What Story Are You Telling Yourself?

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 in 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. SDC fam, welcome back to another episode. Since I record a podcast, I know many of you have been waiting for a new episode and I'm super excited to be back. This last month was kind of life changing and absolutely transformative to say the least. Last week, was it last week or the week before? Two weeks ago, I went on a seven-day spiritual retreat which I'm not going to go into too much detail about it, but I am going to specifically talk about one component of the retreat as it relates to this episode. This episode is titled, "What story are you telling yourself?" Without further ado, let's really just jump right in. You know me, I don't really like to spend a lot of time fluffing. Let's really just get to the point. So when it comes to this journey, man, when it comes to this thing called life, this thing that we are all here to do for an undisclosed period of time, we all tell ourselves stories. The stories that we tell ourselves determine our experience of reality and you may not be consciously aware of this, but you are telling yourself stories 24/7 every moment while you're awake, you are repeating stories and narratives to yourself, right? Whether it's stories about yourself, right? Your self-image, who you are, or stories about the world, right? We make generalizations about the world, about other people, about ourselves, right? So we're always telling ourselves stories, stories about it's possible or it's not possible or it's going to be easy or the story of, "No, it's going to be too hard or I'm not cut out for it or it's not possible for me." The stories that we tell ourselves determine our experience of reality. I mean, that is the fundamental basis for how our life unfolds, right? The unfolding of your life is nothing more than what starts out as a thought, which then becomes an action or decision or behavior, which then produces a result. And when you take hundreds of these or thousands of these or millions of these and you spread them through time, you get you, which is your health, your weight, the quality of your relationships, the types of friends that you have, the job you work, your income, you know, all the different aspects of your life where you live, all the things are a result of what you think, the decisions you make and then the outputs of those and what you do with those outputs. So a lot of us, man, when we embark on this journey, the story that we tell ourselves is a story of suffering. And it's like, listen, if you just change the story, if you change the narrative, your experience of that thing is also going to change, right? So where do I get this concept of story of suffering? I originally got it in the previous coaching program I was part of. We used to hold every quarter this two to three day super immersive event that was almost like this kind of military style kind of bootcamp for one and a half days. And then the second kind of half of it was deeper like coaching principles and things like that that we would learn within the program. And one of the evolutions that we would do was called the story of suffering. And what we had to do is a bunch of guys, we had to push this four by four, raptor, four truck through a mile and a half of mud and just uphill and it was just brutal. And this was after having probably burned over 10,000 calories the previous 24 hours and all the different exercises and things that we were doing. And so this evolution was called the story of suffering because we had to push this truck five, six thousand pound thing with a few guys just through the most terrible landscape. And the concept was was like, listen, you can get behind this truck and you can push it. And in every moment and in every second, you could hate it and you could be wondering when it's going to be over. And you could tell yourself a story and a narrative of why to pay all this money to be here. What the hell does this have anything to do with the things that I'm doing? I'm just trying to grow my business. I'm just trying to become a better man or a leader. And you guys are having me push this truck and my back is sore and I'm hungry and my legs are exhausted. And so it's like, you could sit there in every moment while you push that truck and you could tell yourself a story. And the type of story that you tell yourself determines your experience. The alternative thing that you can do is you can accept that, hey, I've got to push this thing. I don't know how long I get to push it for, but I just got to push. And the way that I get from point A to point B is I put my hand on the vehicle. I look down and I just put one foot in front of the next. And that is the only thing that I focus on. I don't think about how long it's going to take. I don't think about why I'm here, you know, with what the purpose is, you know, why they're making me do this. I'm not thinking about my back pain or my leg pain or my shoulders being exhausted from putting my arms up. I'm just putting mechanically one foot in front of the next in front of the next in front of the next in front of the next. And that becomes the meditation. It doesn't matter what is going on. It doesn't matter what raw sensations I'm feeling in the body. I simply focus my mind on mechanically moving one foot in front of the other in front of the next in front of the in front of the next. And when it comes to anything challenging in our life, this is what we are called to do. Yet, if we sit back and we bitch and moan about it and we're constantly telling ourselves stories about what it means and poor little me and how did I end up here and what about my neighbors and what about all my friends and what about the world, right? And we just sit there and we constantly worry and ruminate about the thing. That thing only amplifies, right? You have to understand that who you are fundamentally at the base layer of reality is simply a conscious awareness. That is it. Everything else is a story. And if you don't believe me, just dig into all the philosophical and spiritual texts, go read all the books on therapy. It's just it's common knowledge at this point, right? Like you are simply a conscious observer and that is it. It's a pattern. It's a program that came from somebody else's vehicle. Somebody else's thought pattern. And what's a thought? It's this abstract phenomenon that comes out of nowhere. If I were to ask you, what's your next thought going to be? You couldn't tell me. You could tell me it's the fridge, but where did that come from? In five minutes from now when you're not paying attention, when you just get another thought, where does that come from? We don't know. Thoughts are an abstraction. And as you spend more time in meditation and you dig deeper into the world of mindfulness, you recognize that, dude, we just have these thoughts. And they produce 60 to 90,000 of them a day. And they're constantly shifting. They're impermanent and mostly unreliable. We're continually thinking about things and creating narratives and stories and structures about things that never even come to you. So you have to get to this place where you can begin to recognize that, hey, whatever I'm doing, wherever I'm going, I can be a witness. I can be a witness and I can just focus in on the present moment. And that's what we're called to do on this journey of quoting drinking, right? This is a evolutionary process in our mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual health. This is a evolution in our relationship to how we manage our internal state of reality. And when I say internal state of reality, I mean, right, if consciousness is this desktop, in which we can view, right? We've got our five senses and we're taking data in. We're ability to simply observe the data that's coming in, right, or being produced in our mind, and to observe the data that we're feeling sensationally within the body. And what we do with that data determines our reality. It's not that complicated, right? You are a witness to stories and narratives that are constantly being constructed. You are not the stories and narratives. You are the witness to it, right? It's like you're sitting in a movie theater watching a movie, right? I was just doing this yesterday. I watched a couple movies with my girlfriend and I was sitting on my couch and I was looking at the TV. I wasn't the TV. I wasn't the characters. I wasn't the one going through the problem. I was the one watching it, right? And similarly with you, with whatever it is you're going through, you have the capacity to sit back and to watch it. You have the ability to sit back in a detached way, observe and notice the story, right? Now the kind of the, I don't know if the right word is dichotomy or paradox, but what's happening here is that you're both the one observing and the one telling the story. But when you can take a step back and you can sit in the seat of the observer, you can begin to audit that narrative, right? And you can witness it and you can change the story. This is cognitive behavioral therapy. You go pay a therapist, just sit there and you tell him, you know, what's going on. And they'll say, okay, well, you just told me this. Have you thought about reframing it in this way? Have you considered this perspective? Have you considered this alternative? Have you considered this viewpoint? Right? And we have the capacity to do this in everything that we do, especially on this journey. And this journey calls for it so much because the stories that we tell ourselves about alcohol, the stories that we tell ourselves about whether we're giving it up or we're missing out or everybody's having a better time while we're over here, determine how our experience of sobriety unfolds. Right? If you think that you're giving up alcohol, like you're giving something up, you're losing something, then if that's the story, then as a byproduct, what happens is you are now living as if you're in a deficit state, like you're missing something. So there's always going to