EP 212 Minisode: It’s not where you are… it’s how you respond
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Hello everyone. So I do a daily podcast called Coffee with Colleen inside my emotional sobriety coaching program. These are short, sweet mini-sodes that either give you an inside look at something I’m going through in my own life or a simple, easy strategy that you can implement or both. You may hear me reference other content that only my clients have access to. So if you’re interested in learning more about my program,
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get in the show notes and schedule a discovery call with me or my team. 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.
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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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There is a 100 % chance that you will fall back into old habits. So just get over it. The mindset that sees that as a problem is the mindset that is creating that problem. It is never about where you are. It is about how you respond to yourself when you find yourself wherever you are. And the habit that needs to be broken
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is the black and white thinking where you’re either winning or you’re losing or you failed or you’re succeeding and the conversations in your head about getting back on track or having to start over and being back at square one or finding yourself on the slippery slope. You need to train your brain to realize you have a choice. The moment of truth is the moment you see the pattern.
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you see the habit. That’s the escape hatch. And the default way of thinking is your brain has wallpapered over the fact that there’s an option here of how to respond because the real habit that needs to be broken is turning on yourself and beating yourself up because you see yourself as the problem instead of the strategy as the problem. And because you feel bad, your brain wants to solve this problem and the problem is you.
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and you get sucked into these thinking patterns of what is wrong with me? Why do I keep doing this? Why can’t I stick with it? These are the wrong questions to ask in this moment. These are the questions that expand the shame and the sense of failure that make it harder and harder for you to self-correct, for you to do something different. I just got a voice memo this morning and it absolutely made me cry.
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from one of you talking about a huge win that came as a result of responding to a vicious post-holiday hangover with self-compassion and curiosity and love instead of the habitual response of shaming and blaming and beating yourself up and telling yourself this is a problem, which just reinforces the shame and the sense of failure and makes it
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for sure guaranteed that it’s gonna happen again. The breakthrough that came as a result of waking up with this hangover and changing how she responded was a powerful learning experience that allowed her to see what happened in a new light and have nothing but compassion for the woman at the party who was not connected, not standing in her power, unaware, even asleep.
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to the fact that she had options and choices and to see that version of herself from such a place of love and a desire to help and support and care for and heal with and integrate this part of herself into consciousness instead of once again cutting her off and banishing her and telling her she’s bad and stupid and shameful.
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guilty and then pushing that those emotions down into the subconscious instead she brought the shame into consciousness and just Felt it allowed herself to cry and look at that version of herself with love because that woman is living in the habits and the thought patterns that you your higher self Created and allowed it to evolve into like you don’t blame her
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for being unable to escape or resist the habits that have taken years to form and understanding that the habit itself formed because you were doing the very best that you could to take care of all of your people and check all the boxes and do everything that you were taught to do. Like there is no room for blame here. It’s just responsibility. The habit exists.
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A habit is just a program that runs in your brain that you are able to do without thinking. So it requires willpower to do something different. And it takes time for new habits to form and you can’t change what you don’t first accept. So shitting on yourself, shitting on yourself for the fact that the habit exists serves no purpose except to reinforce the habit itself.
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because the habit is driven by the shame and the failure. And the only way to break the habit is to respond differently to the habit. Once you notice that you were in the behaviors and the thought patterns of the habit, that’s where the habit is broken. It is not broken with willpower resisting the habit. It is broken in the response when you realize that the regrettable choices that you made
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were not actually choices, they were habit. You were on autopilot. And this moment of truth is the fork in the road. And if you don’t understand what I’m saying here, or you choose to not believe it or act on it, then you are committing to run another lap around the cul-de-sac of stupidity. It is not where you are in this moment or what happened in the near past.
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or how you feel. It is how you respond to where you think you are and what happened in the past and how you feel in this moment. What has to change the work you do is in the response. And here’s how you do that. The moment you realize you did it again, or you kind of did it again, instead of thinking the thoughts that come into your head that are focused on the past and focused on the behavior, you want to stop and feel
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the emotions, just allow them to exist. Stop trying to think your way out of what is a thinking problem. Feel, allow the shame and the judgment, and then put your hand on your body’s heart and say, it is safe for you to feel these things. I will hold space with you. I will hold your hand or hold your heart as we process these scary, nasty, judgy beliefs.
