Episode 269 Minisode: WARNING- Today’s Success May Cause Tomorrow’s Failure
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What happens with almost every woman who joins my program is they start off strong and then they get their first win. Maybe it’s a weekend where they drink exactly as planned or they wake up Sunday morning feeling clear and proud instead of hung over and ashamed and they’re flying high. They come to a group call and they’re like, oh my God, this program really works. I’ve got this figured out. I can put this behind me now. And I’m just watching thinking, oh no, my friend.
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because what I’ve learned after years of doing this work is if you think that you have conquered Mount Alcohol Use Disorder because you had one good weekend, you are setting yourself up for a crash that is going to feel devastating. Because here’s the thing nobody talks about. You have to stop chasing the highs if you want to avoid the lows. And I don’t mean you’re going to become some detached, unfeeling robot. I mean, you have to understand that any win, especially early wins,
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are not the end of the story. They’re just one iteration in a much bigger process. Today I’m going to explain why the victory lap mentality is just the flip side of the coin of the shame spiral. The only way to change your relationship with alcohol for good is to redefine both failure and success.
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My name is Colleen and I’m a mindful drinking coach helping high achieving professional women permanently reduce their alcohol consumption by 80%. Join me each week for evidence-based holistic strategies to regulate your nervous system, balance your dopamine, and activate the growth mindset that makes you so powerful in other areas of your life so you can stop worrying about losing control and trust yourself again. Get happy, not sober. It’s not about the alcohol.
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One of the most fun things about bringing women into the program is watching them get some early successes. You know, the first weekend that they are able to drink mindfully or drink in moderation, and then they come and they share their wins. And it’s so positive and so powerful. And I’ve been doing this long enough to notice that there are some patterns. And it’s always easier to see other people’s patterns than it is your own, right?
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And if you’re listening to these episodes in order, you know that I am in a Keira Bobbinette rabbit hole right now. I stumbled upon her on a podcast, James Dottie’s podcast, The Magic Shop, I think it is the name. And then I ordered her book, The Unstoppable Brain. And then I’ve ordered her next book and I haven’t even cracked it yet because I’m still just whirling from all of the insights that her perspective is offering.
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She talks about the performance driven mindset, the perfectionist mindset, where we are used to seeing things as wins and losses and success and failure and how that framework, that model of viewing our circumstances affects the brain. There’s a part of the brain called the habinula that is turned on or activated by perceived failure or fear of failure. And the habinula is the breaks.
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our energy and our focus and our motivation to keep going and Her research and her mindset work. She teaches an iterative mindset Which is a lot like the growth mindset except the growth mindset is still kind of a identifying point a and point B and bridging the gap and building the skills and I love that mindset but the iterative mindset goes a step farther and it removes the illusion of the point a and the point B and why
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removing the illusion of here and there and just moving into a present moment where you’re always evaluating your circumstances based on how you’re experiencing them and then tinkering around with your strategy and then taking actions that cause new results and evaluating the effectiveness of the strategy. It’s a really beautiful idea to think that you never fail.
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It’s just some strategies produce more positive, favorable, pleasant results. It’s not you, it’s your strategy. And separating yourself from the win or the loss or the success or the failure, and just examining your results with the perspective of a non-biased scientist and deciding what actions you want to take moving forward to create the next iteration of whatever it is you’re focused on.
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At some point in the recent past, I have realized that I have to stop chasing the highs if I want to avoid the lows. But aside from that being just another juxtaposition between words of concepts, I didn’t really understand what that meant. And my first approach to that kind of felt like I was robbing myself of the pleasure of the success and basking in a glory.
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like the goal would be to just be more apathetic or detached. But it’s not that at all. And what’s allowed me to see this as an application that I not only want to practice, but teach is noticing the pattern that when you get some early wins with the drinking behavior and you get it right, almost always or very often predictably, there’s going to be a setback.
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And that’s not inevitable. It doesn’t have to be part of the process. What it is reflective of is the mindset that is judging you based on your performance when you drink. It is so easy when you have the win to tell yourself this story that, ah, it’s over. I got here. I’ve got it all figured out. I don’t have to worry about this anymore. I can put it behind me.
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This program works so well, oh my God, amazing. But sticking your flag on top of Mount Alcohol Use Disorder and declaring victory because you were able to change your behavior on one weekend or even for a period of time is ignoring or not taking in the whole truth. So let’s revisit what is Alcohol Use Disorder. Bottom line is it’s when you are in the habit
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of drinking more than you think you should drink. And habits exist in your subconscious. It’s the autopilot mode. It’s the behaviors and thought patterns that occur when you’re not paying attention, when you get distracted by stress or emotion, happy or sad emotion, when you get distracted by circumstances, whether they are good or bad. It’s your brain simply running the plays that it’s
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used to running. And so any behavior change that you are able to successfully navigate is being driven by consciousness, by willpower. And that’s how all change gets started. You have to take uncomfortable actions. You have to do the thing before you feel ready to do the thing. Stop thinking about it in your subconscious autopilot and just do something that will cause you to experience a different result. But no matter how
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good that result feels, it has not formed a habit. I teach you all of the tools to make it a habit by noticing the wins, noticing what you did right or what actions you took that caused the result, because evidence of progress is what motivates you to keep going, continue trying, continue to push towards the next iteration.
