 We don't do a good enough job of dealing with negative emotions, right? We need, we need a, we need a systematic way to deal with negative emotions. At some level, we are over-indexed on positivity. We think that we should only have positive emotions. That positive emotions are the only thing that belong in your portfolio, and that's wrong and that's a dangerous. Negative emotions serve a purpose, but we have to deal with them properly. What's up, everybody? And welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified, and in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Now, I think regret in and of itself gets mislabeled and a lot of people consider rumination to be regret. So what is the difference between the two? And I think that nuance is important as we start to talk about the power behind regret. It is a great question. It is a great question. You want regret to operate like a sharp poke. Rumination is like a heavy blanket, right? So and it's such a it's such an important point. We are not. We don't do a good. We and I say really Americans in some ways, we don't do a good enough job of dealing with negative emotions. All right. We need we need a we need a systematic way to deal with negative emotions. At some level, we are over index on positivity. We think that we should only have positive emotions that positive emotions are the only thing that belong in your portfolio. And that's wrong. And that's a dangerous negative emotions serve a purpose, but we have to deal with them properly. So when you face a negative emotion, including a negative emotion like regret, which is our most common negative emotion, you have a choice, choice one, you can ignore it. You can say feelings don't matter. I'm going to be put. OK, that leads to delusion. You can also, as you say, very stutely. You can also wallow in it. You can say feelings are. Oh, my God, it's like, oh, the feelings are the only truth. Oh, my God, it's as there's no chance here. Oh, I'm just going to think about this and think about this and think about this and think about this and not use it as a not use the regret as a poke, but use it as like a warm bath to luxuriate in. That's really dangerous, too. What you want to do, what we want to say is that negative emotions, particularly our most common negative emotion of regret, that is a signal. It's telling us something. We need to think about it. So feeling is for thinking. We get a negative emotion. It's like, oh, the world is trying to tell me something. I have to be awake and alert to what it's telling me. And then it is a powerful instrument for moving forward. I think one of the things that was. Some great insight in this book and illuminates everything is breaking up regret in the four categories. It was I think it's a lot easier to say I have no regrets if you're not looking at it in a granular level. So once you started breaking it apart and I started going through all the different ones, there was regret that popped out that I realized that I feel now that I understood it better and was even discussing it with AJ before you came on. So if you if you wouldn't mind, would you break those up into the four categories for us? Yeah, yeah, thanks. So let me let me, as always, not directly answer your question, but meander into it. So the here's the but it's a there's an it's an important meander. So when we think about regret. The way that that, you know, and again, it's like some very great social scientists have studied regret in all of its dimensions. When we think about what people regret, they've often analyzed it. And I did this too in some work that I did, analyzed it by the domains of people's life. This is a career regret. This is an education regret. This is a health regret. And what I found is that that wasn't very revealing. Exactly as you say, Johnny, because beneath those domains is there's something deeper going on. And let me I think give you an illustration about that. So I have so what I did as part of this research is I collected 16,000 regrets from people in 105 countries. It's crazy, just an incredible trove of human stories and longing and aspiration. And I have if you go to my database, I can find you literally hundreds of regrets that go like this. X years ago, there was a man slash woman who I really liked. I wanted to ask him her out. I didn't ask him her out and I've always regretted it. OK, so that's a romance regret. Then you have people who say, I really regret not starting a business. Shouldn't have worked for somebody else. I really regret not starting a business. OK, that's a career regret. Then you have people who went to college. Oh, I really regret not studying abroad. I was too chicken to do it. And now I regret it. That's an education regret. Those three regrets are the same. That doesn't one is an education regret. Yeah, one is a career regret. One is a romance regret. But they're the same regret. It's a regret about boldness. You're at a juncture in your life. You can play it safe or take the chance. You play it safe, you regret it. And so what I found is that there are these four... So now I'm actually answering your question, Johnny. There are these four core categories of regret. One of them are what I call foundation regrets, which are regrets about essentially not doing the work. About making choices in your life that gave you an unstable platform. Smoking is a big one. Not taking care of your health, not exercising, not eating right. Not working hard enough in school. Not saving enough money, those kinds of things. Now those are sometimes complicated because those things are not always in somebody's individual domain, but individual choice. But foundation regrets. Second one, boldness regrets. If only I'd taken the chance. If only I'd taken the chance. To me, what it suggests is that human beings want to... It goes to our motivation conversation. Human beings want to do something. We want to learn, we want to grow. We want to have a psychologically rich life. Three, moral regrets. Very interesting topic. Smaller in number, but fascinating in their own way. You're at a juncture, you can do the right thing, you can do the wrong thing, you decide to do the wrong thing, and you regret it for years. I've got a woman in the book who would regularly steal candy from a store when she was 10 years old. She's always, she revealed that regret. It bothers a hell out of her. She's in her 70s. It happened 60 years ago. I have regrets about people bullying people, kids in school, all kinds of regrets about marital infidelity. People, I think there's something heartening about that. Is that these moral regrets suggest that we actually want to be good. And when we're not, we feel terrible about it. