Remorse – The Gift I never Saw Coming

I want to talk about remorse.

Not the version that keeps you awake at three in the morning cycling through everything you wish you'd done differently, though I know that one well enough. I'm talking about something else entirely, the version that, if you're willing to sit with it long enough and honestly enough, becomes one of the most clarifying and ultimately liberating experiences available to us as human beings.

I was asked recently by my own coach a question I wasn't expecting: what is the gift of remorse for you?

I sat with that for a long time before I answered because my instinct, like most people's, was to treat remorse as something to move through as quickly as possible rather than something that might actually have something to teach me. We are not, as a culture, particularly good at sitting with uncomfortable feelings and men are arguably the worst at it of anyone.

However, in sitting with it, what came up genuinely surprised me.

I found remorse for a childhood spent quietly developing insecurities I didn't understand and couldn't name. For an adolescence spent turning those insecurities into something I'd now describe as world class limitations. For the years I spent performing a version of myself I thought the world wanted whilst the real version waited patiently and with remarkable persistence somewhere underneath all of that noise.

Furthermore, underneath the remorse, I found something I genuinely wasn't expecting.

I found clarity.

You see, in looking honestly at everything I felt remorse for, I got to see with absolute certainty that there had never been anything fundamentally wrong with me. That I had always been enough. That the only thing that had ever kept me playing smaller than I was born to play was the story I had inherited, believed and then spent decades reinforcing about who I was and what I deserved.

This matters enormously in the context of the work I do with women and with men.

The women I work with are not remotely held back by a lack of capability, intelligence, talent or worth. They are held back by exactly the same thing I was held back by; a story, carefully constructed over years, often decades, by a system and frequently by the men within it, that told them their worth was conditional, their voice was optional and their power was something to be rationed carefully so as not to make others uncomfortable.

What remorse offers, when we're brave enough to explore it fully, is the opportunity to see past that story to the person who was always there underneath it and who is still there.

I have spent over thirty years coaching women and men to navigate relationships, workplaces, friendships, family dynamics and leadership environments shaped by the patriarchal code and what I can tell you with absolute certainty is this; the person underneath the accommodation, the self-editing and the strategic shrinking is always remarkable in so many ways. Not occasionally nor in exceptional cases but always.

The remorse for example that many women carry, for the voice they didn't use, the opportunities they didn't take, the boundaries they didn't hold and the version of themselves they didn't allow to be, is not evidence of weakness or failure.

The remorse that the men brave enough to look honestly at themselves often carry for not being allowed to express their true feelings and emotions, for believing they had to be hard when they wanted so much to be soft, for the play they were told they must never play or for the tears they were trained never to allow, is not evidence of their weakness or failure either.

It is evidence of a system working exactly as it was designed to work, which was to make you doubt yourself consistently and thoroughly enough that you'd eventually stop questioning it.

Here is what I’m inviting you to consider though.

Remorse, properly used, is not a place to live. It is a place to visit with intention, to look clearly at what it shows you and then to use what you see as the foundation for something different. The clarity it offers is not designed to punish you for who you have been, it is designed to show you, with uncomfortable precision, who you have always been underneath everything that was placed on top of you.

In all my 30+ years’ experience as a coach and my 50+ years as a boy, adolescent and man, my experience, that person, the one who has been there all along underneath the conditioning, the accommodation and the quiet self-betrayal, is someone worth every moment of the work it takes to find them.

The question remorse ultimately asks us is not who did I fail to be?

It is who have I always been and what have I been waiting for?

I have been doing this work on myself for decades and without a doubt I will be doing it for the rest of my life. I also know that it is both possible and worth it because transformation is not reserved for people who had easier starting points or fewer things to overcome. It is available to anyone willing to look clearly enough, long enough and honestly enough at what the remorse is actually trying to show them.

Not as punishment.

As a gift we give to ourselves.