Episode #29 Transcript
The Cure for “If Only…” Agony
INTRO: This is the Decision Masters Podcast. I'm Kirsten Parker, the Decision Coach for Overthinkers. When you feel good about your decisions, life feels good. You get to be present in your days and excited about where you're going. I'm gonna help you build your decision mastery. So it's easy to know what you want, navigate uncertainty and handle any feelings that happen. Whether you're in the middle of some overthinking angst right now or you simply love feeling in charge of your choices, you're in the right place. Clear confident, decisions are right around the corner. Let's get into it.
KIRSTEN: Alright buddyboo. It's that time of year when we start reflecting, and that is always a ripe time for today's topic: today we're talking about the “If only…” agony, and we’re talking about how to cure it. Because unsurprisingly, as a decision coach, this comes up a lot for me, and it also probably is coming up a lot for you right now. Or it might be soon, if you start reflecting on decisions you've made this year.
There can be a strong voice in your head that wants you to deeply consider how things would be now, if only you'd made different choices. And unsurprisingly again, this mucks up a ton of decisions we're trying to make now. Because *hello*, if we don't want to have this conversation over and over in our head about “if only, if only, if only,” we better choose right, right now. We better make the correct choice so we don't spend the next 20 years agonizing about “what if.” So, of course, this comes up a lot in decision coaching. It comes up as, “I don't want to feel this way about my past decisions,” and “I don't want this pressure impacting my current decisions,” and “I don't want to live like this forever.”
So I'm going to talk with you today about this phenomenon in the same way I talk with clients about it. Because this voice that shows up and wants you to think about all the if-only’s has a name, it turns out, and its name is RAUL. RAUL stands for the Romanticized Alternate Universe Lie, and it's a problem that I want you to solve more than anything. And that's a big statement, because we talk about solutions to problems all day long here at the Decision Masters podcast. But truly, I think if I could help you with just one thing, it would be to banish RAUL from your way of operating forever.
Because the faster you get RAUL out of your head, the faster you can let go of regret about past decisions that you have no other plan to get rid of (except for “I hope eventually I stop regretting this”), the faster you can stop wasting so much bandwidth on these “if only” thoughts that just—it's just recycling stress. And the faster you can minimize the fear of regretting the choices that you're making today, so you can make them and actually be confident about them. Obviously, I have deep personal experience with this RAUL stuff, right, like… ask me how I know.
I want to share with you the way that I used to imagine life. Because—if you know me at all, you know that my mind works in pictures and metaphors—I really did used to think that life was like a highway. This is the way I pictured it for many, many, many years. Life was this one lane highway, like winding around the cosmos. And you just made your way forward down this one lane, and every day that went by it was just like you're further down the highway. And as long as you're on the highway, you're good. That that was the right place to be. That one lane was the correct way to go. And it was also the path that I had to travel in my mind in order to end up happy, to get where I was supposed to go.
And if I veered off the one lane, it would be an irreparable mistake. That offramp would forever take me away from where I was “supposed” to go. So every decision I had to make was like a potential offramp. And if I chose right, I won. I got to stay on the highway until the next decision. And if I chose wrong, it was like certain disaster. It was a permanent offramp. I mean, I might still keep driving, but who knows where I'd end up and how miserable the journey would be. So this mindset is a big frickin problem, as if you can't tell by now, right? Because as long as you're putting so much pressure on your current decisions, you better believe you are putting the same pressure on all of your past decisions.
Because essentially I was living in a low grade panic all the time. Raise a hand (or raise an eyebrow if you're driving) if you've ever felt this way. You're kind of always scared. You're going to find out that that decision you made ten years ago was actually a mistake. Like, “Oops, that was the off ramp, and that's what I've been trying to recover from for the past decade, and that's why I'm so miserable now.” This mindset is how you end up living in a constant fear of regret, and it's how you end up second guessing every choice you make. That's why you never end up feeling done with a decision, because it's always a little bit open in your mind, like, “Am I committed to this? Do I think this is the right choice?” Even if you made that choice ten years ago.