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. The final one are connection regrets. Connection regrets are the biggest category. And it's basically you have a relationship, I don't mean a romantic relationship, any relationship. You have a relationship with parent, a child, a sibling, a friend, whoever. And it sort of comes apart and you want to reach out, but you think, ah, it's going to be awkward to reach out and they're not going to care. So you don't reach out and you drift further apart. And people deeply regret that. One of, to me, and I think it's relevant for some of the stuff that you guys have talked about before is it's amazing how important friendship is in people's lives. I mean, there was a revelation to me. Like friendship really, really, really matters in people's lives, more than I expected. And I think that more than many men are willing to see before their eyes, especially men, but women too, but especially men. And so the lesson there is, I mean, to me, that's been a big lesson for me that the connection regrets because here's what happens. I'll give you an example. Let's take two characters, all right? They're friends, but the friendship has come apart. And most of the time these friendships come apart not because of any cataclysm, because of any fight or anything like that, you just kind of drift. So we got two friends, Johnny and AJ, all right? They have a close relationship, but over time it starts drifting apart. And I say to AJ, okay, oh man, I had this friend and I was really close and somehow we just drifted apart and I should probably reach out, but it's really awkward and he's not gonna care. You're so wrong about that. You're so wrong about that. Number one, there's a lot of evidence showing that those kinds of things are much less awkward than we think. And also it's almost always well received. And so what I've done to people in writing this book and reporting this out, the story kept changing on me because people would change their behavior in response to the conversation. But I said to one woman who had this kind of story, I said, well, what if Jennifer, like she grown apart from this one friend, what if Jennifer reached out to you? Oh my God, that would be the greatest thing. I would love it. I would be so touched. It would make my year. It would make my decade. And I'm like, well, you kind of answered your question there. I would argue that connection regret is the genesis of the show. Whoa. 15 years ago. And it's focused on relationships. And I think what's happened over the 15 years of doing the show is that with the rise of social media, with the rise of technology, we've over-indexed on actions and behaviors that don't foster real relationships, real deep friendships, being vulnerable, not showcasing your highlight reel, not high-fiving people when they have something to celebrate in their life, but being for them there for them when the chips are down and opening up when the chips are down for you. And we see this time and time again with our clients. And we've asked a few guests, what to do when you feel that disconnection happening? And I think this two-year period, we've felt it across many of our relationships. Friends moving away for work, friends having health issues, obviously during the pandemic, and just all of us being in this heightened sense of anxiety, we've let some of those relationships slide. And now we feel this pressure of how do I reconnect? How do I rekindle it? And you bring up such a great point that it's not a matter of how, it's just a matter of do it. Any reaching out is gonna be impactful. It's not, what's the best way to do it? What does science say is gonna get the warmest response time and time again as you saw in your respondents? Any reach out is gonna be responded too well. I would like to stand up from my chair and shout amen right now because I think that is one of the biggest takeaways of this book. It's been the biggest takeaway for me, AJ. Here's the thing. If you are at a juncture where you have a relationship of any kind, you say, well, should I reach out? Should I say what I really, should I tell somebody I love them? Let's get all gooey on us. All right, should I tell somebody that I love them? Should I reach out to someone who I haven't talked to for a while? If you are at the point where you're asking that question, you have answered it. The takeaway from me is always reach out. If you're wondering whether you should reach out, the answer is yes. The act of the question gives you the answer. And one of the things that comes out, and there's some very, very interesting research on this on a number of different domains, is that we often woefully overestimate how awkward we will feel about something and how uncomfortable we'll make other people. And Vanessa Bonds at Cornell has some great research on compliments, where it's like giving people compliments. We're worried that if I give you a compliment, I'm worried like, oh my God, and it's gonna come out wrong. People don't care, you got a compliment. They love getting a compliment. They're not evaluating how articulate you are. They're not evaluating, oh, did he get the color of my glasses frames exactly right? It's just that. There's a great, there's a Nick Epley study in Chicago, a fascinating study where he went to, he had people on the commuter train in Chicago and he had his research, he had some people just get on the train as usual and he had other people and their job was to strike up a conversation with a stranger, okay? Kind of uncomfortable, right? And they said, well, how are you gonna feel about that? And how are they gonna, the stranger gonna feel about that? And then they, and so their predictions was, oh, it's gonna be awful, it's gonna be totally uncomfortable and the other person's gonna hate it. Get the results in, eh, it wasn't come time, the other person, I kind of liked it. I mean, we're just, it's one of those things that we're just really wrong on. So, well, we're wired for connection. And when we had Vanessa on the show, we talked about that, we over index ourselves on how awkward something is gonna feel. The other person is over indexing on their own awkwardness as well. So they're missing your awkwardness. They're not feeling your awkwardness because they're so self-conscious of their own. And the surprise in all of this around the connection piece or the coming up, and I love all of the anecdotes in the book is that small actions here, repair all of that time lost. And you can pick things up again. It's not a matter of blame. It's not a matter of needing even to apologize. The simple act of saying, I'm thinking about you. I care about you enough in this relationship to reach back out is enough to repair that connection regret.