Our lives are full of decisions that need making..

Most of which we make only semi-consciously – left or right, up or down, smooth or crunchy.

And yet each one of these small decisions changes our path slightly, bringing in new elements or releasing old ones.

If we were to know years down the line that choosing crunchy peanut butter would one day lead to a conversation with someone who turned out to be the love of our lives, would we have given the decision more thought?

Or less?

Decisions. Easily made – and imbued with significance with the benefit of hindsight.

Apart from our choice of peanut butter, which turned out pretty well, we make many more decisions that, with hindsight, appear not to have turned out well at all.

Over the years, this can lead to guilt and regret, which have a habit of building up into more determined monkeys on our backs.

At its extreme, this regret and guilt can paralyse us into avoiding making those decisions which matter most to us, which is ultimately just as damaging as making a wrong one occasionally.

As with all things we do in this life, it is important to be kind to ourselves and not beat ourselves up about those decisions that didn’t turn out as well as we’d have hoped.

No decision is ever made with the benefit of hindsight and regret can be a very negative and debilitating emotion.

We can minimise some of these decision making regrets by implementing a few simple strategies:

Don’t worry too much about the small stuff – it could go either way and it is really not worth stressing over.

With bigger decisions, a regular meditation practice can help – by finding somewhere quiet to sit for about 20 minutes a day and letting all our thoughts pass us by, without holding on to any of them, we will gradually calm down.

In time, we will develop a serenity and peacefulness that will allow our intuition to come to the fore.

Once we start trusting this intuition, we find that we will have less cause for regret about the decisions we make, as we’ll be making them from a position of what is authentic to us.

If we make our decisions on the basis of what is authentic to us at the time, we cannot then regret them in the future.

Our chief cause for regret then will be on those occasions when we failed to act in a way that was true to our values.

Part of the process to leading a more authentic life is to let go of the decisions that we made in the past. We can resolve not to repeat mistakes, but in reality there are no mistakes.

We do what we do because of who we are. If we wish to make better decisions, we need to grow and change ourselves.

Regret is not futile, as it can inspire us to make the changes that we need to make to evolve.

But , ultimately, we cannot allow ourselves to continually wallow in regret and self pity, as it will prevent us from learning the lessons we need to learn in order to grow.