be this void. But if you recognize that you're intentionally in a powerful way choosing to not drink, because when you look at alcohol, you associate it with poison, with toxins, which with something that destroys your life, eliminates all the things that you actually care about and value, like your family, your time, your health, your friends, your relationships, the quality of your work, your responsibility, your leadership? If you begin to associate alcohol with all those things, and then you recognize that you're making a powerful choice every single day to no longer associate yourself with that, then you get to move forward powerfully. Right? And then you begin to see that anybody else who's still playing that game of being caught in that vicious cycle where they're filtering everything through alcohol and alcohol is everything as a means to an end to go drink, then you can have a sense of gratitude for no longer being in that cycle. Right? So the story that we tell ourselves is everything. It's everything. Right? How big you become in life, you know, the impact that you have, how far reaching your energy goes, in terms of your friends, your relationships, the line of work, you know, everything, is all about the story that you tell yourself. Is it possible for me or is it not possible for me? Is it only for certain types of people or is it for other types of people? Right? Like the story that you tell yourself determines your experience of reality. So like I challenge you, you know, grab a pen and paper and grab your journal and start writing out like stream of consciousness. What is the story in narrative that I'm constantly telling myself about myself, about other people, about the world at large? Right? Dude, you're a free agent, okay? And I'm not sitting here saying that, you know, like, whatever, you can tell yourself whatever story that you want. But you have to understand that with every story comes an output, comes some level of consequence. Sometimes the consequences are good. Sometimes they're not so good. But here's the deal. It's like, if you, here's the, like, so here's an interesting way to think about it, okay? Because there's so many people on earth and there's so many perspectives and so many viewpoints, everything becomes convoluted. And so our sense of self, our sense of perception, our grasp on reality, becomes very muddied. So here's a thought experiment for you to help you understand the importance of the stories that you tell yourself. So right now, let's say there's 8 billion people on earth. Imagine systematically removing each and every person, one by one by one, all the way down until you're the last person left on earth, okay? I'm gone, everybody, you know what's gone? It's just you on planet earth and nothing else has changed, right? You've still got nature and animals and cities and everything else, but you're the only person left. At this point, think about the value of your stories. Think about the value of your perceptions. And think about how when you have nobody else to compare it to, not the media, what they're telling you, not all the politics and the politicians, not the world leaders, not the establishment, not your friends Suzy down the street, or your parents, or your kids, or anybody else. When you have nobody else's perspectives, think about the value of your story. About what's left, about what's possible. When you eliminate every single person on earth, every other form of perception, every dogma, every ideology, you're left with you floating on a rock in the middle of infinite space. You have no idea why you're here, where you're going, what the purpose is, or what the hell's going on. At that point, you could be like, wow, we're just out here creating stories. You have no way to verify anything. You have no way to know. It's just you're just this conscious witness that's telling yourself stories. And when you take it into context like that, you can begin to see like, dude, the value of your story, it matters. It matters. Because if you're the last person left on earth and you tell yourself a story about how you can't survive and it's not possible for you, well, then guess what, you're done. But if you change your story, and you begin to change that story into one of empowerment of possibility, well, then you're going to go out and you're going to figure it out. And the stories that we tell ourselves as it relates to alcohol, man, you have to begin to look at them in a more empowering way. I know the traditional 12-step recovery AADL, the first thing they tell you is that you're powerless. And that's just horseshit. It's horseshit. If you look at every neuroscience-based and medical article that has any level of research behind it, when it comes to people getting sober, when it comes to people overcoming their addiction, the first and most important thing that is necessary is the feeling of empowerment, a feeling of having some sense of control or agency over one's life. You can't tell an addict, somebody who feels like, everything is slowly and surely dwindling in front of them, that they're powerless. It's not a good recipe for success. And if you look at traditional success rates in AA and things like that, they're just not that great. It's just due to addictions, a tricky deal. But you have to start with a belief that things could get better. It's like I tell this to people all the time, like, "Dude, you've got your life, whatever it is." Now imagine what's going to happen six to 12 months from now if you just stop pouring poison into the machine. Dude, it could only get better. But you have to be willing to endure the early challenges of some of the withdrawal of agitation and anxiety and poor sleep and some craving and stuff like that. Right? And maybe a little bit of boredom on the weekends because you're used to drinking on the weekends and you're going to have to endure what feels like a sacrifice of not going out to some dinners or hanging out with people who like to drink. Right? You have to be willing to tell yourself a different story about those things. Because if you look at them and you just tell yourself deficit, deficit, deficit deficit, deficit, well, like, what kind of life is that? What kind of game is that that you're playing with yourself? You can change the story. You can change the narrative. It's all about what you choose to focus on. So part of the reason I wanted to talk about this story, the story concept is when I was at the retreat, one of the days we did this sweat lodge. And so we built this sweat lodge from scratch. And there's about 30 of us. And we were in that sweat lodge for around three hours. OK, now I don't know who's listening to this. If you've ever been in a sauna or in a steam room, but general consensus is that when you're typically any-- I mean, depending on the heat level, sometimes they vary. Typically between 170 and about 200 is what most sauna and steam room sit at. You can be in that heat for about, on average, like 20 to 30 minutes is what most people do. I would say 15 to about 30 minutes. Some people hit 35, 40, maybe 45, but 15 to 30 is really like 90% of people I'd say. And so, dude, when you hit that 30 minute mark where you're like, I'm ready to get the fuck out, it's hot. You start panicking a little bit how hot it is. That's about the wall that we hit in hour and a half into the sweat lodge. So we all stayed in there for another hour and a half at that moment where alarms, like sirens, were going off on every level, mentally, emotionally, physically. I mean, the level of heat that we were all in, and the fact that we all stayed for another hour and a half, that was, I mean, it's like it's still sitting with me to this day, to this moment. It was one of the most profound experiences I'd ever gone through. Because when you think you're maxed out, when you think that you absolutely cannot stand it, like you discover that you can go so much farther. So when you're in that sweat lodge, when you're in that sweat lodge, and you are like max capacity, you're like, I'm ready to get out of this thing, OK? And your mind is freaking. Your body is on fire, right? Like the raw, and I love just using this word. I'm such a fan of moving away from the concept of feeling and emotions and moving towards sensation. Because in our journey of learning how to mentally and emotionally regulate, we have to learn how to objectify the feelings and emotions that we feel. OK, most of us were never taught what feelings and emotions are. We don't know how to interpret them. We don't know how to manage them. We don't know how to make sense of them. But what we can all agree on is that these are sensations that we feel in different parts of our body. Some people feel anxiety as this heavy weight in the middle of their chest. Some people feel it in their stomach. Some people feel stress as this weight like on their shoulders and upper back and traps. Sometimes it moves down into their arms or in their fingertips, right? But when we were in that sweat lodge, man, if you sat in there and you were just wondering when we were going to get out, you're fucked. Like, you would go crazy, right? You would literally go crazy. When you're-- this isn't like-- I'm not puffing up the numbers here. There's 30 people. You can interview them all. We're in there for three hours. And hour and a half in, you were at that max level. And it was the thing that I was most scared of, most most terrified of going into this thing, because I do sauna regularly. And I'm like, dude, I'm in here for 30 minutes. How am I going to go longer? Now granted, it wasn't a sauna. It was more of a steam room type deal. So we brought rocks in every, like, 45 minutes that were burning under a fire. We poured water on them, and we did four doors. And I'll go into the details at a later time. But yeah, like it-- so when you were there, and you were experiencing that, just super intense raw sensation, the story that you told yourself was everything. And so, the story that I told myself, that the guy eating it, had prepped us and he was talking about some different things