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The brain wants to tell you. The brain is a bully and we’re not listening. So let the fuckers squawk all at once. I’m gonna stay here and hold space in these emotions and I’m gonna feel them and shift my focus and pay attention to the sensations in my body. And then I’m gonna allow you to release this energy. I’m gonna allow the tears or the sadness or the frustration.
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or anger or whatever it is that comes up, I’m gonna allow this energy to pass through me because I’m not gonna stuff it down because I think it is me. And then I’m gonna take full responsibility for where I’m at and I’m gonna use my willpower and energy to redesign my life so that I can support this body as you move through it with these little fucking habits.
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that are programmed into your brain so that I can make it easier for you, for myself, to get better results in the future. All time is now. It is always present o’clock. It is in this moment. And if your focus is in the story of what went wrong and why you suck and why this shouldn’t have happened, you’re perpetuating it. You are strengthening
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the habit itself. If instead, you allow the energy of the emotions that you’re dealing with, and then look to the future and think how can I use my willpower not to force myself to try harder to do better at the party, but to create a system or a design of my lifestyle, what needs to change so that it is easier for me to be the best version of myself and to live with intention.
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and peace and power. How can I take full responsibility? No blame, just responsibility. It is what it is in this moment. And the habits that I have are what they are. And instead of thinking I will be the first person in the history of all humans to just willpower my way through the rest of my life, fighting against these habits, I’m going to use my willpower to design systems, new habits.
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processes that allow me to focus on how I feel and how I want to feel so that I can live from the inside out instead of the old habit where I’m constantly looking at myself from my outside in and judging my performance and disconnecting from my truth about who I am and what I need in any given moment. Hear me when I say that the drinking habit formed
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in response to you rejecting your own needs and your own truth. Because my friends, my sisters, that’s what you were trained to do. There’s no blame. Our mothers and parents were trained to do this as well. We’ve all been taught to manage our behavior and to worry about what other people think and to go along to get along. We’ve all been taught that the woman who can put up with the most shit and still smile
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wins. And at least in the early days of our drinking, we’ve believed and we’re told that, hey, if you need a drink to help you do that honey, grab one. And as long as these programs are still active in your brain, the thinking habits that drive the drinking habits, you will continue to occasionally wake up and realize you did it again. It is how you respond to yourself in that moment that the change occurs.
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And instead of responding to yourself as you normally have, you have to realize, oh, I just woke myself up from the dream. The skill that you have to go for that you set your intentions on is not avoiding any sense of relapse of your old habits. is fully accepting that that is part of the process because that’s the only time you can actually address the beliefs, the needs, the identity that are driving.
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the habits, that’s the change. So having curiosity, having compassion, and having a forward facing focus of where do I want to be? How do I want to act? And then if I want to act that way, what do I need to do to design an environment that makes that easier? How do I want to feel? What would I need to be thinking to feel that way? You are the creator of your life and
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You created this life because you thought that’s what it meant to do it right. That’s how powerful you are. Any woman that can get all the stuff done that we do and do it with a hangover is a powerful manifestor. And if you want to manifest something different, you simply have to decide that’s what you’re going to do and then do it. If you want to live without the rules,
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and the conditions that you’ve been taught to place on your own ability to love yourself when it is okay to be okay. If you wanna be free of that, you have to free yourself. You have to accept who you’ve been and how that happened and then love her. Just like you would love if your child tried to make you breakfast and the eggs were raw and the potatoes weren’t cooked or whatever and how you would love the effort.
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Love yourself for the fact that you’ve always been trying your hardest. You’ve always been doing your very best and accepting that you are where you are as a result of you attempting to do your best with some bad information allows you to have compassion because past behaviors do not define you any more than future behaviors define you.
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You’re not trying to become a better or different person. You’re trying to create a life where you experience easier, better, more powerful results, which requires you to always see this as an experiment. Every single day, you’re just tinkering around with your strategies, learning from what you like and what you don’t like, and designing systems and support for yourself.
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that cause you to experience more peace and ease and abundance and power and control and ultimately happiness and joy. So your takeaway in this moment, your homework, what actions can you take to cause yourself a new and improved experience today?
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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.