Hal Elrod: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. This is Hal Elrod, and today we’re talking about regret and living your life in a way where regret serves you. It doesn’t hurt you. It doesn’t cause you to suffer. It doesn’t cause you to beat yourself up. It doesn’t cause you to live in the past. Regret can really hurt us. In fact, it can be like that heavy backpack that you carry through your entire life, and you don’t realize that you can set the backpack down. What’s inspiring today’s episode is, well, number one, last week, our episode was like 15 minutes.

It was a much shorter than usual podcast episode, and I got some great feedback. They’re like, “That was great.” It’s nice to have, instead of like a 45-minute or 60-minute podcast, some shorter episodes. So, I thought, you know what, let’s keep it fresh, and do that again. And specifically, though, what inspired the episode is a letter that I wrote to my kids about my biggest regrets. So, I am going to read you this letter and then we’ll unpack it and apply it to your life. So, it says:

Dear Sophia and Halston, there are a few things I’ve been carrying in my heart for a long time that I want to share with you. They’re my biggest regrets, mistakes I’ve made that I can’t undo. My hope in sharing them isn’t to make you sad, but to help you learn from my experiences so that you don’t repeat them. Life has a way of teaching us through both our joys and our mistakes, our wins and our failures. Regret, when we use it the right way, can be one of life’s greatest teachers. The key is to let regret guide you, not trap you. If you dwell on things you can’t change, regret will only bring pain. But if you acknowledge it, learn from it, accept it, i.e., can’t change it and make different choices moving forward, regret can lead to wisdom and a better life.

That’s why I’m sharing mine with you. My biggest regrets, number one, missing family experiences. Some of my favorite memories are the moments we’ve shared together as a family, and that’s why it breaks my heart that I missed out on certain experiences, specifically the camping trips to Kings Canyon that you went on with Mom and Babcha, and I was not there. Those are moments I’ll never get back, and I wish with everything in me that I had been there with you. Now, whether it’s Halston playing basketball or doing a play at Living Oaks or Sophia in one of her mini theater productions, I never want to miss anything you do. Just being in your presence and watching you do anything is literally one of the greatest joys in my life.

Number two, putting work ahead of family. Before I had cancer, I was a workaholic. I spent too many days and nights focused on work instead of being fully present with you and mom. If I could go back, I’d give anything to trade some of those work hours for more time with you, laughing, talking, just being together. Nothing I ever have accomplished professionally matters more than you two. After cancer, even when I was still on chemo and feeling sick, I started waking you up every morning with stuffed animal puppet show, Derpy and the inappropriate unicorn, and reading you stories every night so that I can make sure to begin and end each day with you. Then I started cutting my workday short so I could drive you to school and pick you up every day, which I still do because spending as much time with you as I can will always be more important to me than any work that I do.

And number three, moving away from family. One of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made was moving away from Nampa. That’s what we call my dad, instead of Grandpa, Nampa. He moved to Temecula to be close to us and to watch you grow up. Then we left for Texas, leaving him in Temecula by himself. Mom and I did what we thought was best for our family, but in hindsight, I don’t know if we should have left and whether or not we should have. The fact that we took you guys away from Nampa still hurts. If I could do it over, I would’ve made living near him and your Grandma Juju and Aunt Haley and Mom’s family, my number one priority, and I would’ve revolved the rest of my life and work around that priority.

The lessons I want you to take with you. I can’t change the past, but I can share what I’ve learned in the hope that you make different choices. You may not fully understand this now, but as you grow older, I hope you’ll remember these words. Choose family first, always. Family is everything. It’s the most important part of life, and it’s not just about loving your family. It’s about doing life with them day in and day out. Multiple generations living near each other, supporting each other, that’s how I believe life is meant to be lived. I believe God intended it that way. When you’re older and deciding where to live, what job to take, or what lifestyle to build, don’t just think about money, friends, convenience, or adventure.

Think about family. Think about being close to the people who love you most and who will always be there for you, no matter what. One day, you’ll look back on your life. The moments you’ll treasure won’t be promotions or possessions. They’ll be family dinners, late-night talks, holidays spent together, and little moments of laughter and love. Those are the things that truly matter. And when you make mistakes, as we all do, acknowledge them, learn from them, and teach others what you learned, but don’t dwell on them. Don’t carry regret like a heavy weighted backpack. Let it be a signpost that guides you forward, not a chain that holds you back.

Sophia and Halston, you are my greatest blessings. If you take only one lesson from me, let it be this. Build a life where family is at the center. It’s a choice you’ll never regret. I love you both more than words can express. With all my heart, Dad.

