Regret

Say Goodbye to Regret by Bob Santos: A Book Review
Say Goodbye to Regret Bob Santos

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In Say Goodbye to Regret: Discovering the Secret to a Blessed Life, Bob Santos offers readers powerful advice and inspiration to help them liberate themselves from the prison of their past and poor decisions. Emphasizing that making mistakes is a part of what makes us human, Santos advocates for people to use their past and poor decisions as tools for learning and progress. The book is a reminder of the bible’s practical relevance and significance to our everyday lives. For Santos, a stronger investment in God’s Word, reading it, studying it, and meditating on it, yields better decision-making, decision-making informed by the wisdom of the Word.

Say Goodbye to Regret: Discovering the Secret to a Blessed Life aids readers in understanding how aligning their lives, their ways and thoughts with God’s ways and thoughts empowers them to experience victory over regret. A spirit of regret seeks to incarcerate you, dominate you—inevitably enslaving you to the darkness of depression and despondency. To defeat the spirit of regret, Bob Santos recommends accessing and using God’s love to conquer this deflating spirit.

The author asks readers to answer two valuable questions: “Think back to a regretful decision. What factors led to your poor choice? How might you have done things differently?” (p. 29). Too often we fail to think critically about why we made the decisions we did—whether favorable or unfavorable decisions. Without serious reflection on the decisions we make, we will never grow, never advance to the type of humans we long to be. Critical reflection, therefore, is crucial to breaking free from the bondage of regret and the frustrating web of deception that accompanies it.

In short, I highly recommend this book. As a minister and life coach, I deeply understand the the importance of spiritual health. When a person is not well spiritually, it affects every dimension of his or her being. The spirit of regret is so enslaving that it can completely overtake an individual. This work, however, enables a person struggling with regret to comprehend how to employ the Word of God to defeat the vise-grip and stranglehold of regret. The Word of God is always the answer but one needs to know how to use it triumph over the pain regret inflicts and desires to continue to inflict.

To facilitate the penning of this honest review, Book Crash supplied a copy of this work.

Dr. Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Acknowledging Regrets Can Move You Forward
Emotional Health

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We all have our regrets.  Although we shouldn’t live a life full of regrets, it can be quite liberating to deal candidly with your regrets.  You may have invested greatly in people who have evinced that they were not worthy of your time, but the time you devoted to them speaks volumes about your character.  Even though those individuals may now be your enemies, learn to appreciate the lessons you’ve learned from your interactions with those who have proved themselves to lack gratitude.  Don’t allow your life to become consumed by focusing on regrets; instead, take the necessary time to think critically about the things you regret.

Too often people are afraid to confront challenges in their lives that make them uncomfortable.  Although many would have you to believe that you need to do whatever it takes to make you feel comfortable, it’s beneficial to have a constant healthy level of discomfort present.  Discomfort unveils to us that we’re human.  If you’re always avoiding phenomena that cause discomfort, then you’re trying to remove yourself from experiencing inexorable dimensions of the human condition.  You’re going to have to recognize that staying away from discomfort is going to limit your progression significantly.  Ultimately, you will discover your most impactful regret is failing to assess the emotional and physical toll of your regrets.

Forgiving yourself and the people who have hurt you are essential to experiencing true progress.  The regrets you have about past and present relationships and decisions you’ve made have to be placed in the proper context: you and others are human.  Every human being has made mistakes and will continue to make mistakes.  When you don’t forgive yourself and others for mistakes, then the weight of those mistakes hold you down, stifling any chance of you moving forward in life.  A failure to forgive yourself and others results in bitterness, even if you don’t recognize it.  You have to resolve whether you’re going to allow your own mistakes and those of others to defeat you.

Be open to a new beginning with yourself and others.

It’s important for you to realize you’re not the only one who has regrets.  Spend some time talking to others about their regrets and how they process them.  The discourses you have with them can offer you some practices you can employ to place your regrets in an appropriate context.

What if someone has hurt me so deeply, though?  Welcome to the real world.  On this planet that we inhabit, someone is going to do something to cause you harm, whether it be directly or indirectly.  Learn the lessons from your experiences with the person and move on to better people and things.

Don’t turn your regrets into more than they should be.  Do you really just want to be a drama queen or king?  If not, make a commitment to transform every regret into an empowering opportunity.  No one desires to be around someone who is emotionally exhausting.  You can run the people you need to succeed in life away from you.

Take a close emotional inventory.  What are the things keeping you from progressing?  How can you address them?  After you respond to those two questions, devise a practical plan for implementing the solutions birthed from your critical emotional inventory.  If you would like to involve others in this process, understand that this can be beneficial.

Refuse to allow your regrets to dominate you.  Choose to live and win!

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison

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The Pain of Knowing You Did the Wrong Thing

Did the Wrong Thing

When you know that you have done the wrong thing to someone, you should ask for God’s forgiveness and should ask the person for forgiveness. God will forgive you. The person may forgive you too. You should ask the person for forgiveness in person to allow him or her to see that it is a genuine request for forgiveness—if this is at all possible. People will respect you more when you just come out and genuinely apologize for the things that you have done wrong. Don’t try to make excuses for what you have done wrong—just apologize. When you try to make excuses for what you have done wrong or try to engage in a debate about whether or not what you did was really wrong, then you cause even more pain for your victim or victims and run the risk of never getting forgiveness from that person.

Although some people may never forgive you, you should try your best to get their forgiveness because you are the person who caused the pain in the first place. The one thing that you can do in the future to prevent causing people pain is to simply not strive to intentionally hurt people. When you have developed a reputation for being compassionate, then the times where you unintentionally hurt people will be less of a problem because people will automatically excuse you because your compassionate reputation precedes you.

One thing that makes me angry about people who intentionally hurt others is when they try to cover up the hurt that they have caused. When they attempt to make it appear like they had nothing to do with the hurt that they caused, this represents the essence of cowardice. I have a difficult time not going wild on someone who knows that he or she has intentionally inflicted pain on me, but comes around me acting like everything is okay—like nothing has happened.

Let’s be better people and not intentionally hurt people. If we would not intentionally hurt people, we would not have to carry with us the pain of knowing that we have done the wrong thing to somebody, and what a pain that is.

Antonio Maurice Daniels

University of Wisconsin-Madison