was that this is just a perspective. So, for an hour and a half, that was my mantra. This is just a perspective. And I was so present. I was so present. I found this space inside of myself where I could simply observe. I was detachedfully. I was in a detached way, simply fully present and observing my entire body like in this intensely heightened state of sensation that I've never felt before. And the mantra was, this is just a perspective. And that helped me get through it. Right? And so, what does it mean? What does it mean to say this is just a perspective? It means that, hey, two hours ago, my core body temperature was fine. I was okay. I was totally comfortable. I was chilling outside. We all had our shirts off. We all were good. Then I came into this perspective of life where the raw sensations were more intense than anything I'd ever felt. More intense than any craving. More intense than any anger or frustration. More intense than any overwhelm or stress or fear like, dude, way more intense. Way more intense than any craving than any boredom. I'm talking, you're getting close to heatstroke. You're barely surviving. And everybody was okay and everybody was fine after. We got water and cooled down, whatever. But way more intense than anything. And I knew it was going to be over. I knew that. I knew that. We all knew that. And that's the perspective that we need to keep as we go through life when we have thoughts that are debilitating, negative, overwhelming, self-critical, judging of others, judging of the world. We get so caught up in this story. We're so convinced that we're right and that that person's wrong and that the world is this way. And then we start something happens. We get a craving or we get a trigger or we get overwhelmed or we get frustrated. And it's just, man, our brain goes into this primal state, right? Our ability to think rationally and logically, it becomes diminished and we're ready to fight or we're ready to run. We're ready to something. And we're so convinced. And we think that whatever that thing is, it's going to be there and we got to do something about it. You know, but all thoughts, all emotions are impermanent and always changing. They're cyclical. They come and they go, you wake up and you're tired. And then you wake up a little bit more and then you're kind of relaxed. And then you go and you take a cold shower and then you're awake and then you're a little hungry and then you eat and then you're full. And then you're a little tired so you have some coffee and then you have a lot of energy and then you get super focused and then you crash and so you have a little bit more caffeine and half way throughout the day. And then you get an email from your boss and then you're a little bit anxious and then you talk to a coworker and they said they got the same email so you feel a little bit better. And then, you know, 530 strikes and you know, you start to feel relief and you go home and then you get into traffic and you get frustrated and then you go home and something else happens. You know, and then you relax and then you've got kids that are screaming and then you got to deal with that and you get frustrated. You know, and then you got to cook dinner and then like, dude, it's just always changing. It's always in flux. All of it's impermanent. The cravings are impermanent. They last 15, 20, 30, 45 minutes at the most and then they start to subside. Your frustration with your kids will last 15 to 20 or 30 minutes and if you just sit there and observe it eventually that will subside. The hunger intensifies and then you satisfy it and then that subsides. Dude, your ability to step back and to be a witness to reality. Your ability to step back and become the observer of your reality. Your ability to step back and simply be a expansive vessel that doesn't judge or tell a story or construct a narrative or apply a meaning to something. We'll allow you to be able to begin to move through life in a more harmonious way when your ego that wants to hold on to everything and could control everything Could just step back and recognize that hey if you didn't think for a week Guess what besides your job or whatever else like things would be fine Guess what if you didn't apply a story or a narrative to every little thing in your life? Guess what everything would be fine. I Think a lot of us forget that the mind is a tool It is not who you are you are not the voice inside your head you are the observer of it And if you've gone to therapy basically like Save yourself 10 years of therapy and if you just understand that one concept and then read the right books like you can kind of figure everything else out You know, and I'm not saying you know Advocating for you to not go to therapy trauma is real and in all these things but like Making this shift taking this step within how you manage your conscious interface From being fully identified with the voice stories and narratives and fully identified with the feelings and emotions aka sensations Like your ability to step back and hold compassionate space for both without judging either one of them and Becoming the compassionate witness Is going to do you more good in your growth in every capacity as a human being than almost anything else that you can do I Think largely becoming an adult is this process right this personal development this personal growth this healing process is this process of Awakening out of autopilot and what what's autopilot autopilot is operating According to the programs and patterns of your mind and operating fully identified with the programs and patterns of your emotional system and Guess when those are established largely between zero and seven So who you think you are in the present moment is nothing more than a series of roadways or railroads rail road tracks Billions of established neural pathways that happened when your brain was in a hypnotic state between zero and seven Taking all information and literally from your environment and Doing something with that information in a very limited way because you have low intelligence low context and a limited map of reality Stories narratives beliefs perceptions self-image what's possible what's not possible Emotional patterns thought patterns right like this this process of growing healing and awakening overcoming our addictions and hitting that next stage of our Evolution as human beings is largely a process of undoing it's a process of undoing the things from the past Which at one point were helpful which served us which helped us survive but are no longer helpful That is why stepping back into the state of observation is so crucial This process of you know auditing who am I what stories and narratives am I telling myself? About my life about what the possibilities of the future are as it relates to my health my relationships my relationship with with alcohol my work my Possibilities of my business or my income or my finances or the impact that I want to have or these hobbies that I want to get into or These passions that I want to explore or these places that I want to want to inventor into Is it possible or is it not possible? What's it going to take? What's the story? What's the narrative? What's the path and process to get there? Do I have to grind and try to figure out everything myself or could I find somebody who's done it? Who could become my coach or my consultant? Right who could be there to be like hey guidepost a b c d e f g pay attention to him you're coming up on him Here's how to handle it this way here's how to think about it this way You know the story that we tell ourselves man it it drives and creates our experience of reality And so man going through that three hour sweat lodge It's like You're just not really afraid of that many things anymore after that You know if you can peacefully find a way to coexist with raw sensation that's a 15 out of 10 for an hour and a half There's not much you can't do and there's not much that you can really be fearful of You know again frustrated or angry or sad or bored or pissed like Dude you go do that It just like it pales in comparison it pales in comparison and so much of this journey So much of this journey. I say this all the time. It's largely this macro process of redefining your relationship to pain and just right when we become addicts when we develop a problematic relationship with alcohol right like Addict or not whatever alcohol use disorder falling somewhere on the spectrum. I'm not trying to label you or anybody else here But when we develop this kind of addictive type tendency, right this this bad habit, right which using Which is really just neuroplasticity at its highest effect We just we just kind of operate in these in these ways Right and in these ways they they become predictable and we have to be able to develop the capacity within ourself to step back and to observe the pain and the discomfort that that comes up right so okay Yeah kind of lost my my train of thought there for a second So when we fall into these patterns right our ability to handle pain really diminishes I mean if you haven't watched that video that Dr. Andrew Sheuberman posted about alcohol you should definitely watch it. It's like two and a half hours long or so Two hours and he goes super super deep into the science. It's like proven alcohol makes you less Resilient to stress it lowers your window of tolerance your ability to handle pain Not just physical pain that you're masking with alcohol but generally in life mental and emotional pain get smaller Right, so this process of overcoming our Addictions and transcending to a higher version of ourselves is largely this this macro process of learning How to reinterpret pain signals Right, and it doesn't mean that just because you let go of the alcohol now you're destined to just live with pain signals for the rest of your life No, you are evolving to a higher level of yourself which gets better at handling pain gets better at handling discomfort gets more resilient Right, you're it's it's like going from this person who can only run a mile and Once you come up on that