decide, this is how I'm going to go about creating the life that I want. It's the mechanism, right? Coaching is the mechanism to get you towards that life, and it's worth the investment. 

And once again, I always want to make sure you love your reasons for deciding that. The important part about all of this is that a decision is made. A decision to not wake up one more day living exactly the same life, but interrupting that pattern in some way. 

Whether that's through coaching or therapy or some sort of intentional accountability with a friend or it's just between you and God and a journal. Whatever it is, you have to decide you're going to wake up tomorrow and do something different because you want a regret-free all in sort of life. 

For me, this looked like some very intentional conversations with some mentors of mine, a book that I read and I journaled all the way through, and eventually, a coach that I hired. 

And all of that was me being very committed to creating a life that I loved, a life that I was all in for, that I had no regrets for. 

Create a vision for what a regret-free life looks like.

The second step in moving toward a regret-free life after you've decided to go all in in some form or another, and deciding to invest your time, maybe your money into it, is to create a vision for what that regret-free life looks like. 

That vision is like a map in your brain. If you don't give your brain a map, it's just going to wander aimlessly, trying to help you get to a destination that is unclear on where it is. You have to paint a very clear picture, give your brain some very clear direction on what it even means to live this regret-free life. 

And I like to start the process right out of the gate with my new clients. I mean, when we start together, you fill out this profile where I get to know you, and I ask several questions about you and your goals. 

And one of the questions I like to ask is, do you have a secret dream? Maybe it's something you haven't shared with anyone else, but you would really love to see it happen in your life. 

We hold ourselves back from our dreams.

And many of my clients, not all of them - but many of them, have an answer to this question. And that always blows my mind how we as human beings tend to hold ourselves back from our dreams. 

For some of my clients, it's been writing a book or doing a Ted Talk, or it could be a particular job that they want to work towards, or a dream business that they have always wanted to have, or a lifestyle that they want to live. 

I had a client that has just finished up her six months of coaching with me, and one of the sessions we had toward the end of our time together was talking about some secret dreams. 

I actually have a workbook that my clients go through when we talk about the subject of living a regret free life that just helps them to have this conversation with themselves and kind of get out of their head some of their goals and dreams and just allow them to dream bigger. 

And what I love about this particular client, her dream was so cool. This dream - she's had it for a really long time to do this very specific hike in Norway. And it's been on her bucket list for many, many years now. And we started talking about it, and we started talking about what it would take for her to make that dream happen. 

She realized it really wasn't all that far off. She had just never really set an intention to make it happen. And when you don't set an intention to make something happen, the only way it's ever going to happen is by chance winning the lottery, right? 

That's not the kind of life I want for you. 

I want you to feel set up to reach all of your goals and all of your dreams and to make them all possible. Which means you actually need to take time to define them, to put them down on paper and make them real. 

I find a lot of women, me included, really have struggled with this. Because when we allow ourselves to actually dream and see the things that we actually want, it has a realness to it. And all this fear comes up, right? 

The fear of making it happen.

The fear of taking time to go after the goal.

The fear of what it's going to cost you money wise, maybe even time wise.

The fear of failing, of never making it happen. 

Up until this point, when you actually say out loud what it is you want and what those big dreams are, it's only ever been hypothetical. It's only been a nice idea in your mind. And when things kind of remain a nice idea or hypothetical, there can be no failure because you've never really committed to them in the first place. 

Fear of failure holds us back from even trying.

So instead of actually naming the things that you want, allowing yourself to dream about it in a very real way, our brain tends to shy away from that out of a whole lot of fear of it not happening. Or a fear of failing or a fear of all of the trade offs that are going to be required in order for it to happen. 

A lot of women cry on their breakthrough call with me. And the reason this happens is because it's one of the first times they're admitting, not just to me, but to themselves, that they want something different. 

It's the first time they're being honest with themselves about their dreams, their unhappiness in life and the things that are getting in the way of them having the life that they want to have. 

It takes a lot of guts and vulnerability to schedule this call and be honest with what it is you want and to allow yourself to take your brain to a big vision, a big dream of the life that you want. 

Another reason I see women hold themselves back from really dreaming big - so failure is a big one, right? And all of the fears around that another reason is uncertainty and confusion. 

They think they want to go after a job or maybe a dream business of some kind. Or they dream about being a stay at home mom or just working part time or maybe moving somewhere, or being a nomad family and living all over the world. 

Being ‘right’ is our safety mechanism.

They actually have a sense of what this dream is, but they don't know for sure. And they crave certainty and the idea of getting a decision right - you can see my air quotes there, right is very important to our brain. It's like our safety mechanism for sure. 

The problem is your goals and dreams for your life are neither right nor wrong. They're completely subjective. You hold the power and what you decide to do or not do in your life, it can feel very scary. And I talk a lot about this with my clients because our brains so desperately want to focus on getting something right. 

What I do with my clients is I help them create a compass to help them define what rightness means to them. 

Name your values, name your identity and name your purpose.

In coaching, what we do is we name your values, we name your identity and we name your purpose. Those are a part of the compass that I help you create. And we define those things together. We put some language around those things which really help your brain see these are the things that are most core to me. This is what feels right deep down in my bones. 

And we do that so that as we start talking about dreams and we start talking about goals and we start talking about the big things you want in life, we have something to come back to. This language that we develop in your compass that points to the rightness of it or why it makes sense in your gut why you might want that. 

