Quitting Drinking is About Choosing Your Potential

Hey, I'm Barti Arez and I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. Welcome to my podcast where I teach you how to stop drinking, how to quit craving, and how to begin the journey back to yourself so that you can transform your life. After a 14-year binge drinking career, starting and stopping dozens of times and trying everything in the book from AA to therapy, I finally discovered the key to sustainable sobriety. And on this podcast, you're going to learn practical tips, tools, and strategies to help you quit drinking alcohol the easy way so you can finally step into the next chapter of your life and begin fulfilling your potential. For private one-on-one or group coaching, visit www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com and book a call with me. Hey, welcome back to another episode. My name is Barti Arez. I'm your host. I'm the Stop Drinking Coach. In today's episode, I want to dig in and I really want to talk about your potential. I want to talk about choosing your potential and what this means. You know, almost three years ago, it's crazy. I'm coming up on three-year sober. I've been saying I've been like two, two and a half years sober for so long to think that I'm coming up on three in a couple of months is crazy. I mean, this year is just flown by. And as we're on that topic of this year flying by, I want to ask you a question. You know, if you're listening to this and you've had a problematic relationship with alcohol for a while, you know, did you do dry January? Did you think that like, hey, maybe this was going to be the year? And if you've told yourself that and you find yourself still drinking and you know this thing has been problematic for at least a couple years, if not longer, many of us know that we have a problematic relationship with alcohol for sometimes five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. I want to encourage you to really be honest with yourself in this moment as you're listening to my voice and really just look at the trend, right? I talk to so many people and so many of us, including myself when I was drinking, we rationalize the fact that, hey, well, out of ten times, two or three times, it doesn't go crazy. I don't overdo it. But most of the time, right? If we're being honest with ourselves, like imagine you are a private equity firm. Imagine you are the CEO of a business or you're an individual who's looking to buy a business and you're looking at the marketing data. You're looking at the analytics. You're looking at the trend of the finances. You're looking at the reports, right? Our relationship with alcohol, 85, 90 percent of the time is problematic, right? Maybe it's 70 percent of the time. Still, the brain wants to hold on to that 10, 20, 30 percent and say, oh, well, sometimes, right, when you play Russian roulette, you're playing this a game. It's like, oh, well, sometimes it's okay, right? But most of the time, it's fucked, right? And it's like, you just, that's how you have to look at it. It's the only way. You can't hold on to the 10 percent, 20 percent of the time that things don't, you know, blow up and say, okay, well, maybe I can have a grasp on this thing, right? It's like, imagine you were on a casino floor, right? You're on a casino floor and you're going in and every time, you know, it takes $100 from you and you have a 90 percent chance of losing. Like how many times are you going to put that $100 in only to get a dollar back, right? It's insane. When you look at the trend, when you look at the historical data, the relationship is moving your life into an incredibly negative direction in the way that it's impacting your mental and emotional health, in the way that it is literally keeping you trapped in a vicious cycle, right? It's damaging your relationship with your partner. You're not showing up the way that you want to for your children. You're not setting a good example. You're not being a good role model and leader. Your output at work, your productivity at work, isn't what it could be. You're likely leaving money on the table or opportunity on the table. So you have to understand that like, dude, quitting drinking and I've said this another podcast, it's a power move in the society that we live in today, right? You look at the fabric of our culture. You look at the fabric of our society. People by and large don't even consider alcohol a drug and it's absolutely insane. It just goes to show how susceptible and gullible and impressionable human beings are. I mean, we really are. People highly, highly underestimate or overestimate their intelligence and their willpower and their self-control and their own subjective experience. Like, dude, human beings are very impressionable. We're very easily conditioned because the fact of the matter is, when you wipe every thing away and nobody has any idea what we're doing here. Let's not negate the fact that we all were injected into becoming a human without asking. Now we're here floating on a rock and what seems like infinite space in every direction and nobody has any idea why we're here, what we're supposed to do, what happens after, what the purpose is, what the meaning is. So everybody's just trying to figure things out, right? It's like, take yourself back to when you were a child, right? When you looked at adults as these godlike beings who were taller and had everything figured out, and now we're adults and we realize that absolutely nobody has any idea what's going on. And so as a result of that deep existential pain, that deep existential crisis that virtually nobody has any answer to, maybe several million people have acts of faith, right? It's like, okay, well, what am I supposed to do with myself? What am I supposed to do with my time? And I create the life that I actually want for myself, do I am I deserving of it? Right? Like who am I to go out and architect my dreams and my reality and fulfill my potential? Especially when we've had all this trauma or all these challenging experiences throughout our childhood and our adolescent years, which affects our confidence, which affects our self-esteem, which affects our ability to mentally and emotionally regulate, which affects the voice in our head, our relationship with our self, the self-talk that we have. Like alcohol is this drug that has just been swept under, right? Like, and we've all just bought into it. Like this is just so normal. It's what you do. You wake up, you go to work, you drink, you wake up, you go to work, you socialize and you drink. And it's like, dude, no, this is a drug. Just I really want you to begin like thinking about alcohol. Like imagine if it was just cocaine, or imagine if it was heroin, or imagine if you were poppin pills in the way that you were every single day or multiple days per week with alcohol. You would probably look at it and be like, dude, this is a serious problem. Like I'm an addict here. And imagine if we lived in like replace alcohol, imagine everybody going out and doing cocaine, right? Or like poppin pills, multiple days per week. It'd be like, dude, this is a major epidemic. But for some reason, human beings have a hard time seeing that with alcohol, but it is no different. A drug is a substance that alters your neurochemistry. And alcohol does that very aggressively, so aggressively, we have a name for it called alcoholism. And alcohol use disorder. I would say like 70% of people who drink alcohol are on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder and don't even realize it. They have a problematic or somewhat dependent relationship with alcohol and they don't even realize it. And so the way I look at this thing, you know, and