How to be a safe cracker to figure out your drinking
Amy Latta's podcast interview of me dropped this week.
Amy has been my coach for the past 6 months, aka I pay her for her expertise. She has thousands of followers who also respect her POV. And I was really humbled when she said that she learned from me.
It is funny how when someone else appreciates your work, it is permissible to slow down and do the same.
This week, I invite you to please take a minute and appreciate yourself and what you are doing, without feeling like you need to wait for someone to do it first!
And secondly, let's revisit the concept of finding your own unique solution to your drinking. (This is the concept that Amy has taken and run with in her own marketing!)
Remember the combination lock that you had on your locker? Or maybe you are like me and had to buy 17 of them for your kids - wth they do with all of them is beyond me....
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There are a finite number of numbers on the lock, and yet there is an exponential number of combinations that will unlock it.
Now think about this in regard to you drinking less. There is no one solution.
Oh, there are plenty of people who believe that they have the one solution. Maybe it is AA, or meditation, or reading this one book that changed everything for them, or 1:1 coaching, or group coaching because you absolutely have to have the community, or you definitely should use alcohol free drinks in place of your regular drinks and others will say you definitely should not substitute with AF drinks, etc. etc.
Rather than get frustrated or confused by all of this advice, let me offer that these are just people's opinions. These are their thoughts about what worked for them. For every "this is the one thing that absolutely worked for me and will definitely work for you" claim, you can find hundreds more who claim the opposite.
To say that there is ONE solution is to blatantly ignore how beautifully nuanced we all are.
Maybe you just haven’t figured out your code YET, but there absolutely is one.
Your job is to keep trying until you figure out the unique combination that works for you. Your job is to act like a safe cracker because inside this safe is freedom. Your job is to set self-judgement aside and adopt a mindset of curiosity. Your job is to take what works for you and leave the rest.
For me, I found that it wasn't what I was doing so much as what I was believing that was holding me back.
As long as I believed that:
I needed a drink to relax
I just loved the taste
People will think that I have a problem if I don't drink
It helps me sleep
It made sense that I kept going back to drinking too much.
True freedom for me came when a coach helped me to challenge these underlying beliefs. Once I opened up to the possibility that I could relax or sleep without wine, and that I could find something that I like to drink as much or more than wine, things changed for me.
Once I was able to clear this underlying stuff up, I was unencumbered to find own unique combination.
My unique combination is a little bit of yoga, meditation, and community through a FB group, and lots of self-coaching.
Today I help my clients find theirs. Working together, we act like a safe cracker and figure out the combination that is unique to them so that they can drink exactly as much as they want when they want.
If you need some support in this challenge, I would love to help you too. Hit reply or schedule a call here.
Take care,
Caroline
PS Here is the podcast episode for your listening pleasure.
PPS - If you want to drink what you want, when you want but are spinning in indecision over what to do next and whose advice to follow, I would love to help you find your own inner wisdom. That is the advice that matters! Schedule some time for us to chat here.