This mindset is how you end up always looking for evidence that your decisions are playing out in an acceptable way. It keeps the radar going. The radar that's constantly scanning for, “What do I regret? What's evidence that I've made a mistake?” And this mindset, this RAUL mindset, is how you make it pretty impossible for yourself to make a clean, confident choice today. You essentially create an alternate universe in your mind. And I want you to know we are not shaming this. We are not saying you're wrong. I'm saying you're like every other single person on the planet who identifies as an overthinker and listens to this podcast. You're so normal for doing this.
But I'm pointing it out to you as something that you can absolutely change. Because there's this alternate universe that you might have crafted in your mind where you never took any off ramps, and things always went the way you wanted, and there were no mistakes and there were no surprises. Where you foresaw everything that could possibly go wrong in advance and you successfully avoided all of those things and life just turned out perfect.
It's a little bit romanticized when I put it that way, but it's true. This is what we do. We romanticize this alternate perfect universe and it's a lie. And you might be using this lie against yourself like I used to. You might be hearing this story in your mind about how things would be today if only you had made the right choice, not taking the off ramp. That's how you would have ended up where you're “supposed to be” right now. And you might be believing this story as truth, as if your brain has actually traveled between dimensions and visited this very real place, and then has come back to report to you how badly you have screwed up. Oh my gosh, no wonder why the smallest decisions today end up causing so much angst, when this pressure is subconsciously riding on them. There is so much at stake when we're operating under RAUL rules.
So this is what I want you to know: you do not have to settle for the reality that you're living in as if it's a consolation prize. Because that was what I found out I was doing. And that's really sad. It's really sad to believe that you've cost yourself your highest happiness and success. You already took the wrong offramp, it’s already too late for that. And that alternate you in the romanticized alternate universe is happier and better, and you just have to settle for the rest of your entire life with this second tier version of yourself, in this second tier version of reality that's all your fault. I want you to know that is not the way you have to feel. That is not the way you have to experience your present or your past or your future.
Now here's the truth. You, here in today's reality, the one that we can see, you do have things that you don't love about this version of the universe. I know you do because you're human. There are things that you wish were different and that is painful. That is the truth. But that pain needs processing. And believing that there's a world in which you don't even experience this pain is a wonderful idea. It's so much more attractive to your mind—which is trying its absolute hardest to protect you from that pain—it’s so much more attractive to try to escape from that pain by believing wholeheartedly in this romanticized pain free universe, with no mistakes and none of the surprises, where you did everything right.
But believing in it wholeheartedly doesn't get you there. It only makes you bypass the pain of accepting this reality for what it is, and it makes you the bad guy in your own story. And of course, all of this makes sense, right? Because as weird as it sounds, sometimes it's easier to be angry than to process pain. They both feel crappy, but processing pain can feel vulnerable and weak, and at least being angry feels strong. So, of course. Of course this is where we go in our minds. This is how we try to solve the problem of the pain. This is how we try to solve the problem of the things we don't like about this reality. Of course we go to the romanticized alternate universe in our minds.
But in order to stop living in this “if only” agony, you have to be willing to give up the lie. You have to be willing to still feel a little bit crappy. But I promise it's how you get to your cure. It's not 1,000% pleasurable, but it is 1,000,000% freeing when you stop believing RAUL, when you stop believing your brain when it tells you, “Here's how things would be right now, for a fact, if you'd only done X instead of Y.”
I told you I was going to talk with you the way I talk with my clients about this, so here goes. This is the way that I talk with clients about banishing RAUL from your brain, stopping the belief in this lie. And I'm going to tell you this because one of my clients literally just told me a couple of weeks ago that this is exactly what she needed to hear. This is what clicked for her that took all the wind out of this romanticized alternate universe’s sails. Try it on, maybe it'll click for you too:
It is a story you're making up when you think about how things would be today if you'd done X instead of Y. It's a very convincing story. It's a very compelling, emotionally engaging story. But my counter response to it is always an alternate story. And my alternate story is: if you would have done X instead of Y, you would have gotten hit by a bus. That is what I tell clients. That is literally what I tell clients when they come to a session and they tell me, for a fact, “If I had only done this, then I would factually be experiencing this. If I'd done X instead of Y, or if only I'd not done X, then factually, I know with 100% certainty, this is what would have happened or not happened. This is how life would be different, this is how reality would be altered.” And my response to them is always, if you would have done X instead of Y, you would have gotten hit by a bus.