if you take me back to that moment where I was drinking four to six bottles of wine a day during the pandemic and I was literally committing a slow suicide, not even realizing it, right? I was literally killing myself. I was pouring so much poison into the system, I was breaking it down in every capacity. In that moment, when I hit that quote and quote, rock bottom and I injured my left shoulder and I was in the most excruciating pain of my life and it like everything was kind of crashing down and I was reflecting on everything. You know, there's two things. There's two things that ran through my mind and I want you to think about how these two things, what they mean to you. One was the pain of alcohol was so great at that point I couldn't deny it, right? I was feeling the visceral physical pain of agony of my left shoulder mangled, dislocated, not in the right position, my tendons, like muscles, like everything was just, was fucked and I was in the most excruciating pain I had ever been in. So the pain was real, right? I could finally connect like the inputs to the outputs, right? And maybe you're not dislocating your shoulder but there's a tremendous amount of pain and other ways for you, right? Your marriage could be falling apart. Your productivity at work could be going down the drain, right? Like whatever it is, your relationships, the way that you feel every single day is just taxing you, right? Like you're tired of it, you're tired of being sick and tired. So the pain was real and I couldn't deny and ignore it. But number two, and I think this is so important, this part, and this is where the light of hope comes in. And hope is a necessary human emotion that we all have to be able to cultivate when we're in times of pain and challenge, right? The hope was, listen like I deep down. When I talk about my core, like the essence, my root, my soul, whatever that essence is, I know that there is a greater degree of capacity for potential for who I am. I know that I, my dis existence, this three-dimensional space, this avatar, this party, being a human planet Earth, this human experience thing that we're all trying to make sense of. For me, there's more to it than just being in the cycle of drinking alcohol. I just knew it. I could feel it. And I know that if you're honest with yourself, if you reflect it deeply enough, you take yourself back to your childhood, you take yourself back to being a teenager. When you imagined what it was going to be like as an adult, what life was going to be, it was more. It was more. You had these dreams, you had these goals, you had these aspirations with your health, with your family, with your career, with your finances, with you traveling the world, with you seeing things, experiencing new cultures, like whatever it was, with skills that you were going to develop, the way that you were going to make your mark on this planet. Right? We all have that. And in that moment, I held on to that. I knew, I knew in that moment that if I wanted to move into that state, if I wanted to experience and be able to experience, tap into a line with and express that potential, there was no way I could do it drinking. Like, realistically, I was probably only expressing 10% of my potential while I was drinking alcohol. Looking back as a stop drinking coach, three years sober, with all I've been able to do, with the podcast I've been able to create, the tens of thousands of people I've been able to get sober, the confidence I've developed within myself, the self-esteem, the integrity, the way that I show up, my discipline, like everything, the character that I am, is 10% wouldn't even be close to it. I mean, I'm 50-fold a different person in the way that I show up energetically on every level. So thinking that I was operating at 10%, I'm giving myself a pass there because I really wasn't. So I knew that if I wanted to move into that state, into that state of expression, of alignment, into my potential, and I wanted to become a true creator of my life, if I wanted to truly be able to architect the reality that I wanted on my terms, I needed to do it without alcohol. There was no way alcohol could be in the picture. I was just honest with myself then. It's like, dude, for 15 years, I had every opportunity for 15 years I tried to moderate. For 15 years, I tried to tell myself stories about how it was possible or it was so exhausting. Every single time I drank and the next day I woke up, I told myself, I'm never drinking again. I swear. There was never a time I woke up in the morning and said, I want to do that again because every time I dinge, that was a binge drinker. Like, it was just so taxing. Do you know how that affects you as a human being? How that wrecks your internal sense of fortitude and constitution, where every single time you drink, in drinking takes you through this emotional rollercoaster and it taps your dopamine and it makes you feel good and it gives you the illusion that you're doing something right, but you're doing the opposite. You're taxing, you're neurochemistry, you're hacking your system, you're not doing the right thing, you're taking a drug, you're not self-regulating, you're not facing your trauma, you're not facing your demons, you're not learning how to manage your impulses, you're just being an unconscious, hedonistic person who's just going for instant pain relief, instant pursuit of pleasure, and then you tell yourself you're never going to do it and then the next day you do it and then three days later you do it. I mean, you know, you're been through the cycle. Maybe you're in the cycle right now, like it do to just destroy you, it destroys you on every level. And so I knew in that moment that like if I wanted to access and express that potential, there is no way I could do it with alcohol and for me to think that I could would be the ultimate form of fucking disrespect. I would be spitting on my own grave at that point and that's what scared me. That still terrifies me to this moment. I'll tell you the thing that scares me the most about being a human being, about being alive is getting to that place where I ultimately die and having time to reflect on it and to reflect on my life and be like, what did I fucking do? Like, I didn't empty the tank. I was scared. I was afraid. I didn't follow my dreams. I didn't express myself the way that I could. I didn't follow through. Like, I still have reserve in the tank. That's the thing that fucking terrifies me is to get to the end of this thing and to, I don't know if we do like nobody knows if we get another shot. I assume that I don't and I think that's the best way to live regardless of your religious beliefs or anything else. Like, temporary put the faith aside and just look at the evidence. We don't know if there's another chance. You don't know if there's going to be another and anything else. You don't know if you pop up again. For all we know in the infinite amount of time that exists, this is the one shot, the one opportunity for the next 50 years that we have to experience this, this beauty. Like, you can even add them. What a gift it is to be alive and we're just pouring poison into it systematically. Can you not see how that's an error code in pursuit of pleasure and pursuit of sitting around a bunch of other people and fucking bullshiting? Like, what? Dude, you're more than that. Your life is more than that. You weren't put here on planet earth to go through the system and to get into college and to start drinking and then to fall into a silly basic pattern of wake up, work, drink. Like, dude, you have to look beyond the matrix, look beyond the conditioning. It's a trick. It's a trap to keep you dependent, to turn you into a slave