Feeling guilty is the lazy way of reacting. A guilty person resigns himself to keeping his faults and does not try to take actions to improve.

Don’t use guilt feelings to justify laziness and procrastination. If a person tends to think in terms of guilt, when he hears an idea he will say to himself, “How awful it is that I’m not following that idea.”

It is more productive to keep focus on what you can do to implement the principle or concept.

-from Rabbi Zelig Pliskin’s “Gateway to Happiness,” p.222