Quitting alcohol? Do NOT do these 3 things

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Chapters

• 0:00 Key Mistakes in Stopping Drinking
• 9:32 Building a Supportive Community for Sobriety

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to the Stop Drinking Podcast, where we help you make stopping drinking a simple, logical and easy decision. We help you with tips, tools and strategies to start living your best life when alcohol-free. If you want to learn more about stop drinking coaching, then head over to wwwsoberclearcom. Now let me tell you a secret about Marcus and his drinking problem. See, marcus was a good man. Marcus had a family, he had a business, he had a beautiful home, he had a nice car, he went to the gym, he was fit, he was healthy and on the outside Marcus was a smashing success. But over the years, workload had increased, family pressure had increased and every time there was an increase in this pressure and this stress, marcus would go to the bottle to escape. And over the years he was drinking more and more and more.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Marcus had tried to stop multiple times. He tried to stop on his own, but he could only ever go a couple of weeks. And when I finally spoke to Marcus, this is what he said Leon, I just don't understand it. I'm successful in every area of my life, I have built the life of my dreams, but this one thing, I just can't crack it and I don't know why this story is so common. I've heard this story hundreds of times and, after seeing this pattern hundreds of times with people that I've spoken to, with people that I've worked with, it all boils down to three things, and these three mistakes could sabotage anybody. They could sabotage my clients, they could sabotage you, and if I made these mistakes, they'd sabotage me. And because I don't want you to break these mistakes, we're going to unpack them and I promise you, by the end of this video, you will understand what 99% of people will never get. And it makes no difference if you're a normal person, a multimillionaire, a doctor Everybody is making these mistakes. To me, it's mass insanity, and by the end of this video, we're going to restore you to sanity. I can't wait to share this with you. Today, we're going to be looking at the mistake that I continually made for 10 years and how I fixed it in an instant. We're going to look at another mistake that literally, literally takes a split second to fix, but nobody does it, and I don't know why. And the third mistake isn't just relevant to not drinking, but it's relevant to leveling up in every area of your life. So you definitely want to stay tuned. So let's get into mistake number one. I'm not joking. I have made this mistake probably three, three, 400 times, and what I'm talking about here is telling yourself you're not going to drink and then that's it. So you're basically winging it. You're cowboying it, you're just praying and hoping for the best.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Now, if this truly worked and if this had a decent chance of success, I think most people in the world wouldn't drink, because how many drinkers have woken up with a hangover and said I'm not drinking ever again? All the time I did it when I was 16, 17 years of age. I have an 18-year-old brother, I'm 32. I have an 18-year-old brother. I'm sure he's woken up and said it to himself. So so many people have made this promise to themselves and just said I'm stopping. Yet it never works. Like honestly, it might work 1% of the time.

Speaker 1: 2:45

Now here's the thing when we're 18 or 19 or just kind of getting our first taste of drinking and getting drunk, and we wake up with a hangover and we tell ourselves we're not going to drink and then we end up drinking again. Isn't it weird that when we're 30, 40, 50, 60 or whatever, and then we're seriously sick of drinking and we make a serious attempt, we do the exact same thing that we used to do, but that same thing is the reason why we're still drinking. It doesn't make any sense and so many people do this. There's no plan, there's no structure. It's just I'm not going to drink. And then, how long does that last?

Speaker 1: 3:15

See, the best thing that you can do, if this is you, is have a plan, is have some kind of structure. This is why people love Alcoholics Anonymous. It's a 12-step. I call myself an alcoholic. I don't believe there's any such thing as an alcoholic. I don't think God and stopping drinking are related. I can understand that if you don't use the internet and you don't educate yourself. If you just walked into a meeting with a drinking problem and you saw a system, it's like, oh, there's actually a process and my mum's not drank for over 20 years. She followed that process. Boom, she's finished. But having a plan, having steps to follow, is extremely helpful. In fact, it's not just helpful, but it can be the difference between just saying yeah, I'm stopping and then drinking two days later and actually fixing this issue.

Speaker 1: 3:58

Now, if you don't want to do AA and rehab and therapy in this kind of like traditional way of stopping drinking, let me give you a different way to do things. My recommendation is to use a mental model called first principles thinking. See, what most people do is they do this thing called reasoning from analogy. And reasoning from analogy is not really researching and really looking deeply into a topic. It's making like a split second decision. For example, maybe you live in a really good neighborhood. You've got 10 neighbors around you and these are educated and really smart people, and there's two schools in the local area and all 10 people are sending their kid to this one school and not a single parent is sending their kid to another school. In this instance, you could reason from analogy. You could look at that situation and go well, they're probably right. Is it the right thing to do? It depends. Certain decisions you need to reason from first principles. Other decisions it's okay to kind of just cowboy it.

Speaker 1: 4:47

But when you use first principles thinking, you break down the problem into its component parts. So if you weren't going to listen to the majority and the 10 people in the school example, you would study the problem. You'd look at this school. You'd go through the prospectus, right? You'd look at the data. You'd look at how many people graduate. You'd look at the grades, you'd look at the headmaster, you'd study the individual component parts and then make a truly informed decision. Then you're not just following the status quo and doing what everybody else is doing. Sometimes it's okay to do what everybody else is doing.