into the system. You know, you have to choose your potential and that's what quitting drinking is. That's what it was for me in the moment and what it is for everybody. Because nobody wants to be a slave. Nobody wants to be addicted. This is nonsense. This is nonsense. You're more than that. Your life is infinitely more than that. You know, there's this video trending on social media. It's like, listen, if somebody said they would give you $100 million dollars tomorrow, would you take it? The answer everybody says is, yeah, of course. Thank you. Okay. Well, the only tradeoff is that tomorrow is your last day on earth. Would you still take it? 99.9%? In fact, 100% of everybody watching the video, they say no. It's like, okay. So then what you're saying is that your life is worth more than $100 million dollars. Right? And it's like, think about that. Think about that. There's no amount of money. There's no amount of whatever that is more valuable than you. You are the greatest asset. You are the most valuable asset. Nothing is as valuable as your health. Nothing is as valuable as your peace of mind of your survival, of your ability to move forward. That is the most valuable thing. An alcohol destroys that in every capacity, mentally, emotionally, energetically, spiritually, physically, in the way that you show up in every capacity, your relationships, what you say, how you communicate your body language, the way that you express your energy. Life is just an exchange of energy. You exchange your energy for time for money. You exchange your energy with your partner to create love. You exchange your energy to your kids to help them grow and evolve. You exchange your energy with your friends to laugh and have a good time. You exchange your energy by being present and consuming others. Somebody else's energy when you're reading a book. This is an exchange of energy. An alcohol lowers that energy in every capacity. It does not fuel it. It does not fuel it. It does temporarily for 15 minutes, but at what cost? But at what cost? At the cost of your potential. At the cost of who you could be. At the cost of who you who you could express. Listen, there's note like, had I not chosen to face my pain? Had I not chosen my potential? Had I not chosen to develop the perseverance and the commitment and consistency to move through craving, to learn how to self-regulate, to learn how to manage my impulses, to learn how to talk to myself. These last 24 episodes that have changed and transformed your life and expanded your map of reality would not have come about. But I chose my potential. And so this is what came of it. Helping thousands of people, making a massive impact, changing the trajectory of families' lives, giving children their moms back, giving children their dads back. I can't even fathom the impact, the ripple effect that my work has had. I just, I don't know. I have people from Africa reaching out to me on TikTok like, "Dude, it's crazy." As a result of me choosing my potential. So what if you chose your potential? What if you chose your potential? What is possible? I'll tell you, you can't even fathom what's possible. I didn't know that I'd be sitting here three years ago. I had no idea. I just knew that there was more. And I surrendered to that despite the pain and challenges along the way. I learned to self-regulate. I learned to manage my time. I hired coaches. I worked with coaches. I learned the fundamental skills that exist on how to manage this vehicle, this operating system, the mental, emotional, physical tools to be able to manage this thing. And that's the thing. But think about all the millions of people who got sober that were just like you. And that's the thing that we all, all people who struggle with alcohol have to remember. Because we think we're so unique. My situation, Vardia, you don't understand it. I only drink three days a week. And I'm high functioning. I don't really get hangovers. I wake up. I go to work. I've got a great job. I've got a great career. I've got a great business. My wife is, she's, you know, she kind of supports me, but knows I'm drinking too much. But I know that it's, you know, I'm gaining some weight and you know, I'm turning 40 or 50 and, you know, I'm getting tired and like, I'm not, I've got this marathon. I really want to run. I want to get back into cycling like whatever. Dude, it's all the same. We're the millions of people who got sober and continue to stay sober and live beautiful lives. We're in the exact same boat as you are. And it's like the recovery space by and large when you look at how they call things, you know, mentally ill and like the deep dark black hole that the AA world says you're born this way and you've got character defects. Dude, it's so disempowering. It's so disempowering. How do you think anybody does it? How do you get sober by learning how to mentally and emotionally regulate, by learning how to manage your impulses, by learning how to manage the energy that flows through your body, which involves your thoughts, which involves the voice inside your head, which involves your interpretations of reality, your interpretations of your past, your interpretations of the future. The word interpretation is one of my favorite words because when you dig deep into the world of therapy and coaching and personal transformation and healing, it is all an interpretation. It is the story and narrative. It is the subjective perception that we place on reality, which colors the experience. If you don't believe me, this is why a thousand people could watch the same movie and have a thousand different interpretations of it. Who's right? Who's wrong? They're all right and they're all wrong. That's the answer. They're all right and they're all wrong because objectively the movie has no meaning without a subjective filter to process it. Objectively the movie is meaningless. But it takes the subjective witness with all of their past data from the time they were born and an empty sponge between what they got from their parents and what school they went to and their educational system and their friends on the playground and the school teachers they had and the subjects they learned and their genetic predispositions towards certain personality types and tendencies. It takes all those things. You culminate that data and then you spit out an interpretation. That's it. And so learning how to manage the internal processes is what gives through time is you become good at it is what reclaims your personal power as a creator of your life. Imagine who you could be if you had elite levels of self confidence. Imagine who you could be if you had elite levels of belief in yourself. Imagine who you could be if you fully believed in your soul that you deserved everything that you were hard for. Imagine who you could be if you developed these skills that you've always been attracted to or have always kind of been good at. What if you maximize them? Imagine who you could be if you learn how to properly manage your time so that you could maximize your productivity. Imagine who you could be if you could get around the right people who would motivate you who could remind you of who you are of constantly holding up the mirror of pushing you when you didn't feel good. Imagine who you could be. Dude, whatever you want, whoever you want, it's all possible. Nobody's holding a gun to your head. Nobody's holding a gun to my head. Not the government. Not Biden. Not other countries. Whatever you want to create is possible for you. Whatever you want to experience is possible for you. Being drinking is about choosing your potential. Despite the pain being so great, it's about choosing your potential one day at a time, one moment