I wrote that letter a few weeks ago. I just felt inspired to write it, and as I was reading it the other day, actually yesterday, I was like, “I’m going to share this on a podcast because I think this would resonate with a lot of people.” A few things that you can take from this. Obviously, you might go, “Oh, wow, there’s a lot from that letter that I can relate to,” and you can see how it’s kind of a healthy way of taking regret and learning from it, and then passing it on to other people, in this case, my children. And ultimately, the life that we live, the experience that we have every day, moment by moment for the rest of our lives is based on our perception, our perspective. And if we choose to see regret as a bad thing, if we choose to see the mistakes that we made as a bad thing, by labeling it bad, we create a negative experience of life. And like I said, it can last for your entire life.

I was reading an article in doing research for today’s episode, beyond the letter that I just shared with you, an article from Mark Manson. Mark Manson wrote the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving Up, and he has sold millions and millions of books because he is absolutely brilliant. I encourage you, check out his website, read his blog posts, read his books. He’s a very brilliant thought leader, if you will, like a true thought leader. He is very, very wise. So, he has a quote. He says, “A regret is simply a mistake we haven’t learned the proper lesson from yet.”

So, if you do something wrong, but you learn from it, then suddenly that mistake becomes helpful, it becomes an asset, and you don’t need to live in a state of regret. You can go, “Okay, this thing that I regret, I’m using regret as a signpost of something that I did or didn’t do, that in hindsight, I would have done differently had I been aware or thinking or had the discipline or whatever it was at the time, I would’ve done it differently.” But there is no point in dwelling on something that you cannot change from your past. You’ve probably heard me say this before, but the source of all of our emotional pain is resistance. It is resisting reality and wishing that something that is out of our control, which includes everything that’s ever happened to us.

You cannot go back in time unless you are Marty McFly with the DeLorean and change anything, right? So, you have to either accept the past and be at peace, or regret the past, resist the past, and put energy into wishing something were different or something didn’t happen to you. And to the degree that you resist reality determines the degree of emotional pain that you create for yourself. That’s that heavy backpack of regret. It’s a resistance of reality, wishing that something were different, that’s out of your control, and in resisting reality in the form of regret, you are creating emotional pain for yourself that you carry in the present moment based on something that’s not happening anymore in the present moment, that’s happening in the past.

So, yeah, it saddens me that we moved away from my dad, and my mom and my sister. Like in hindsight, I really think that, if you think about this, here’s a slight tangent, but I think it’s valuable. Our society, and it was probably very intentional, was to promote college as the most important thing for an 18-year-old graduating high school. The most important thing in the world for you is the college that you get into, and they start preparing. Think about that. They start preparing a high school student, right, to start thinking about college, what college you can get into. You got to take your SATs, you got to take like all the testing, okay? It’s all about the college.

And then what ends up happening is because that’s promoted as the most important thing, and students, your brain is still forming at 15, 16, 17, 18 years old, and then what do kids do? And parents, by the way, are equally as brainwashed that the college you get into is the most important thing. And whether or not you want to debate that, that’s another conversation. But the premise here is, so what does an 18-year-old do? They leave home. They leave home, and they go away to the best college that they can get into. Now, I would argue, and you can gather this from the letter that I just read to you, that I wrote to my kids, I would argue that family is way more important than college.

That the people that love you and that raised you and that you… And I realize, by the way, I know when I say family, that’s a loaded word for some people. It’s like, “Hey, my family sucks. I moved away from my fam.” Like, I get that, and I would have you replace the word family with loved ones, right? So, if you’re like, “Screw my family. They’re not good to me. They were abusive.” Got it. Loved ones. And maybe now you’ve moved away from the family that didn’t love and support you, and you’re actually surrounding yourself with your new family, with your friends, and your associate. You’re the people that love you and support you the way that your family maybe didn’t.

So, again, realize that context, that family, loved ones is really a more accurate word for that. So, with all of that said, though, going back to this idea that, yeah, college is most important, so we leave. I mean, my family, they all broke up. They went different ways, one was for a job, one was for college, so on and so forth. And now, me, my mom, my dad, and my sister, we all live, I mean, either states away or at the closest is my dad and sister that live like it’s like an eight-hour drive. And I just think that they had it figured out. You go back like 100 years back or just go into even societies where they live in villages. And the entire multi-generational living where you’re the great grandparents and the grandparents and the parents and the kids and the baby, like they all do life together. That’s my personal opinion.