Speaker 1: 5:16

We can't break everything down into first principles. It takes a lot of time, but with alcohol it's a serious problem that's worth spending time, money and energy fixing because it pays dividends forever. So how you do this is you get alcohol, you get addiction and you study it. You break it down and then what you start doing is looking at your internal beliefs and external beliefs in society. You start looking at why you drink, what you think alcohol gives you, what problem it's trying to solve, and you start breaking down your beliefs. You can write them down and then you go to the external world and you start thinking about okay, what does society believe around alcohol and is this actually true? And what you do is you study the component parts of the problem until you're able to put it back together to make an informed decision of whether or not alcohol is worth drinking. That's what I do in my program. We break it down into first principles, we study the individual component parts and put it back together.

Speaker 1: 6:05

Then drinking becomes a choice and when you see alcohol this way, you always choose not to drink it, but just winging it and hoping for the best. Listen, if that's you, good luck. My recommendation is find a plan. Get a coach, join a program. If you want to go to AA and go that route, do that. I'm not here to discourage anybody. Whatever works for you works, that's great, but seriously have a plan. So the second mistake is the easiest to fix of all and it happens in a second See.

Speaker 1: 6:31

A lot of people probably 70-80% of people that want to stop drinking alcohol use a very specific phrase I am trying to stop drinking. And boy oh boy. I don't know why people do this, because I have never, ever, ever, met somebody that has told me they're trying to stop drinking and it worked Ever. Just think about it for a second. If you're trying, when you say you're trying to stop drinking, you're basically giving yourself a way out. Well, I failed, but I was only trying, and it's almost setting yourself up to fail. And I'm not here to criticize anybody, right? I've done all of this. I've done exactly this countless times. I remember in my twenties I'd call my mum, I'd be like right, mum, this is it. I'm serious this time. I'm really going to try my hardest and I seriously meant it. But it was almost like in my subconscious I was self-sabotaging, I was creating a way out.

Speaker 1: 7:16

But this is so easy to fix, so easy. But it all starts on a foundation of knowledge and understanding, just like I explained earlier, with first principles thinking. See, once you've gone through a process like that, that's purely built on education and information and changing your worldview, something happens. You stop seeing alcohol as something that adds value to your life. You see it the same way that you might see any other illegal drug. I'm sure if you saw crack, you don't need to try to not smoke crack. It takes zero effort on your part, but that's because you are properly educated and you have the correct paradigm when it comes to that thing. But with alcohol, nobody has that same paradigm. People do like I do, my clients do, so it's possible to get there. But nobody sits down and properly attacks this problem. So that's why everybody's trying, nobody's just making a choice.

Speaker 1: 8:02

But if you ask me, the goal of not drinking is to solve it like you'd solve any other problem If you had any other health problem, like, let's say, you get athlete's foot. Do you want to try and fix your athlete's foot for the rest of your life or would you rather just make a decision, try one medication, do it properly and then move on? You wouldn't want to have this burden around of athlete's foot for the rest of your life. You'd want to fix it, but with alcohol we drag it around with us. It doesn't make any sense. The best thing that you can do is change your paradigm, change your worldview. You make one decision to stop drinking alcohol and then you move on. So instead of trying, you just build a new identity. You see yourself completely differently.

Speaker 1: 8:37

I know this works because it worked for me and it also worked for my client, gordon. Now Gordon has recently shared his story. He just hit six months without a drop. If you want to watch that, there'll be a link somewhere up here and then you can also click the link in the description and you can watch Gordon's interview. But once Gordon did that, boom, that was it. Six months after years of struggling.

Speaker 1: 8:54

And now let's get into the third and final mistake. Most people are winging it. Most people are trying, but the third thing people are doing wrong is they're trying to do it alone, and this just makes no sense. It is not necessary. The thing is is we live in a world where people are proud. They don't want to be seen as somebody fixing a drinking problem, because it's almost like society looks down on these people.

Speaker 1: 9:17

Oh, you can't control your drinking. What's wrong with you? So it can sometimes be a struggle to find the right community to actually do this with. Some people they don't care. They walk into an AA meeting in their local area, they're fine with it. Some people find a community outside of stop drinking support. They might find it in a gym, they might find it in a church.

Speaker 1: 9:32

But doing this on your own makes no sense. Why struggle alone? It's okay to find support. It's okay to ask for help. That's why I built a community into my Stop Drinking program.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Now, that's not for everybody. That's for business owners, high-level professionals, because I wanted to create a community that worked for those people. Because I am an entrepreneur, I wanted to build a community that I liked. But that might not be for you. I'm not saying my program's for everybody, but one thing I'd recommend is find your community, build a support network.

Speaker 1: 9:59

Maybe you need a coach, maybe you need a program, maybe you need a community. But when you're in the right community, what starts happening is people are better than you. That's the hard thing in a good community. I go to a CrossFit gym where every single coach is stronger and fitter than me. So I go there and I am forced to up my game. My coach is a monster right, he's a beast, he's strong, he's super, super fit, and I feel like I'm chasing this guy. But that's forcing me to just up my standards and up my game. So when it comes to stopping drinking, why can't we do the same thing? Thanks for checking out the Stop Drinking Podcast by Sober Clear. If you want to learn more about how we work with people to help them stop drinking effortlessly, then make sure to visit wwwsoberclearcom.