at a time with every breath, with every step that you take forward. And that, my friend, is the most profound evolutionary growth process you could possibly embark upon. Because choosing your potential means that you are moving into a state of uncertainty, and manifest expression. The reason most people repeat and relive the same problems over and over and over and over and over again for decades at a time is because the way they interpret reality, one is they're living in autopilot. They are not fully conscious and awake. This is the spiritual path. This is the spiritual evolutionary process. They are not fully conscious. Most people live in a drone-like state. And it's not their fault and it's not because they're less than it's because they haven't woken up yet. They haven't fully become conscious through practices like meditation. They haven't fully woken up to the capacity and understanding that you are not the voice inside your head. They haven't started to distinguish the different layers of reality that exists within the human body. And the way they interpret things are based off of the past. You can't move into an architect and create unmanifest potential if your system is an autopilot and continually repeating the pain from the past in the present moment. Because all we ever have is the present moment. The future is an illusion. There is no such thing as the future. There is also no such thing as the past. And I've said this before on other podcasts and other videos. It's like the most life-changing quote that I heard in early sobriety was by my coach and he said life is one long experience of the present moment. So if you want to live a good life, you have to learn how to make peace with the present moment. And that just blew my mind. All the cards came crashing down because I realized that all of my alcoholism, all of the alcohol uses were all the challenges, all the bullshit of my life was because I didn't have a harmonious relationship to the present moment. I was always trying to change it. I was trying to numb it. I was trying to escape it. I was trying to maximize it, minimize it, make it more fun, make it less fun, escape pain. I couldn't just be. I couldn't just love myself. And that is the deep fundamental fabric of this journey, which will be one of my next episodes on loving yourself. Because if you truly were conscious and awake, if you were, I'm talking the type of presence that like a high dose of psychedelics will give you. Real presence. Where it just, it shatters the software program. It shatters the conditioning. You wake up and see, wow, everything is made up. This whole system is made up. It's not like money made up, technology made up, social media, all these things, these fabrications that we've held onto and we think are, you know, that we give so much meaning and emotional weight to. It's like, wow. Right? Like, when you wake up in that moment, dude, it's, it's taken a pause to reflect because it's, it's just so profound. Having been so consumed with alcohol and being here on the other side, what my life has become, the shift, the changes, the absolute indescribable transformation. Because I was, I was, I developed the courage to choose my potential and that's what this is and that's who I am and that's what the stop drinking coaches and that's what everything that I put out is. It's about you choosing your potential. It is about awakening the true light of consciousness and moving consciousness forward. Alcohol does not move consciousness forward. It represses it. It suppresses it. It makes it dark. It weakens it. It destroys it. It destroys the very fabric of the family unit. Love, connection, trust, presence. It destroys it. Generations, millions of families. just regurgitate and just stay stuck in patterns of generational trauma and it alcohols the way out. Everybody just numbs out. Everybody just, you know, dude, it's not you have to wake up, you have to see it, you have to see it for what it is. Alcohol is procrastination against your personal evolution. You have to want more. You have to have a growth mindset. In sure, is there going to be pain along the way? Yeah. Is there going to be craving your boredom or whatever agitation along the way? Yeah. But that's part of the human experience. Who told you what what what what marketing material? What conditioning? What what what parent? What figure told us that, hey, you have to avoid all discomfort. Hey, you can't feel the good the bad feelings. Dude, those things are necessary. Those things are necessary. If you look at an incredible bodybuilder or if somebody who, you know, competes like physique and just has like a Greek god body, you look at that and you admire that. You respect that. Maybe you don't you don't find it attractive. Some people do. Some people don't. Whatever. But when you look at a beautiful body, you look at that and you admire and you respect that person. Because if you've spent any time in the physical domain, you know that to be able to architect and create and mold a physique and sculpt the physique like that takes an incredible amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of perseverance. It takes an incredible amount of self sacrifice. It takes an incredible amount of mindfulness around the energy that you consume, aka food, in how much, what you consume, in what quantities you're measuring the calories. You're going to the gym, you know, hours and hours working out in perfect, you know, ways like even if you don't like it, you admire it and you respect it. You know, and that's what's important. You admire it and you respect it. And like, you know, to express your potential like it's that's what it takes. That's what it takes. And you have to believe that you deserve it and that you're good enough and it's possible for you because it is. Life is a mirror, right? Nobody's going to be around to come tell you that like you do when you believe you don't. Like I will. But you have to understand that like you have to you have to get to a place within yourself to believe that it's possible. You have to get to a place in yourself where you believe it's possible because if you don't, then life will say, okay, great, you don't. The universe doesn't care. The universe is a mirror. And maybe I can retract that same and I would say the universe does care. The universe wants the best for you. But it will reflect back the energy and the vibration that you hold. It's like that the most famous quote man, whether you think you can or can't you're right. You read all these personal development books. You listen to the thousands of hours of podcasts. You listen to every entrepreneur, a successful person who builds a billion dollar business and writes their their autobiography and gives you the tips like, dude, it's all the same. Whether you're listening to Oprah or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or whoever. Pick your pick your poison. Like whoever you want me, whatever. Like it's all the same thing. They all say the same things. It's like at some point you have to just give in and be like, all right, maybe it's not me. Maybe it's like, or maybe it's me like not buying into it. And it mirrors back your state of consciousness and energy. So you have to believe that it's possible for you. And then you just take the first step. You just take the first step. You don't have to commit to never drinking again. I haven't not committed to never drinking again. I just know I'm not drinking today. Super easy, super effortless. And I love it that way. It's great. And that's what you have to do. You just have to commit to not drinking today. And then you have to work a good program that provides structure, support, accountability, right, gives