mile, I mean your legs are exhausted your feet hurt your shoulders are sore from swinging your arms I mean your yet you can barely breathe Right to this person who can run a marathon Right, what's the difference? What's the difference between a person who can run a mile and a person who can run a marathon? Okay, well, yeah the person who can run a marathon is better conditioned for sure but the person who can run a marathon Has gotten to a place has trained themselves in such a way where they can peacefully coexist with prolonged levels of discomfort and pain That's it right what's the difference between the person who bags groceries at the store and the CEO of the company Right the person who bags groceries at the store can handle a minimum amount of complexity while the person who's running the business can handle a tremendous amount of complexity It could be the same person who just went through a process of redefining their relationship to pain and to complexity and to discomfort Right like just like when you step into a gym when you first step into that gym and you do bicep curls The fives or the tens are heavy. There's a tremendous amount of burn and lactic acid that builds up and you can only get a few reps But as you sit there and you do bicep curls for six months Guess what at month six you can rep 40s or 50s in each hand same person Right and so you got it that's like akin to your journey of quitting drinking right like You think that like we have this fear that the boredom and that like all the loss or like all the things that you think are scary and challenging like all the missing out with my body is in like the dinners and just nonsense nonsense You know that you think is like so painful It's like you become more resilient right after six months It's just like curling fifties and then you put tens in your hand and you can do thousands of reps or hundreds of reps and you don't even feel it Right like once you can curl fifties in each hand you can do You can probably do 500 reps or more of tens right but that first week you could do like six or eight Right, this is the process of strength and resilience of increased capacity to bear weight to bear stress to bear load to bear overwhelm Right you'll go you your your capacity expands Right and when we're in a in an addictive type cycle and an addictive type state our capacity is very small So we're literally following this tiny let's say quarter-size loop over and over and over again It's this vicious cycle and we can't handle anything distress the boredom to over It's like, "Oh, it's too much. We just go straight to the drug," because that's the only thing that we found relief in, because we don't have these other tools. We haven't developed it within ourselves. Right? It's like swimming. If you're in the shallow end and you don't know how to swim, you're going to be scared to go into the deep end. You're going to stay in the two feet or in the three feet where your feet reach the floor. But guess what? Like, learning to swim and learning to develop the mechanics within your arms and your legs and the way that you breathe, right? Going into the four feet and the five feet, "Yeah, it's going to be scary. It's the first time you can't reach the floor like whatever." But eventually, once you learn the mechanics, you can go and swim in the ocean, where it's 5,000 feet deep. You know? So the story that we tell ourselves about this process, about who we are, about our life, about our capabilities, about what's possible, about what life could be is very important. Right? The story that you tell yourself in the moments you have a craving matters. The stories that you tell yourself when you are trying to coexist with very intense raw sensation in your body matters. The story that you tell yourself about what you think is suffering matters. Because you can experience pain, but pain is different from suffering. Pain is different from suffering. That's really, really, really important to let that soak in. Boredom can be defined as a, a, a, a, some sense of pain. It's like, oh, man. I don't know what to do with myself. Nothing seems like that satisfying. I don't know what should I do or should I go. It kind of sounds silly, right? Something that we're so afraid of. It's like, dude, boredom. You're just sitting there, dude. You're fine. You're safe. They're on a movie. They're on a YouTube video. We're so afraid of boredom. I'm going to be bored. So what's, what's, what's going to happen if you get bored? Huh? You can be bored for a few hours. What's going to happen? You can go walk. You can go eat some food. Face time a friend. Put on some cat videos on YouTube. I don't know what you like. Like if you're an adult and you're deathly afraid of boredom, take a moment to pause and ask yourself, okay? I'm this conscious witness inside of this vehicle. And this vehicle is walking on this piece of rock that's hurling through space. And I get one of me as far as I know. And I have an undisclosed period of time left. And this is an insane gift that I'm experiencing. Yet I am unwilling to simply coexist within this vehicle, this vessel that I inhabit for a few hours without stimulation. How did I get here? How did I arrive at such a place? And why am I so afraid of it? What do I think is going to happen? You know, there's so many stories that you can begin auditing. So many stories about yourself, about your mindset, about your fears. And I encourage you to do so. Grab your journal and write out every story that you tell yourself about what you think is going to happen on this journey or what you're so fearful of. And then audit it, write it down and then put three bullet points under each one. And write out like poke holes in it. You know what evidence do I have to support this? You know? But am I still safe? What are some alternatives ways to think about this? Man, it's like, it's so important. It's so important to audit the stories that you tell yourself. If the story that I told myself in that sweat lodge was when's this going to be over? When's this going to be over? I can't wait to get out. Dude, I would have been fucked. The whole thing, like, it was miserable. It was miserable. But it would have been way worse. It would have been like brutal. But I just told myself a different story. And guess what? You can tell yourself a different story too about all of it, about your relationship. You can tell yourself a different story. You can tell yourself a different story about your work. You can tell yourself a different story about who you are. You can tell yourself a different story about what it all means. And guess what? Like, it's a personal story. It's happening within the fabric of your consciousness. You don't have to share the story with anybody else. But the story becomes a defining bridge for how you move through that experience. So if you're telling yourself shit stories, try changing them to more empowering ones. Cognitive behavioral therapy. It's super simple. You just, what's the opposite? And if you're telling yourself a shit story that's just super disempowering, try to take a step back, move back into that state of observation, the compassionate witness, and watch yourself doing that. Imagine you're up in a phone, like in a security room, and there's like a camera looking down at you, and see yourself over there in front of you, like telling yourself that story. And if it's a negative story, like see your head kind of down and like, you know, hunched over, like you're kind of depressed, and be like, hey, like, would you tell that story to like your kids or your partner or somebody you really love or care about your best friend? It's like, no. Okay, well then try changing the story. What would you tell them and come up with that and then just repeat that to yourself ten times or a hundred times and just blindly be willing to believe that. You don't need anybody's permission to change your thoughts. You don't need anybody's permission to change your beliefs. You can wake up today or tomorrow and just choose a different story, a different narrative, and you can blindly run with that. If it feels good to you and it's good for you and the people around you and good for the world and it's constructive and empowering, you can believe that. And guess what? When you just start showing up that way, two people around you into the world, they're just going to assume that you changed. They don't know all the details of your past, of your fears and insecurities and imposter syndrome and all the other things and the reasons that you've stacked up a mile high about why it's not possible or hard or whatever else it is. They don't know. Just like when you are at the grocery store and you see somebody and you don't know anything about them, but they happen to maybe be really lively and charismatic and happy or I don't know. You know, person with a YouTube channel and they're presenting all this information and you really enjoy it and you're like, "Man, this person's awesome." But you don't know what's going on behind the scenes. And so reality becomes a mirror. It just begins reflecting back. That person chose to be positive and constructive and to be of service and now they're helping you and you're returning the favor back and boom, like things change. Things change. Reality is a mirror to your internal state of consciousness. Reality simply mirrors back what you hold true inside. So you've got to begin auditing the stories and narratives that you're telling yourself, especially as it relates to alcohol. You know? But not only especially as it relates to alcohol to everything, right? Because at the end of the day when we go to quit drinking, putting the bottle down to step one, beginning to manage all the stories and narratives that were leading us to drink, right? That's the real work about yourself, about yourself image, about possibilities, beliefs, your family, your friends, how you grew up, your childhood, your parents, your work, your boss, the government, whatever. You know? Those are the things that we really have to pay attention to. And the story that you