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It is the conscious experience of the feelings that allows you to direct the rewiring of your subconscious mind. You get to choose what you are learning and how you are learning it. But there are so many variables that go into the results that you get on an evening or a weekend night when you are drinking that cause how you drink. There’s thousands of them. It is not one and done. Change is not something that you think about.
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and decide and then just go execute the behavior. That’s how it starts. But real change that is programmed into your body so that your brain does it without thinking about it is something that you feel your way through. So those early wins are powerful. However, they are not the end of the story. I teach you that within the concept, the framework of the iterative mindset,
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The way out of the hell hole of the alcohol use disorder habit is to change how you respond to what you perceive as a failure and process the feelings of shame and guilt and self-flagellation where you’re blaming yourself. And that’s why I talk about how hangovers are the most valuable learning experiences because you can’t access those emotions when you’re busy getting it all right.
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And a short stretch or even a long stretch of good behavior gives you relief from processing the shame. However, that’s a skill that you’re still gonna have to learn. And as a perfectionist, your strategy in life has been to avoid those feelings by managing your behavior. As long as you’re doing good, you don’t have to feel bad. But as a human being, you will always have the full range.
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of emotions and just managing your behavior so you don’t have to deal with them is a really bad strategy. That’s how we got here, my friends. Healing from shame, past traumas, guilt, fear, all of the things, requires you to go to the source of what’s causing those feelings. And what’s causing those feelings is the belief that it’s possible for you to win and it’s possible for you to lose.
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and that your circumstances in any given moment, the results in your life are somehow a reflection of who you are at your core, your worthiness, your value as a soul and as a human being, that the love that you have for yourself should somehow be conditional based on these results as opposed to seeing the results as simply a reflection of your strategy and you get to tinker with it and keep moving on.
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The source of your shame and your fear is a separation of yourself. It is a distorted thinking pattern. It is a distorted truth that you are not already whole and that you need to work on changing things out there in order to feel better in here. Shame is a separation of self because you’ve come to believe you’re in the habit of believing that
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Your emotional experiences are telling you the truth about who you are and the painful emotions need to be hidden and suppressed because they are not acceptable. You are not acceptable, but painful emotions are not telling you the truth. You might even think of your emotions as a lie detector. The more pain that you’re experiencing in any given moment, the more distorted the truth is in your brain.
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your painful emotions are your invitation to clean house in your subconscious, to rid your body of the toxic beliefs that you are not worthy, you are not good enough, you are not capable, you are not lovable as you are in this moment. But you also are gonna have to learn when the flip side of those emotions, the positive stories,
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The high of the win, the accomplishment, the moral superiority, and the belief that your behavior in this moment makes you more valuable, better than you were before. The only way to avoid these lows is to stop accepting the trophies when you are high. And that doesn’t mean that you can’t feel amazing. Just remind yourself that this too shall pass. m
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and make sure you are not bypassing the emotional skills of learning how to stay present with all the feelings because you’re so busy going back to your old habits of just controlling for your behavior. We humans get so attached to our stories because we like to think we know how the future is going to be. And so we form opinions about the way things are, the truth, but the truth is always changing.
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Yesterday’s truth is tomorrow’s bullshit. And the more you get attached to what you think is true and right, the harder it is to be aware of when your body alerts you that something needs to change. Your personal power comes from your ability to trust yourself, to take the actions that you need to take to get where you want to go without waiting for a guarantee.
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that everything’s gonna work out. Your personal power comes from your ability to take actions and move yourself forward without fear of how you’re going to feel when your own expectations are not met. Because you no longer see yourself through the lens of success or failure, winner or loser. And you know that there is nothing inherently right or wrong or good or bad.
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about where you are in the present moment. Your circumstances do not mean anything about your worth as a human being. And your power comes from not looking at where you are, but how you need to respond to where you are with whatever actions are your best guess for how you’re gonna cause your own happiness in the future.
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All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving, coachable woman who is ready to commit to manifesting your best life, and you’re going to need to reduce your alcohol consumption by about 80 % so that alcohol goes back to being a pleasure instead of a soul sucking problem, get in the show notes and click the link and schedule a discovery call with me or my team.