you a system to follow, teaches you these things around mental and emotional regulation, self-regulation, impulse control, strategies and tools, perspectives, interpretations, models, ways of thinking, ways of managing and moving the energy through your body. It's all possible. And then the work comes in. And where the work comes in is where you begin expressing your potential. And it's so much easier to do it in a community where everybody is a family and you have accountability and support. So hard to do on your own, probably impossible. Very few people do it on their own. There's no way I would have been able to do it. And for those of you guys who try to do it on your own and get a month or two months and then fall back, it's because you lack support and accountability. You need to be plugged into something around month eight when I moved to Austin. You know, I started going on dates and meeting people and doing all this stuff. And it's like Austin's a huge drinking city, huge drinking culture here. And it was like, man, if I didn't have the coaching, if I didn't have the support, if I wasn't showing up to weekly calls, if I didn't have accountability, if I was completely on my own back then, and I didn't have anybody to answer to to show up to to have to show face to, man, even after all that, there would have been a good chance I would have went back. But the thread, the fabric, the connection of accountability and support and being around other like-minded people held me strong. And now I'm here. And now it's effortless. And I'm so grateful for that. And that's what I offer to you is a system of support and accountability and everything else, the tools, the perceptions, the models, the ways of thinking, the ways of managing, of reprocessing your past, of making sense of the things that you've never been able to make sense of can provide resources, tools, like, man, it's so possible. But you have to choose your potential. Choosing alcohol is a symptomatic way of choosing your pain. Because you're thinking in the pain, you're thinking short-term, you're thinking small, you're thinking, "Oh, I got this frustration, I got to manage this frustration. Ah, this overwhelm. Ah, I got to manage this overwhelm. It's so small, it's so short-term. It's so, it's what keeps you in a little box. Because you're only thinking about the present moment. And that's what alcohol does to your brain is it weakens the prefrontal cortex that's responsible for executive function, long-term planning, critical thinking. The very drug that you're taking is weakening the part of you that can express its potential. And that's why it's so fucked up. It's strengthening the part of you that keeps you focused in on the present moment. It's strengthening the emotional part of you. It's strengthening the fight or flight part of the brain. That's why we have to escape it. You have to get out of that to allow the mind, body, and spirit to reharmonize so that you can begin pursuing the potential. Alcohol is such a selfish drug. It's so selfish. You know, you take alcohol away from all the people that show up to the same bar every week. Do you think they're going to show up? Do you think they give a shit? Do you think they give a fuck? No. They go there to get high. And then when they get high, then they start being a silly goose and having dumb conversations that they really don't care about or ever reflect about or think back twice on. If it wasn't for the alcohol, they wouldn't give a shit about those people. And if you're being honest with yourself, think about the people that you associate with. Okay. Maybe some of them are good friends, but a lot of them are empty conversations. Probably have 500 phone numbers in my phone. Maybe a thousand of people you just meet at a bar. You have a nonsensical conversation. You act like your best friends. You get their number. Yeah, man. I'll hang out with you next week. Do we should kick it? We should hang out. Never fucking call them back. It's nonsense. You have to look at it objectively. Look at it objectively. Like you're analyzing data. Like you're the CEO of a company. Like you're, you know, you're, you know, an investment firm. Would you buy your business if you were acting the way that you were? If would you buy it? It's like, I wouldn't have bought mine. No way. If I was me now with clarity with who I am with the mindset, perspectives, map of reality, what I have bought myself three years ago, fuck no. And if the answer is no, then it's like, all right, get yourself to a place where you're viable. If your marriage is falling apart, if your relationship is falling apart, ask you if you would buy yourself. If you would stay in a relationship with yourself, with your types of behaviors, with your mindset, with the way you're managing your time, with the way that you're keeping up with your health and your fitness and your exercise and your habits and your integrity. And then we wonder, it's like, oh, well, my things fall in a part. It's like, well, yeah, what do you, what do you expect? Just because you're married or just because you're in a relationship with somebody, doesn't mean that you stop doing the things that you did at day one to show up as your best self. You have to keep dating. You have to keep proving to the person that you're a worthy investment and that you guys as a mutual container for personal growth and evolution are doing doing that. But alcohol is the opposite of personal growth and evolution. It's the thing that stops your personal growth and evolution. You're not growing, you're not evolving. Sure, you're showing up at your pain in the bills, but what the fuck does that matter if you're not present? Nobody cares. Yeah, you make good money. Great. That your partner doesn't give a shit about that. Yeah, sure. Security is valuable and important and that means something about your character or whatever. But like, if you can't be present, if you can't express love, if you can't mutually align and continue to grow together and evolve together, none of those things have any meaning. They're valueless in the face of presence in love. So I want you to grab a pen and paper, your journal, the notes on your phone, and write out, articulate, make it clear to yourself in bullet points or write out stream of consciousness, whatever makes more sense to you. Who could you be? What is your potential? Imagine if you were no longer tethered to alcohol and craving alcohol and you had all your time back, you had all your energy back. Who could you be? How would you show up? What would your day look like? And sometimes it's hard to imagine those things when you've been drinking for 30, 40 years and you've lost your identity and you don't know who you are outside of the alcohol. So I understand that. But just for a second, just use your imagination. Use your imagination. What would the state of your health be like? What would your target health be? How would you feel? How much energy would you have? What skills, what new skills would you have? What would the relationship that you're in look like? Maybe it's not a relationship with a partner. Maybe it's just the relationship with yourself. How would you feel? Elite levels of confidence and self-esteem. Now these things don't happen overnight, but there's something that there are things that you finally develop when you're not drunk all the time. You have all this time back to become the person that you want to architect. It's like even if there's pain, even if there's trauma, just imagine the opposite. Because for me, that's what my life is now. There was all this pain. There was all this trauma. There was all this hurt. There's these feelings of emotional