I developed a compass of sorts when I was going through a big change when my daughter was first born nine years ago. 

My journey to finding my way.

It was in this realization that people were really the most important thing to me in all of my jobs that I had ever had. Mentoring people, connecting at a deeper level with people, knowing people, and what held them back and what propelled them forward, helping them reach new levels. 

It was never about the actual work that I was doing that I really cared about. It was the people that I cared a lot about. 

And I knew this. I knew it like deep down in my bones. And it was with that level of certainty, along with some other things that I had named at that time, that really allowed me to take the risk of following this dream to be a coach. 

Defining what were my guiding principles.

It was how I knew that it was right for me. I had done this deeper dive work, this compass work that I had created for myself to really help define what were my guiding principles, what were my guiding values, if you will. And they all made sense as I thought about going after this dream of becoming a coach. 

So however you get yourself through that fear of failure and uncertainty, whatever you use to guide you, if you are going to have a regret-free life, you need to name it. 

You need to have a very clear picture about what it is, and you need to go on a journey to figure out how to get yourself there to some level of clarity. And after you do that next, it's time to think about how to make this regret-free life happen. Like, what's it going to take? What's the plan? 

The 2 excuses that hold you back.

Now, I see a lot of women get stuck in this step, not because it's not possible for them to achieve the life that they want and the goals that they have, but it feels really uncomfortable and hard, and I hear it a lot. I don't have the time and we can't afford it. These are the two very easy excuses that tend to hold you back, and they're almost never true. 

It might be uncomfortable to figure out how to make time for the goals that you might have. 

If you want to be a Ted Talk speaker, for example, or you want to write a book, it's uncomfortable to think about how you're going to make time to do that because likely you don't have oodles of amounts of time right now to spend doing that. It's not going to fit comfortably into your current schedule. 

You're going to have to change something to make it happen. You're going to have to trade something off, and that feels really uncomfortable, but it's still possible. 

Same with money, which is a conversation I have a lot with my clients, and it starts with that decision to invest in coaching or not. 

Our brains like to think we can't afford things, but that leaves us feeling very powerless, as if our goals and our dreams are based on if it fits comfortably into our budget. 

Now, if you haven't listened to the podcast I did with Nicole Stork-Hestad on making powerful money decisions, you should definitely go back and listen to that. I will put that in the show notes for you, it was episode 97. 

Making our money work for us.

We talked all about this, about not making decisions based on the idea of if it fits into your budget, but making decisions based on what you want and then figuring out how to make the budget work. You tell the dollars where to go. That was her advice to us on that podcast episode. 

So when I have a client that's interested in working with me, but they feel like they can't afford it, I always give them the exercise of going off and getting off our call and figuring out how to make it work. 

I want them to actually do the math and figure out where the money is going to come from in order to work together. Because the truth is, if there was an emergency of some kind with your kids and you needed to come up with that money, you totally would. 

Most of us, like 99.9% of us, have access to all sorts of money in the form of borrowing or in accounts that are being saved for various things. The money is always there. 

It's a decision on if you want to reallocate money towards your goals or dreams or reallocate future dollars towards those goals and dreams. 

So what I want to encourage you is if money is the only reason you're not going after whatever your regret free life is that you've determined for yourself, I want you to do the hard work of figuring out how to make it happen. 

And then take the time to decide if the dream or the goal is worth the discomfort of what it's going to take to make it happen. Figure it out first and then decide if that feels worth it to you. 

I have a client that came to me thinking that she really wanted to be a stay at home mom. And we had several sessions talking about the subject, and eventually we got to the point where I told her she just needed to figure out how to make it work financially and come back to me at our next session with an actual financial plan for how she could quite literally quit her job right now to be a stay at home mom, because her brain kept wanting to tell her that it was irresponsible, that it was impossible, that that couldn't be done. 

And when she came to me with the next session with a plan, it was fascinating because the reality was she could afford it one, but she actually didn't want to sacrifice what she would have to sacrifice in order to make it happen. 

And all of a sudden, her brain was able to let it go because her brain was able to see that she could actually make the choice. She could actually figure it out. But the trade offs were just too great for her and she didn't want to do that. It was a very powerful place to be. 

When she could see it was a possibility, she could in fact, afford it. But in the end, it wasn't going to be worth it. 

Your dreams are always possible. There's just likely a lot of fear involved in going after them. There is risk, there is potential failure, there's a whole lot of discomfort. But they are always possible. 

There is always time and there is always money if you decide all of the trade offs to making it happen are worth it. 

So number one, you need to commit to going all in to a regret free life. 

Number two, you have to decide what that regret free life is. You have to paint a picture, have a vision of some sort of what it is. 

Number three, you have to create a plan for how to make that regret free life happen, no matter the discomfort and fear. 

And the last thing is to decide a next step and take it, even if it's just a baby step. 

Maybe it's an important conversation or an honest conversation with your partner. Or maybe it's a conversation with your boss. Or maybe it's a commitment to write down your dream every single day. Maybe it's scheduling a breakthrough call with me to explore going after your dream and coaching. 

Your regret-free life isn't going to happen by chance. 

It's not going to happen overnight, either. It's going to happen as you take one step at a time, pushing yourself through the discomfort and staying committed to the life that you want. 

You only get one life. Every day is an opportunity to take a step toward the life that you want because your greatest potential is always ahead of you. 

Join the movement working moms and go after a have it all life. Life is just too darn short. You've got this, working moms. Let's get to it. 

Rebecca Olson