Not saying it’s right or wrong. I believe that’s the most important thing, at least for me, that family’s most important. And my grandma’s been trying to tell me that. My grandma, Sally, every time I talk to her, I talked to her the other day, and she goes, “Hal, you know me. I’m a family-aholic.” She’s 91 years old right now. I don’t know if she remembers that she tells me that she’s a family-aholic every time we talk, but she does. And I love it. And I go, “Grandma, I got that from you. I have become a family-aholic.” I didn’t get it when I was younger. Took me a while. It took me making some mistakes and moving away from my family to realize that, “Oh, I am a family-aholic.”

And I am really grateful to say that I just spent time with my sister. I’m going to visit my dad next month. And then my mom is coming to visit as well next month, so I’m going to get to see the three most important folks outside of my immediate family, of my wife and my kids, of course, but my mom, my dad, my sister, we’re all visiting here within the span of a month. So, that makes me very, very, very happy. With all of that said, I just want to bring us back to where we started. And it’s this topic of regret, and I just want to remind you, remember that regret is a form of resistance, resisting reality, and wishing that your past were different. That resistance is futile. You’re not going to change your past by regretting it and wishing it were different.

The only way to transmute that regret into value in the present and the future for you and others is to learn the lesson from the regret. Live the lesson now moving forward to the best of your abilities and share that lesson with anyone and everyone that you can so that they can learn from your past mistakes so that they don’t make them themselves, and that they don’t have that regret that they need to transmute at some point. But the reality is, as human beings, we will all make mistakes. We will all have regrets. We will all have regrets. It’s not about not having them. It’s about not living with them and perpetuating those regrets in a negative way, where it negatively affects your mental and emotional wellbeing, but instead transmuting them into lessons, learning from them, living them, and improving your life.

And I expressed to my family regularly, meaning actually my dad and my mom, “Hey, I’m so sorry that we don’t live next to each other.” So, like they know my mom and dad know where my heart is at. They know that if I had to do it over again, I would’ve kept us all together living in the same neighborhood for the rest of our lives. But it did not work out that way, and I don’t beat myself up because of it. I just hope that my kids will learn from my mistakes, and I have certainly learned from my mistakes of being a workaholic before I had cancer, and I’ve made meaningful changes in my life as a result.

And so, I hope that today’s episode inspired you to be at peace with the mistakes you’ve made in the past and the regrets that you have now, and take those regrets and thoughtfully, consciously, intentionally transmute them into lessons for you and the people that you love. Speaking to people that you love, I love you very much. I really appreciate you tuning in today. And may this podcast bless your life. If you really enjoyed it, please share this with another person. And, if you haven’t yet, if you’re a regular listener of the podcast, please go leave a review where you listen to podcasts.

So, if you’re watching my podcast episode, not the solo episodes usually aren’t on YouTube, but all of the interviews I do are on YouTube. So, you can leave a comment or review there, or please leave a review on iTunes or podcasts or Spotify, or wherever you listen to the show. That really helps the show reach more people, and it means a lot to me. Thank you so much. And, oh, last but not least, I almost forgot, my newest book is available today for pre-order, The Miracle Morning After 50: A Proven Path to Joy, Vitality, and Purpose for Aging Adults, and it was co-authored with Dwayne J. Clark. He is a longevity expert, a bestselling author, founder of Aegis Living, and he has revolutionized the way that people over the age of 50 care for themselves.

And so, if you are over 50, this book is for you. And if you’re under 50, this book would be a great holiday gift for your parents, for your grandparents, for a mentor, a friend, anyone in your life who you love and you care about that is over 50 that you see maybe they’re struggling with purpose or clarity or health. And this book hits on all of those, how to optimize your brain health, your cellular health, your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing, how to find purpose, you name it. And you can pre-order it and get five bonuses, including a ticket to the live Miracle Morning After 50 event in December, and four bonus chapters at miraclemorningafter50.com.

And if you’re thinking, “Hal, I already pre-ordered the book. How do I get the bonuses? Like, I pre-ordered on Amazon.” And even if you want to pre-order on Amazon right now, you can pre-order the book on Amazon. And if you already did, you can still go to that website and get your bonuses. So, you can go to miraclemorningafter50.com and then copy and paste your Amazon receipt from your email, receive your order number, and you’ll get those bonuses delivered to your inbox, including the ticket to the live virtual event. Again, miraclemorningafter50.com.

Alright, I almost forgot to mention that to you, and thank goodness I had the book sitting in front of me. I’ve got an early copy, and it reminded me. So, alright, that is it. I love you and live your life without dwelling on your regrets but turning them into lessons to add value for you and other people. And I love you. I’ll talk to you next week.