neglect and loss and feeling like I'm not good enough and I'm not worthy. I don't have confidence. I didn't believe in my voice and I didn't believe in my ability to express myself. I thought that I was weird and that my ideas were weird and I see the world differently and I'm different. It was just all this negative limiting stuff. Imagine the opposite. For every negative thing or self-limiting thing, just imagine the opposite. Imagine yourself how you would be if you were free from the fear, free from the anxiety, regulated, feeling safe in your body. Powerful had a great network, believed in yourself, acquired the skills you needed to. How much money are you leaving on the table currently? How much more money could you make? What would the state of your your health be? What would you be doing? What type of adventures or travel? Whatever those important things are for you, how would you be showing up for your kids? The type of role model, the way that you would spend time with them and mentor them and lead them and guide them and coach them. Get clear on that. It's important that you get clear on that because if you're not clear on where you're going, if you're in California and you're trying to get to New York and New York's far away, it's going to take you 25 hours to drive there. If you're not clear on how exciting New York is going to be, on how amazing it could possibly be, three hours into driving east from California, if you end up on windy dirt roads and you feel lost, you're going to say, "Fuck it, let me go back to California. It's safe. It's comfortable. It's familiar." Right? It's a great analogy. You have to get clear on where you're going and who you could be and you have to you have to you have to connect that deep into your heart. You have to believe it's possible and then you do it one day at a time. That's the thing. That's the trillion dollar secret here. You just do it one day at a time. You just don't drink today. That's it. That's it. That's the only promise you ever have to make. You're just not going to drink today and you just handle your internal state of consciousness and energy today and you apply the tools today. Then when you wake up the next day, you're going to feel a little bit better and your neurochemistry is going to be a little bit more balanced and the craving is going to be a little bit less and your mood is going to be a little bit better. I'm telling you, the journey of this thing in where you're probably listening to this is so scary, so daunting, so unimaginable, like imagining the most boring doll, like, dude, it's not. It's the opposite. That's the fucking secret here. It's the opposite. What do you think is going to happen when you remove the toxic poison from your life? Life is only going to get better. You're going to develop more agency, more personal power, more sovereignty. Better, you're going to have more time to do all the things that you want to do. If you don't believe then you can do those things or whatever. That's where coaching and supporting accountability and structure and routine and all these things come into play. If you don't have the belief or whatever, that's where all the extra support comes in. That's what you're investing in is all of that extra so that when you don't know what next step to take, somebody comes in and says, "Hey, this is the next step. You do it this way." And then you do it that way and then you take this next step. We don't have all the answers in the beginning and that's why having this system is so key. That's why it was so key for me. Because I didn't know. I tried it every which way before. I tried AA, tried going to therapy. I tried a million and a half fucking tactics around. I'm only going to drink on the weekend. I'm not going to drink until five. I'm going to switch from liquor to beer. Okay, then I'm going to switch from beer to wine. I'm only going to have four glasses. I'm only going to do it on vacation. I'm only going to do it when my body's hit me up. Like, dude, there's a million and a half reasons. Not going to keep alcohol in the house. I'm only going to do it Friday night. I'm only going to do it after I watch the. I'm only going to do it during football games. Shit, it doesn't work, dude. You're dealing with a drug that alters your neurochemistry. And when your neurochemistry is altered, you are not you anymore. Your values, your critical thinking, your decision-making is not who you are anymore. It warps you. That's why you do things and say things and show up in ways that are incomprehensible when you're drinking. It's not who you are. When you shift your neurochemistry, you are no longer you. Like, those are what produce your experience of reality. Those are what produced. You're not in a neutral baseline state. When those things shift, it shifts your critical thinking. It shifts your values. It shifts your perceptions. It shifts your value system. It shifts the way that you manage and make decisions. It doesn't get you. It shifts your level of empathy of the other person. It shifts the way that you interpret time. It shifts the way that you work through future consequences. That's why you say shit to your partner that you're like, I would never fucking say those things of how it's sober. That's why you get behind the wheel of a car when you've had way too many drinks and you say, oh, well, it's not a big deal and I can do it. It shifts your confidence. It gives you these false perceptions like, dude, this, it's not what people made it out to be. It's not what people made it out to be. So you have to choose your potential because if you don't, then the sacrifices are chosen for you. Your potential is sacrificed for 15 to 20, 30 minutes of pleasure. So you have to, you have to play this game in your mind. This is the how you weigh it out. What is, what is worse? 15, 30 minutes, one hour of craving and discomfort and fomo and boredom or whatever. What's worse? Having to learn how to endure that and keep in mind when you learn how to process and endure that, manage it mentally and emotionally, you learn how to manage your impulse is like, you become really good at that. Eventually, you master it and then it's like effortless or feeling that discomfort and pain for 15 minutes an hour, whatever and saying, fuck it, I want to give into it. And then at the expense of that, all the sacrifices come. Your relationships, your health, your kids, their future, your partner, the stability of your home, the stability of the family unit, the damage to your health that could cause irreversible damage, the lost money, the lost time and your potential. It's like, play it out, hold one in one hand and one in the other. Literally, put your hat, if you're not driving, put your hands in front of you, say, the pain of which one is worse. In your left hand, play the pain of 15 minutes to an hour of craving. I know it's intense. I know you go tunnel vision. I know, but you can breathe through it. Okay? I think we've got tools. We've got strategies to help you. That is temporary. That might last six months. that might last a year where you're going to get cravings from time to time. That or feel the weight in your right hand of the destruction of the family, the poor leadership in your family that you're setting an example of with your kids, the lost time, the lost money, the damage to your health, the inability to actually fulfill your potential. Feel the weight of that in your right hand. Feel the weight of getting to 80, 90 years old, 100 years old and looking back and saying, "Fuck, what could have been? Who could I have been?" To the weight of that is a trillion pounds. It's a trillion pounds. So, if you ask me, I would rather feel the weight of 