tell yourself is so important. You know, if you're going to tell yourself that alcohol is this thing that I'm missing out on, right? Now, I'm losing out. Be sure to also include all the other things that you're losing. You're also losing the hangovers. You're also losing the anxiety. You're also losing the generalized depression. You're also losing the accelerated aging. You're also losing the extra 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 pounds that you've gained. Spending time in energetic environments that bring your vibration down. You're also losing the shame and the guilt that you wake up with every morning. also losing the. compulsion to constantly think about alcohol. You're also losing all the risk that you were putting yourself in as it relates to driving or texting people or calling people or saying things to your family, friends, partner, spouse, that will get you in trouble. Pay attention to the whole deal. Pay attention to all of it. Don't be selective in your thought process. Be selective in your thoughts. Let me retrace that. When you think about alcohol, for example, don't just focus on the things that, look at the whole picture. Play the tape forward. When we think about alcohol, we're like, "Man, it drink sounds good." This thing inside me, this sensation that's too overwhelming that's going to pass in an hour. I got to act on it. It's like, "Okay, well, play the tape forward all the way through." I used to drink right now, but right now I'm not drinking. Your brain's focusing on that 15, 20-minute rush, and it's conveniently forgetting about all the other things. The shame, the guilt, the regret, the pain, the vicious cycle, the hangover, the brain fog, the lack of clarity, the lack of motivation to do things and hang out with your kids and your partner like you should be, instead, you're off in the corner, drinking, where you're coming short. It forgets about all that. Don't be lazy in your thinking. Consider all of it. Consider all of it. The addicted brain just wants to focus on the reward and doesn't give a shit about all the consequences. You've got to play the tape forward. You play the tape forward in almost every other area of your life. Why are you not constantly playing the tape forward with alcohol? It's so simple. Play the tape forward every time you think about alcohol. The story is not, "Oh, I get to have a drink and finally just feel better." No, it's, "I drink. I choose to drink, knowing its consequences." Then I wake up in the middle the night at 3 a.m. Then I wake up in the morning and then I start craving alcohol again. Now I'm back in the cycle. Now I have guilt and shame. Now I beat myself up for doing something I knew that I shouldn't have done. That wasn't really an alignment with who I am. Then I got to have brain fog for the first half of the day and then I got to show up. Then I'm going to be less motivated. I'm going to eat food for lunch and then I'm going to skip my gym. Then I'm going to get a craving again because now the alcohol is leaving my system and I'm withdrawing. The craving is just the withdrawal of the alcohol leaving the system. That's why cravings at day 30 aren't nearly as bad as they were on day 3 or 4 because the first week is you're going through this intense physical withdrawal process. Your brain is soaked with alcohol, ethanol, poison. Your organs are soaked with poison. They figured out how to co-survive with a toxic poison that destroys its cells, its normal functioning that alters it. It wants more because it taps this reward center. Can't be fucking with the reward center. Not a good thing to do. We should work hard for our rewards. We should put in effort. Reward should only come and be tied to effort. There's no free lunch in nature. Remember this folks. Take away all technology and progressive evolution and imagine your back, your indigenous tribe. In animals, not just going to come up and kill itself for you for you to eat it. There has to be effort that goes into everything. A huge farm isn't just going to appear for you to have all this surplus and abundance of food. There has to be effort that goes into it. That's not how nature work. Nature requires effort. A lot of times in life when we feel like we've lost our way, maybe we're parents and we have kids and the kids are growing up. We're not emptying. We had this long career that we just exited from or we sold off or we retired. We started to lose that sense of purpose or direction or who we are. We lose our way. We don't know where to put our effort in anymore. This is a super common one. It doesn't just have to be in our later years. It happens a lot during our younger years too. In our 20s and 30s. Remember that. We are all hurled into becoming a human. Most of us don't get the blueprint. We don't get the manual. Even if we had good loving parents, they couldn't be there every step of the way. Nobody's got the blueprint. Hey, welcome to being a human. 101. Here's 20 chapters on how your brain works, your nervous system, mental and emotional regulation, all the important things of life, how to cultivate skills, how to improve yourself confidence, how to develop your voice, how to gain technical ability in these different areas, how to become a productive member of society. When we don't have all these answers and we're just kind of floating and moving through, it's like, "Oh, yeah, we'll just tap the reward center." That's easy. Just make yourself feel good temporarily in the moment. There's no free lunch. You have to understand this game. It's a vicious cycle. You can't win the game by out drinking, out maneuvering, outsmarting the alcohol. Every time you drink it, it pulls you in deeper. Imagine chains, chains that are locked to your ankles and to your arms. Every time you take a swig, the chains get tighter. You think that you're being more sneaky by switching from liquor to beer to wine, to not having it in the house, to only doing it on vacations, to like, you think you're being sneaky, but you can't. That's not how it works. You are an organic meat suit with organs that have a timeline. You have a brain that has a sensitive balance of neurotransmitters. Every time you consume the drug, it tips, it tips to higher levels of pain. It reduces the baseline, reducing your dopamine, creating more of a deficit. So when the drug is gone, you feel more bored, more anxious, a little lower, more motivated, or excuse me, less motivated, less apt to want to push, less apt to want to be creative. You can't win. Every time you take a drink, it pulls you in a little bit deeper. So the way that you do win, the way that you do win is just by recognizing, dude, this game is rigged. It's a rigged game. It's like going onto a casino floor and the top of this game you go to play, it's a hundred percent lose rate. You put in a dollar and it only accepts hundreds. Every time you put in a dollar, you get, excuse me, every time you put in a hundred bucks, it gives you a dollar back. That's what the game of alcohol is. It's rigged. Every time you put money in, it's always going to return you a tiny, tiny fraction of what you give to it. You're sacrificing yourself to the alcohol. You're sacrificing yourself to it. Here you go, alcohol. Here's my time. Here's my energy. Here's my willpower. Here's my focus. Here's my cognitive ability to concentrate. Here's my creative problem solving. Here's my motivation. Here's my leadership. Here is my energy. Here's my clarity of thinking. Here's my clarity of articulation. Here's my focus of value. Here you go. In exchange, help me numb myself. In exchange, tinker with my brain to make me feel artificially good for a few minutes. All those things that you gave to it, it takes from you. The next day, all those things are gone. For what? For 15, 20, 30 minutes? No. Learn to peacefully coexist with the raw sensation of boredom and anxiety and agitation for a little while. Realize that boredom and anxiety and agitation isn't going to kill you. It's not going to hurt you. You can be safe on your couch feeling bored. You can be safe on your couch with some anxiety or some stress or some overwhelm. Guess what? Welcome to being a human. The anxiety, stress, overwhelm, boredom, all the sensations that you're running from, like a little child that doesn't want to go to school. Those are signals. Those are feedback. Those are data points. The human operating system when it's operating in harmony doesn't just randomly produce. produce anxiety. It doesn't just randomly produce stress. It doesn't randomly produce overwhelm. These are signals. These are data points. These are feedback. It's like, hey, there's something here in the processing of your internal representations in the hard drive. You're pulling them up. The way that you're pulling them up is producing this signal, right? You're 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, but you're still feeling the anxiety that you felt when you were seven. You're still feeling the fear. You're still feeling like, hey, this isn't for you to numb from. This is feedback. This is the check engine light coming on for your human avatar saying, hey, oh, you've got these sensations called depression where everything feels heavy and you feel unmotivated and nothing seems like it really has a purpose or meaning. Oh, got it. OK, don't just take a pill to mask the depression. Get to the source of it. Babies aren't born depressed. Depression comes as a result of pains and challenges and traumas that go unresolved for too long, that affect multiple aspects of our brains, perception, and neural network to where everything becomes hard and pointless and hopeless, because it feels like you're powerless to make changes to your life. That's depression. So we don't just drink over that. We get back to the source of, oh, when did this start? Oh, when you were seven? Oh, when you were 12? Oh, when you were 14? Oh, when your parents got divorced? Oh, well, what did that mean for you? Well, it meant this. Oh, OK, got it. So here's some different ways to think about it. Here's some ways to process and move that energy