It's not the factual truth that your brain is reporting to you. It is a story. It's a story illustrating what you would prefer—which is an opinion that you are entitled to, my friend—but it's a story. And it's a story that doesn't serve you because of all of those things that we already talked about, how RAUL is messing up your life and your choices. So a really fast, albeit slightly jarring way to point out that this is a story that does not serve me is to think about all of the other versions of the story. Because sure, if you would have done X instead of Y, maybe the thing that you're believing in your mind would be the case now, but 17 billion other things could also be the case right now. There could be infinite other scenarios in which we find ourselves. And I always go to the most jarring example of how there could be another version of the story, all the many other things that could have happened that you would never be able to predict or control. Like making Decision X and then immediately walking out of your house and getting hit by a bus. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, immediately finding out that you won the lottery. It doesn't have to be some crazy tragedy.
But really think about every other version of the story, every other way this could have played out. You made Decision X, the one that you've been romanticizing to the point of agony. What if some crazy other thing happened after that moment in time that you're not allowing yourself to even consider as a possibility? My mom was just telling us about this thing that happened over Norway—I don't know, last month maybe?— where there was like a small hole in the Earth's magnetic field. I think it let in some solar whatchamacallit, and people got very pretty pictures, but it was actually not a really good thing. It's like the Earth's magnetic field. I think the way my dad put it was, “That’s the only thing holding all of this stuff together. It's the only reason that we're allowed to keep living.” So it's like, great, yes, let’s pretend you go back in time and you make Decision X. What if the next day there was a giant hole in the Earth's magnetic field and we didn't have any of this to worry about anymore because reality ended?
The point is not to catastrophize no matter what. I'm not trying to be an advocate for pessimism here. But sometimes we do need this radical imagery of how very different—and often, how very much worse—this reality today could be, to snap us back into perspective. To get us more open to accepting, “okay, this is how reality is.” And that is what gives us our best chance to effectively enjoy it, to actually enjoy anything about today's reality. And it gives us our best chance to effectively improve it. And that's the real goal.
I want you to take this opportunity to think about what is the goal of the next ten years of your life. Just take like a small chunk of time, the next decade. That's manageable. What's your goal? Is it to effectively enjoy and improve of your life, the reality that you happen to find yourself in? That yeah, you shape, but you also have to participate in because you can’t, unfortunately, control every single element inside of it? Or is your goal to guilt yourself as hard as you can for any pain that you feel, anything that you don't like? And, if your goal is to guilt yourself as hard as you can because things don't happen the way you want them to: to what end? Because I found out that I was trying to guilt myself into that other universe. I think that's really what I was trying to do. I was like, “If I just believe hard enough that if I had made decision X instead of Y, I could get there.” And oh my gosh, can you just put your hands on your heart right now and have so much compassion for wanting that for yourself? Yeah.
Of course. Of course you get to want things to be better. Of course you get to want to feel better. But this is the cure that I'm offering you today so that you never have to live in the agony of “if only” again. The cure is permission. It's permission to call out that romanticized story for the lie that it is, and permission to accept how things are in this reality, and permission to process any pain about that, *and* permission to enjoy what is still genuinely appreciate-able and joy-sparking about this reality. And permission to commit to making it better. That’s a whole lot of permission, but—what feels better? It may not feel super fantastic the entire way through, but I promise, I promise it will feel so much better than living in “if only” agony. And you will thank yourself for kicking RAUL out of your head.
I hope you enjoy, and if this sparks anything for you I would love to hear about it. You can rate and review on Apple Podcasts and tell me what you think. Tell me if this gets anything moving in your mind. Alright my friend, have a beautiful weekend. Chew on these ideas. Bye!
OUTRO: Hey, wanna know the number one thing you need to kickstart your momentum right now? (Obviously.) I know! That's why I created the Momentum Quiz. Head to kirstenparker.com/quiz to find out your number one momentum killer and get your personalized action plan to boost your momentum and get back on track. That’s kirstenparker.com/quiz. Have fun!