15, 30, 45 minutes of thinking I'm missing out. Missing out of what? What am I missing from? Hangovers, feeling like shit, being stuck in a vicious cycle where I'm constantly thinking about alcohol multiple days per week, filtering all my decisions through it, thinking that people sitting around in a fucking box somewhere or having a great time laughing and fucking at dumb jokes, I'm missing out on that. What am I missing out on? If you ask me, I'm not missing out on anything. They're the ones that are missing out. Because I'm over here taking every ounce of energy that I have and trying to make the world a better place. I'm feeling aligned in the expression of my voice and the expression of my potential and the expression of the way I've been able to synthesize reality so that I can make and support and foster and facilitate people to be happier, more present, and to be more fulfilled and loving and kind and resourceful and abundant and successful. And you can find that in your own way, maybe involve supporting others through sobriety once you start to get sober, being part of the stop drinking coach family and the movement and everything else. But in other ways, with your kids, with your family, with your work, with your business, with your career. Dude, once you make that fundamental shift, working through FOMO, somebody mentioned FOMO in my community today and it's like FOMO, fear of missing out. So we all have this FOMO. When we quit drinking, I'm going to miss out the social scene. It's like, listen. FOMO is such a illusion. It's all about how you think about it. So here, let me just break down and dismantle FOMO for you once and for all. You experience fear of missing out because you think your close friends or the people you associate with, your social circle, are out having a great time on a boat or on a bar or in some country club, right, without you. But the thing is, is that there are tens of millions of people who are living lives that you could only dream of in every capacity, constantly 24/7. Because they figured out the game of life and maybe they're more wealthier, successful or whatever, to where they have all the time, all the freedom, all the resources to just do whatever they want. And you don't FOMO them. You don't FOMO them. You don't FOMO the people who have a better business than you or a better job than you or the people who are in better health than you. But there's millions of people who are. But you don't FOMO them because you don't know them and you don't have a relationship with them. But they are. In every second people are living more favorable experiences than you are. So why is it that we FOMO are friends and not them? Well, because we think, you know, we have a connection to them. But it's an illusion. It's an illusion. The idea of missing out is just an illusion. What you're doing is if you play, if you feel FOMO, it means that you are placing more value and weight on other people's experiences than your own. And this is where you give up your personal power. This is where you give up your agency. This is where you give up your sovereignty. The most important thing to you should be the value of your own personal experience of your family's experience. That's what's important. Not what fucking John or Sally or Susie is doing at the country club or what anybody else is doing on a Friday night at some fucking dive bar in the dark. That's all nonsense. And that's why you are stuck and that's why you're not expressing your fullest potential because you're constantly giving your power away to other people to the matrix of the fabric of the way social circles have been constructed. You're giving your power away thinking that that is where fun is. That's where fulfillment is and it's not. That's where destruction is. That is where numbing is. If you go to each and every one of those people who are regulars at those bars, like listen, there's no free lunch in nature. Everybody feels the negative consequences. All of their relationships are being impacted. All of their children are not getting the ideal role model. All of their productivity at work is being diminished. All of their extra money that they could be investing in the stock market or putting towards a vacation is going into piss. The devil's piss and making them feel shitting the next day. Listen, nobody's getting out unscathed and you see buddies and friends wherever who are drinking and seem like they're having a great time, they're just not dude. Either they're in denial or they still don't have the self-awareness to to be willing to look at the pain because they're still riding the dopamine. And that's why these things are so fucked. Because when you're on that dopamine role going up and the shift hasn't occurred where the pain starts outweighing the pleasure, who knows how long you'll be there. So you have to play the tape forward. You have to let the pain scare you. You have to let the consequences scare you. Fear is a good motivator. I fear putting my hand on a lit stove in fear of my skin melting and being an excruciating pain and losing the nerve endings in my right hand, which is my dominant hand, which allows me to do a lot of things. There's fear there and I'm glad there's fear there. I encourage that fear because it keeps me away from putting my hand on the stove. There's fear of poison oak and poison ivy because I know when I get a little bit of that oil on my skin, it causes a insanely incomprehensible allergic reaction which causes me to itch and pus and ooze and just want to rip my hair out for two weeks. I'm good. I'm glad there's fear there. And for me, there's fear around going close to alcohol because if I go close to it, it is going to destroy the possibility of the fulfillment of the highest expression of my energy and potential. And that is really important to me. That is meaningful to me. And you need to reconnect to that. Maybe it means reconnecting to your child like nature. Maybe it means reconnecting to some deep part of yourself that remembers and knows who the fuck you are. You're not this person who just is on this fucking merry going around numbing them out following the crowd. And you have to choose that and you have to be willing and courageous enough to know that by choosing that it is going to be your hero's journey. It is going to be your hero's journey and there's going to be challenges and discomforts and speed bumps and stuff along the way. But that's why you do it with a community that provides you system structure, support and accountability and a process to follow to help you access that. It's your potential. It's about choosing your potential over choosing your pain. And it's not discounting the pain and it's not saying the pain wasn't real. It's about saying, hey, enough is enough. Enough is enough. I know there's pain. I acknowledge the pain. But what's more important to me is changing is transforming of getting out of this and choosing my potential and understand the potential is beautiful. The potential is unmanifest greatness, unmanifest joy, positivity, gratitude, transformation, presence. That's what that's what's waiting for you on the other side. Not a life of boredom and dullness in in the world. You know, it's not what you think it is. But to get to that other side, to traverse through that journey, there's going to be pain. There's going to be challenge. There's going to be craving. There's going to be boredom from time to time. So what? So what? Who cares? Accept it. Accept that it's part of the journey. Being alive is suffering. That's why religion exists. That's why spirituality exists. That's why philosophy exists. From the dawn of man since we became conscious, we've been trying to make