through our body. And here's some alternative ways and structures and plans and processes you can put into place to help regain that strength, that fortitude, that confidence, that self-trust that you deserve. So the stories that we tell ourselves are important because they determine our experience of reality, whether you think you can or can't-- I mean, such a-- everybody's heard it. Was it Henry Ford? Whether you think you can or can't, either way you're right. Nobody's putting a gun to your head. You get to decide how your journey unfolds. Sure, there's going to be people on the outside that say, hey, you should do this or you should do that. Or your parents might try to guilt you or shame you for making that decision over that decision. But at the end of the day, you're the one who chooses. You're the one who chooses how your story of life unfolds, according to what you tell yourself. Is it too hard? Is it too scary? Is it not possible for you? Great. Universe is like, all right. It's like a magic genie, whatever you want, whatever you sincerely ask of it, whatever you sincerely intend and put action behind. It's like, OK, you want this? Good. We'll give you that. So there's this extreme element of responsibility and ownership that we have to adopt. We have to adopt. More so is people who have a problematic relationship with alcohol than anything else. You know? People who overcome their addictions, like-- and you finally do it, you take ownership for it. You're like, I fucking did it. And it's one of the most beautiful, powerful things that nobody can take away from you. Right? We've got to get rid of this powerlessness thing. You're powerful. Not powerful that you can just keep drinking and go out and control your alcohol, because you've got power over it. No, not that kind. You've got power to make new choices. You've got the power to decide new decisions. You've got the power to think in new ways. You've got the power to transform your lifestyle and your habits and your behaviors. And you've got the power to expose yourself to new information that you don't have. And you've got the power to follow through. And you've got the power to reach out. And you've got the power to be proactive. And you've got the power to connect with others. And you've got the power to show up and to say something different and to do something different. Then you've ever done before. But you have to believe that it's possible. And man, you've got to cultivate the courage within yourself in the beginning, because here's the deal, man, like getting sober and staying sober, the hardest part is like the first month, couple months, few months. Once you do that, this machinery is healing itself. Like, remember that you don't have to digest your food, my friend. Remember that it falls asleep and it wakes up for you. Remember, you go to the bathroom and you don't have to handle your organs and how they move it through your body. Remember when you cut your arm, it bleeds for a little while. And then it mends the wound. This thing, it's always trying to heal itself. It's always trying to maintain this harmony and homeostasis. And when you stop pouring poison into it for long enough, it will find a way to recalibrate. But you've got to be proactive with it. You can't just put the bottle down and then expect everything's going to get fixed. This is your going to school here. Subride the process of putting the bottle down. You're going back to spiritual school. And when I say spiritual, I don't mean religious or one thing or another. Spiritual just encompasses all of life. You're going to the school of learning how to manage your mind and your emotions. You're going to the school of recalibrating your mindset and your perspectives. You're going to the school of learning how to transform the way that you live and what you do on a day-to-day basis to manage this thing. Just like you go and you put oil inside your car, you've got to take care of this vehicle. You've got to do things holistically on a regular basis. You've got to make sure you're drinking a lot of water. You've got to make sure that you're eating good food. That's not a process. You've got to make sure that you're meditating and managing that space. You've got to make sure that you're reflecting on your mind and in your thoughts. There's things that you have to do to do upkeep. And if you haven't been doing upkeep in any way for the last 10, 20, 30 years, and things are declining, well, it's like you go to the doctor or you go to get your car serviced after 30 years of driving it, 20 years of driving it, and they're like, we'll do it. Yeah, there's no maintenance that's been done. The alcohol thinks of distraction, my friend. It's not even about the alcohol. The alcohol is this thing that you drink. It makes you feel good for a little bit. And then like you crave it, you know, for sometimes like, that's not the thing. The thing is the underlying. What are the stories, narrative thoughts? What are the raw sensations that fluctuate through the body? When do they fluctuate at what time in response to what internal representations that we create? Everything's a story. Everything is an internal representation composed of a visual auditorium and a aesthetic component. Every memory, every thought, every perception is a picture or a movie in our mind. It has a voice or a narrative or a story and then it has an associated feeling. And guess what, when you understand that the basis by this, by how this, this machinery produces our experience of reality, you can begin to make adjustments at these different levels and you can develop control and agency over the operating system. But alcohol is a distraction. It's a distraction for all of that. Alcohol is a distraction against your personal evolution. It's the thing that puts all of your pain on pause. Let me repeat that. Alcohol puts your pain on pause. You're not resolving it. It's making it worse. You're adding tons of new pain to your life. You're just digging yourself a grave. You're digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole every time you drink. The protector becomes the prison guard. I got that from my coach who he got it from his coach. In the beginning, we thought that alcohol was protecting us from our self. We thought it was protecting us from having to feel the loss of the parent who passed away. We thought it was protecting us from having to feel the pain of the split in our marriage. We thought it was protecting us from having to think about our broken childhood. We thought it was protecting us from the long shitty work week and our asshole boss. We thought it was protecting us from the kids who won't stop screaming and nagging. We thought it was protecting us from this relationship that felt toxic. And maybe it did. Maybe in the beginning, it did. And so let's honor that. Thank you. Thank you. Let me acknowledge and honor the role that it served. But to recognize in this next chapter of my life, I'm committing to learning new tools, skills, and strategies to manage those things. And guess what? There's plenty of tools, skills, and strategies that will allow me to manage all of it. And I don't need any substance outside of my state. self to do that. It protects you in the beginning, temporarily, but eventually it forces you to go through it for everything. It says, "Oh, you want to have fun? Well, you can't have fun unless you go through me. Oh, you want to go out and socialize? Well, who do you think you are? You can't go out and just be yourself and have fun and talk to people without having a drink? Oh, you want to go to dinner and eat. You want to eat food without having a glass of wine? You want to have a steak? You want to have a nice seafood dinner? Who do you can't do that? You can't have steak without me. Oh, you want to go out and hang out with friends and talk about life and celebrate growth and progress and what you're up to and what you've been working on or what you've been going through as a person? You can't do that. You can't do that without having some alcohol. Oh, you want to go listen to your favorite band? Can't do that without alcohol. Do you see how insane it is? You want to go to the movies? You want to go out and hang with your buddies? You want to go play a sport where you have to be athletic and have precision of thought and body mechanics like golf or whatever else? Can you see how our culture has imprisoned us into thinking and believing that basic things must require a drug? If you cannot see the matrix, then you need to rewatch it. You need more help because it's it's it's everywhere. It's in front of us. And quitting drinking is it's a power move. It's a power move. When everybody around you is drinking, when everybody is partaking, to be the one who's fully present, fully sober, able to handle things if things got crazy is the responsible one to operate a vehicle to get people to safety. That is a power move. That is a source of power and leadership. And sometimes you know you got to start seeing yourself as that person. You got to start seeing yourself as the leader of the group. You got to start seeing yourself as the person who goes against the grain. You got to see yourself as the person who doesn't follow the crowd who isn't a sheep. Not to say that everybody who drinks alcohol is a follows a crowd in a sheep. But like to do the opposite means that you're not you're not doing that anymore. You're not playing that game. And it's not a loss. It's a game. Remember when you stop pouring poison to the system, your thoughts become clearer. You become more emotionally regulated. You feel better about yourself. You have less anxiety. You wake up feeling refreshed. You get incredible sleep. Sleep like a baby. You don't have these constant lingering feelings of you know shame and guilt going into your day. You're not always thinking about filtering life through when the next choice opportunity to have a drug is going to be dude everything gets better. You get healthier. You lose weight. Your skin becomes vibrant. You know people start looking at you and asking you what's