On the surface at least, Julius Caesar and Elmo make an unlikely pair. One was a Roman statesman, general, and historian who was immortalized in a Shakespeare play and who lived more than two thousand years ago. The other is a slightly manic Muppet with mangy red fur and an orange nose, whose exact citizenship is unclear but whose last forwarding address was Sesame Street.
Yet both of these figures are expert practitioners of the same rhetorical maneuver: “illeism,” a fancy word for talking about oneself in the third person. When Julius Caesar describes his Gallic Wars exploits in his book Commentarii de Bello Gallico, he never uses “I” or other first-person pronouns. Instead, he crafts sentences like, “Caesar learned through spies that the mountain was in possession of his own men.” Likewise, when Elmo explains his commitment to the life of the mind, he, too, disdains the first person. He favors constructions like “Elmo loves to learn!”
Some people find illeism annoying (although it doesn’t bother Daniel Pink). But its existence as a style of speech and narration exemplifies the final step in the regret-reckoning process. Talking about ourselves in the third person is one variety of what social psychologists call “self-distancing.”
When we’re beset by negative emotions, including regret, one response is to immerse ourselves in them, to face the negativity by getting up close and personal. But immersion can catch us in an undertow of rumination. A better, more effective, and longer-lasting approach is to move in the opposite direction—not to plunge in, but to zoom out and gaze upon our situation as a detached observer, much as a movie director pulls back the camera.
After self-disclosure relieves the burden of carrying a regret, and self-compassion reframes the regret as a human imperfection rather than an incapacitating flaw, self-distancing helps you analyze and strategize—to examine the regret dispassionately without shame or rancor and to extract from it a lesson that can guide your future behavior.
Self-distancing changes your role from scuba diver to oceanographer, from swimming in the murky depths of regret to piloting above the water to examine its shape and shoreline. “People who self-distance focus less on recounting their experiences and more on reconstruing them in ways that provide insight and closure,” explain Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan and ?zlem Ayduk of the University of California, Berkeley, two prominent scholars of the subject.[29] Shifting from the immersive act of recounting to the more distanced act of reconstruing regulates our emotions and redirects behavior. As a result, self-distancing strengthens thinking,[30] enhances problem-solving skills,[31] deepens wisdom,[32] and even reduces the elevated blood pressure that often accompanies stressful situations.[33]
We can create distance from our regrets in three ways.
First, we can distance through space. The classic move is known, unsurprisingly, as the “fly-on-the-wall technique.” Rather than examine your regret from your own perspective—“I really screwed up by letting my close friendship with Jen come apart and then doing nothing to fix it”—view the scene from the perspective of a neutral observer. “I watched a person let an important friendship drift. But all of us make mistakes, and she can redeem this one by reaching out to meaningful connections, including Jen, more regularly and more often.”
You may have noticed that you’re often better at solving other people’s problems than your own. Because you’re less enmeshed in others’ details than they are, you’re able to see the full picture in ways they cannot. In fact, Kross and Igor Grossmann of Canada’s University of Waterloo have shown that when people step back and assess their own situation the way they’d evaluate other people’s situations, they close this perceptual gap. They reason as effectively about their own problems as they do about others’ problems.[34] Equally important, the fly-on-the-wall technique helps us withstand and learn from criticism—it makes it easier not to take it personally—which is essential in transforming regrets into instruments for improvement.[35] This sort of distancing can be physical as well as mental. Going to a different location to analyze the regret or even literally leaning back, rather than forward, in one’s chair can make challenges seem less difficult and reduce anxiety in addressing them.[36]
The second way to self-distance is through time. We can enlist the same capacity for time travel that gives birth to regret to analyze and strategize about learning from these regrets. For example, one study showed that prompting people to consider how they might feel about a negative situation in ten years reduced their stress and enhanced their problem-solving capabilities compared to contemplating what the situation would be like in a week.[37]
Mentally visiting the future—and then examining the regret retrospectively—activates a similar type of detached, big-picture perspective as the fly-on-the-wall technique. It can make the problem seem smaller, more temporary, and easier to surmount.[38] Cheryl, for instance, could envision how she’d react a decade from now, peering back on her regret. Does she feel bad about letting the friendship remain apart for thirty-five years? Or does she feel satisfied that she addressed her connection regrets—with Jen or with others? When we simulate looking at the problem retrospectively, from the binoculars of tomorrow rather than the magnifying glass of today, we’re more likely to replace self-justification with self-improvement.[39]