sense of the fact that we have to survive, that we have to make sense of what it what this is. That's okay. Lean into that. Get excited about that. Read books. Dig into spirituality. Dig into philosophy. Dig into the greatest thinkers. Dig into the quotes that make you think and make you reflect and appreciate the fabric of this existence. It's finite. Pouring alcohol into it is an error code. We were tricked and duped through marketing and conditioning to think that it's so normal. There's nothing normal about systematic committing a slow suicide and poisoning yourself, ingesting an agent that depletes you of your energy, that depletes you of your vitality, that depletes you of your capacity to love and create and be proactive and resourceful. You need better ways to manage stress. There's a thousand ways. You need better ways to manage overwhelm and frustration at work. You never need it the alcohol. This was not, we weren't adapted to drink alcohol. It's a drug. It's like heroin. It's like cocaine. It's like methamphetamines. And once you begin to see it that way, it becomes easy to stay away. It's, it's what I call going from alcohol equals pleasure to alcohol equals pain. When you begin to see alcohol as a source of pain, it's easy not to go near it. It takes time to recondition that sometimes it can be done in a powerful meditation or hypnosis. Instantly, you just come out paradigm shift. It's effortless. Other times it takes hundreds or thousands of repetitions. Every time you think about alcohol, you redirect your mind to the most painful moment in experience. The greatest cause of destruction and your relationship and the possibility of, you know, getting that DUI or whatever it was and be like, oh yeah, that's what alcohol actually is. Because the brain for as long as it's going to be is always going to default to the, oh, it's euphoria. It's stress relief because that's the first when the neural pathway gets established in your in your brain from point A to point B, point B, it's initial experience is the euphoria in the dopamine. And that's what the brain cares about. It doesn't give a shit that alcohol is ruining your life. Ruining your marriage is stealing from the expression of your potential. Alcohol is an inanimate object. It doesn't give a fuck. It doesn't know that it's giving you liver cirrhosis, that it's giving you high blood pressure and making you gain 50 pounds and like it doesn't know when it doesn't care. It's just being mass produced by the hundreds of thousands of gallons. It just wants you to consume more of it. It's an evil God, man. It's an evil, evil God. So think about it. Think about your potential. By choosing to drink alcohol, you are choosing to give up your potential. And I know it's hard. And I know it's tough. And I know there's cravings and I know there's discomfort. But it's a trap that we got ourselves caught in. We used alcohol as a way to cope internal dysregulation in pain, psychological or emotional, sometimes even physical. Because we didn't know better. We didn't have the tools. We didn't know how to mentally regulate. We didn't know how to emotionally regulate. We were duped. We were tricked. We just followed the high school crowd. We followed with our friends and we went to parties on Friday night. We went to college. We tried to fit in because that's what we do as human beings. We want to fit in. We want to be loved. We want to be seen. We want to be accepted. We want to be the life of the party. We want to express ourselves. We want it like we were tricked. And now we're in its grips. And it's taking everything away. And yeah, it means making a sacrifice. But choose your sacrifice, man. Go back and listen to that episode. Choose your sacrifice or your sacrifices will be chosen for you. It's simple. Either you choose or by default, if you don't make a choice, that's also a choice. If you don't make a choice, then by default, everything else becomes sacrificed. So you have to develop the courage to turn towards the thing, to turn towards the pain, to turn towards the discomfort. And you have to develop the courage and personal power to make that sacrifice one day at a time. Not for the rest of your life for today. And then tomorrow for tomorrow. But don't even think about tomorrow just for today. So if you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, if you want to step into the next chapter of your life, listen, if you go all in and commit to yourself and you don't give up, I won't give up on you. But I can't do that. I can't pour into you until you make that choice. Right? If you're sitting in a car in traffic and you don't get out and start pushing yourself, nobody is going to come help you. But as soon as you open the door and get out to the back of the car, throw your car neutral and start pushing, you'll find that people come to your aid. But you have to be the one who starts. Nobody's going to come save you. And I wish somebody we all wish there was that person. Maybe maybe energetically, I am the person who's who's who's coming, but you have to take that first step. You know, it's like I wish somebody would have fucking looked at me years ago and fucking slapped me and be like, "Barty, what the fuck are you doing?" You know? It's like imagine. Imagine there is a security camera in the top right corner of your house or the bar that you go to every day to drink or whatever. And imagine sitting in the camera room watching yourself just sit there. Sit there after bar, beer after beer, drink after drink, sitting on your couch or in your office, drink after drink. Why don't you look at yourself like they do in that movie interstellar if you've ever seen it towards the very end where he's in that like altered dimension and he's like looking through the books and he's like screaming and crying. He's like, "What are you doing?" You're pissing it away. What are you doing? That's the wake up call that we need. So I hope this episode was the wake up call that you needed. I hope this episode put things into perspective for you and lit something inside you for you to see this thing differently and for you to be able to take forward action. So I appreciate you listening. If you found this episode helpful, I'd appreciate you sharing it with somebody that you know who might need it. And if you want to learn more, visit my website www.thestobdrinkingcoach.com. Scroll down to the bottom. I've got a lot of reviews and testimonials of people's experiences working with me in the program. I've probably got 250 more. A lot of those are from months ago that I haven't added, but I will at some point. I'll be updating my website here at some point as well. But yeah, and fill out an application if you want to work with me. And if you haven't already, I would really appreciate if you left a five star review on both to help this reach more people who might need it. I appreciate you listening and keep fighting the good fight if you're ready to really plug into a system that's going to provide support, structure, accountability and everything else to help support you on your journey. Fill out the application. And yeah, I'll get back to you if I feel like we're a good fit. I will see you in the next episode. Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, leave a five star review and share it with your friends or someone you know who might be struggling with alcohol. And if you feel like you're ready to finally transform your relationship with alcohol, visit www.TheStopDrinkingCoach.com and book a call with me. I offer private one-on-one and group coaching to make letting go of alcohol easier and more sustainable than you ever thought possible. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.