changed. You're happier. You can appreciate the little things. Life becomes fulfilling. You can go travel and do all the things that you want to do without worry, without risk. You know you stop getting into dumb fights and arguments with your children and your partner. Everybody likes being around you more. And in order to get to that version of yourself you have to develop the courage inside of yourself to learn how to peacefully coexist with some sensations that just you've been running from for a while and to recognize that you can coexist with fear. You can coexist with stress. You can coexist with some anxiety for a while. You can coexist with with stress or agitation. You can coexist with with whatever with whatever. This is where you're an adult now my friend. You get to discern the difference between fear and discomfort and danger. If you're in danger you don't want to coexist with danger. Okay. If you're about to get hit by truck you want to move. You don't want to run onto oncoming traffic. You don't want to drive off a cliff. Those things are dangerous. Those things can harm you. Fear. Right. When you're sitting at home on the couch in your office. Can't really harm you. Anxiety, you know, feels like needles feels like a weight in the middle of your chest. Doesn't doesn't feel good but you're okay. Right. As long as you're physically in a safe environment. Right. If you're feeling those sensations as a result of internal representations that you're constructing which, you know, create the sense of impending doom will then work on that. That's what you have to work on. Stop thinking alcohol is the end all be all solution. It's like no work on your mind. Work on the stories. Work on the narratives. Work on the way that you it's you. You're the one living in your own body. Your own vehicle. Your own avatar. That's your anxiety. That's your overwhelm. That's your stress. Guess what? You don't get to blame your kids. You don't get to blame the world. You don't get to blame the government. That's inside of you. That's your responsibility. That's your job. You know, nobody makes you feel anyway. You decide how you want to feel. You choose how you want to feel based on how you interpret the data coming in through your five senses. Okay. And maybe you're not choosing it in the moment but the data coming into your five senses is triggering some old memory that's somewhat similar. And so your brain is pulling it like a predictive modeling tool and saying, oh, this is related to this. So, okay, the protocol is to feel anxious. Oh, the protocol is to feel fear. Oh, the protocol is to think that everybody out in the world is trying to fuck you. Oh, the protocol is to think that nobody can be trusted. Oh, the protocol is to think that it's all hopeless because you've tried and tried and tried in the past. So you can't do it again. That's those are the things that you've got to that's the game. That's the school. That's the process, right? And when I say when you get to the other side and life becomes so much more open and beautiful and abundant more than you can begin to imagine, it's because not just putting the bottle down, it's getting to a place where you work through all those things, all those internal stories and narratives and constructs and sensational oscillations in your body that were once debilitating, that were once keeping you down, operating at 10% of your potential, 15, 20% of your potential. That, that on the other side, my friend, is when life opens up 10x, 100x, who you become the way that your energy can express itself in the way that you move through the environment and the way that you speak, the way that you communicate the way that you lead your friends, your family, the world at large, your business. That is like it's a different version of you, right? Imagine who you are now and imagine all the problems that you're wrestling with and every capacity mentally, emotionally within your business, your family, and imagine having solved 90% of those 12 months from now. What would the possibilities be? How would you be feeling? What would your account look like? What would your, what would the quality of your relationships look like? But you have to be willing to do the work, you have to develop the courage inside of you to finally step into that place of witness, step into that place of observation, and to begin to notice the stories and the narratives, to begin to hold compassionate space for the oscillations of sensation that move through your body without running from them, learning to coexist with them, even if they're intense, and to check your five senses, look, where am I? Check your ground yourself, you know, am I safe? Am I okay? Okay, let me breathe. Let me breathe. Let me drop into the body. Let me ground. You know, let me call a friend, let me go on a walk, right? It all changes. It's all impermanent. That's what you have to recognize, especially in this early process as you get cravings and you're met with these critical choice points. Do I do this or do I do that? Always err on the side of doing the thing that you know is right that contains a level of discomfort and develop this capacity within yourself to say, "BOOM! Okay, this is the next test. Somebody invites me out Friday night to drinks and like, I know I'm, I don't know, this is usually the thing that maybe knocks me out, knocks me back. This is the next test. Let me choose the option that I know is right and let me piece, learn how to peacefully coexist with whatever that is. Let me audit the stories and narratives that come up while I'm sitting at home. Let me audit the sensations that I have in my body. How do I feel them? What do they feel like? Where do they move? Let me get to know them. Can I assign a color to them? You know, how long does it last? Let me journal about it. Get to know it, right? Like, so many of us are so discolored. connected or afraid of what's inside. Dude, it's already inside of you. The anxiety, the fear, whatever it is, it's already inside of you. Stop running from it. Notice it, get curious about it. Become this compassionate, expansive space in which you allow these things to exist. Like, at what point were we taught that like, well, a lot of us, we had these parents that suck it up, you don't cry. You can't come to the dinner table talking about how you feel. You sit down, you eat your food, you shut your mouth, and you go do something else when you're done. We don't talk about feelings and emotions here. Such an integral part of this avatar of this system. So invite, invite the ability, invite the capacity to bear witness to what's going on inside of you. You know, journal, reflect, ask questions. If you have a story that you're telling yourself that like, you know, you've been telling it for far too long and it's not helping, write that down on a piece of paper and write five more stories about that. Five alternative, more compassionate, more constructive stories. Like you would be telling your kids or your best friend or somebody that you truly cared about and circle the one that resonates with you. Most, you know. You have the ability to sit with the raw sensation. Okay. If I can do a three hour sweat lodge and if you were there with me, you would have done it too. I'm not like some special thing. Okay, there's 30 people in there, all different backgrounds, walks of life. We all stayed through it. You know, if, if, if, if, if I could sit there after an hour and a half of being done and go another hour and a half, you also have the capacity to sit with any raw sensation. And guess what? Like the more that you do it, the better that you get. That's like the big secret here. The more that you do it, the more you practice, the more you learn how to mentally and emotionally regulate, the better that you get. It's not like you're destined to climb an uphill battle for the rest of your life. You know, you got to think in like short time frames. You're just doing this one day at a time. But when people are like, man, it's been 30 days and all my problems aren't fixed, it's like, you've been drinking for 30 years, my friend. 30 years, day in and day out. So you got to be a little patient. You got to, you got to have a little compassion, okay? You know, it's like every day you broke your arm for 30, 30 years. And then it's like, okay, well, you finally stopped doing the thing that broke your arm. It's like, why is it, it healed? Dude, it takes a little bit of time to recover. But you just focus on today. That's the only thing that you have to ever focus on. When the pain gets high, when the, you know, the discomfort and the stress and the overwhelm and, you know, it's been a couple of weeks or a month, you're sober, six months in your sober and you don't think you can do it anymore and you're like, how the fuck am I going to continue to experience stress and overwhelm like this? I can't do this for the rest of my life. Bring yourself back to the present moment. I just have to figure out how do I get through today. Then by the time you go to sleep, you're going to wake up 50% better than the day before and you're going to be so grateful that you didn't drink. But it starts with step one. It starts with reaching out for help when you've just acknowledged within yourself that you can't do it alone. You know, I wouldn't have been able to do it alone. There's no way, no chance in hell. But like I said, you guys have heard me say before, I was an animal when it came to alcohol in animal. I was obsessed. All I could think about, all I wanted to do was fiend for the dopamine. You know, I'm a fiend for tapping that reward center. But dude, it's possible. It's possible. You gotta work a program. You gotta be proactive. That is the key. You have to be proactive. You have to take a proactive approach to your recovery. You don't just put the bottle down and then just sit on your ass. 80% of programs, 90% of programs out there that you go and you join these little things. I don't wanna name names. They all say do that. I mean, not all of them. I don't wanna generalize that statement. But a lot of them are