The complexity of reality guarantees that those who are paying attention will look back at past decisions and realize that they would decide differently if they faced the same situations today.
Consideration of past decisions tends to fill people with guilt and shame. These feelings do not need to occur, even when you learn more and better after the fact. Guilt and shame come from a recognition that you did less than the best you knew at the time, not from having learned something better after the fact.
While you feel guilty about something, you still haven’t done all you can to fix it. When you have done all you can to address a problem, you no longer feel guilty about it. When you do all you can in all the most important things, you will be completely free from guilt.
There is never anything you can do to change the past. You can and should identify past mistakes because it means you have learned from them, won’t make them again, and now have the wisdom to help others avoid them. If you realize something you’ve done to hurt others in the past, it gives you the opportunity to try to make things right.
A wonderful benefit of the life plan is that it provides evidence that you did the necessary due diligence to formally define what your best looks like according the character qualities you most admire, your present values, your present understanding of reality, and the many demands of your present life.
As you live according to your life plan, you build protection against future guilt or shame. In the event that you upgrade the qualities you most admire, change your values, learn more about reality, and so on, you will know that what you did was exactly what you believed was best, and you will even have a written record of why you felt that way.