like, listen, if you just eat ice cream all day, you're still winning. A day sober is, you're still winning the jackpot. And that's true. That's true. I don't wanna take away from that. You know, if you do nothing for a week, absolutely nothing but stay sober. And previously you had a problematic relationship with alcohol. Hey, you're still winning. I don't wanna take that away from anybody. But as a coach, like I'm sharing with you that like the broad general approach that I have come to find works most effectively is taking a proactive approach, not a reactive approach where you're on your heels, like reactively handling life and what comes. You wanna go out, like you're running with a spear, you're going to find the next target. You know, and give yourself some grace and you know, the first week or so as you withdraw from alcohol, you'll run a million miles an hour right off the out of the gates. But you know, you gotta do something different. You need tools and strategies and systems. And like I say, like maybe I'm not the person for it. Maybe you connect energetically more with other people. So find somebody else. But find the person that you feel most connected to energetically in the way that they speak and communicate and work with them. That's the most important thing when looking for a coach is going through their content and seeing who you vibe with, whose communication style, whose energy, you know, whose solutions, whose perspectives, whose results. You know, I'm sure there's some good people out there, but I feel like what I'm building is the best. Go to my website, www.thestobdrinkingcoach.com. If you scroll down to the bottom, I've got probably 500 more that I haven't added. Honestly, my website slows down too much. And honestly, I think now already, if you click it, it takes like 10 seconds to load because it's just loading all those like testimonials at the bottom. But yeah, I hope this episode, I trust, I trust this episode was helpful for you. I think regardless of who you are, where you're at, what stage of life, problem drinker or not, we can all benefit from taking a step back, spending more time as the observer in really auditing, what are the stories that I'm telling myself about myself, about who I am as a person, about my patterns and my programs, about how I show up in different contexts or instances, about my relationships, about my kids, about who they are, about what the possibilities could be in that container, about my work or my business or my career field, or the way that I provide service and contribute to people, about my health, about this nagging back pain, about these joints that have been bugging me, about my physique, about my weight, about my, you know, whatever, what are the stories, what are the narratives? And guess what, you can change them, you can change them. And when things get tough, you can find that space within yourself to peacefully coexist with the raw data, the raw sensations that might not feel the best. And that's okay. And to recognize that you're okay, that you're safe, that you're supported, despite the world, the way that it is, despite your boss being the way they are, despite the way the company's going, despite your friends or family, or your cousin, or the person, or that thing, or the other thing. You know, being able to discern in the moment, and to play the tape forward when it matters most, during those critical choice points in our life. That's all life is. The unfolding of somebody's life in every capacity, you look at somebody, two people run a contrastive analysis, person A, by all measures of, let's say, happiness and traditional success versus person B. Who's the opposite, let's say? It's just a series of millions of choice points. Do we do this or do we do that? Do we go towards the pain and discomfort to learn to grow and to become more resilient or do we give into the cheesets and the cheesy puffs? Do we go do the thing that provides instant gratification right now and don't give a shit about all the downturn consequences? Or do we choose the thing that maybe doesn't provide as much stimulation in the moment? But we know if practiced over and over and over again is going to lead us to our medium and long-term goals. You know, it's yours. You're free to choose. We are at each free agents and it's all a choice. It's all a choice. You get to choose within every capacity and an instance of your life, what you want to do. And so I really encourage you with every choice that comes up, every thought that comes up, begin this practice of mindfulness and play the tape forward. You're telling yourself this story, you're narrative that's disempowering, great, play that tape forward. What if I keep telling myself that for five more years? For 10 more years. On the alternative, you tell yourself an empowering story, hey, I can do this. Hey, these are the possibilities for me. I'm going to go out and achieve this. Beautiful. Play that tape forward. How amazing life could, could life get? How much more could you impact? How much more service could you provide? How much better of a leader could you become? How much more people could you lift up? Dude, it's just a series of choice points and the story that you tell yourself about each one of those choice points matters. The story that you tell yourself becomes your experience of reality. So if your experience of reality isn't what you want it to be, develop the courage to believe that you can change the story. And if you need better stories, start associating with people who tell better stories, who believe in greater possibilities. Man, I used to think coaching was a bunch of nonsense. But that was in my early 20s when I had a limited map of reality. I'd never really hired a coach before besides having a coach in football. I was like, oh, yeah, okay, the coach. Sure. Wasn't until I got into a coaching environment and surrounded myself with dozens and dozens and dozens of people who are playing the game of life at a much higher level and had ways of navigating reality that were beyond what I had really been exposed to that I was like, oh, oh, shit, okay. There's a different way people live. There's a different way people operate. And then it was the most transformative 18 months of my life. I went all in. I went all in. And if you are at this place where you're considering like starting this path, starting this journey, you have to go all in. But you just do it one day the time. So you don't you don't even have to go all in where I'm like, I'm never drinking again, but you got to go all in on today. And you got to make today the best that it can be. That's how a mountain is climbed one step at a time. You know, to climb up Mount Everest, how many steps does it take? I don't know. Thousands and thousands and thousands of steps. If it's like 27,000 feet elevation, let's consider it's okay, 27,000 steps. And so you might think the value of that one step is meaningless. But guess what? If you said that about every other step, you'd never climb the mountain. So every step is important. A hundred percent value in each step. Because if you come one step stored, you won't make it to the summit. You won't make it to the top. Every step is important. You have to be fully present and give yourself to the step that's in front of you. And you just surrender to the process and trust that when you go all in and give the best of yourself that the universe and life will reciprocate. It's not out here to screw you over. It just simply mirrors back your vibration. So I'll leave it at that. Went a little longer this time around because I know, you know, it's been been over a month since I recorded my last episode. And I want to spend a little bit more time with each and every one of you. So thank you so much for listening. Again, I trust that this episode was helpful and reframing some some perspectives for you. Do the exercises and activities that I recommend, you know, at any point I tell you to grab your journal and write some things down like use this as an opportunity to grow. Use this as an opportunity to learn. Use this as an opportunity to lean in into and to really like dig into this material and and learn something and discover something about yourself. I appreciate all you guys who reach out on Instagram and on TikTok and send me emails about my content helping you. It really means the world to me. It fuels me. So if you feel called to reach out to me on Instagram or on TikTok at the Stop Drinking Coach or you want to send me an email, um, support at thestopdrinkingcoach.com. I love reading them. It just it fuels me and it fires me up to continue doing this work and helping you guys. If you go to my website, www.TheStopDrinkingCoach, you can fill out an application if you want to work with me. I'm getting pretty close to launching my group program. It's not quite ready yet, but it will be soon and I definitely will make an announcement once that is ready. If you scroll down to the bottom of my website, there's a lot of like screenshots of testimonials and stuff there of people who've worked with me in my program. I've probably got 500 more. Like I said, that I haven't added yet just because my website couldn't handle it. It would slow it down too much. And if you haven't left a review on Spotify or on Apple, I would deeply, deeply, deeply appreciate it. It's been like a dream of mine to see it get to a thousand reviews. I think it's at like 500 right now on Spotify and maybe two or three hundred on on Apple, but yeah, that's been a goal of mine. And, yeah, any support any support on that front would be would be super helpful. Also share this podcast with somebody who you think it might help, whether you shared on your social media and tag me, or a friend, colleague at work. I know thousands and thousands of people who have been able to really get a lot of support and quit and maintain variety just through the podcast alone. So, I appreciate you guys listening and yeah, 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.thisstopdrinkingcoach.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.