EP 215 Minisode: This is the woo-woo part00:00
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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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I’ve been hearing myself say that the solution to alcohol use disorder is actually a feeling, which is why it feels so complicated because you’re up in your head trying to make sense of why you drink and why it feels so hard to drink less or stop or what’s really causing this. How did all of this happen? You try to solve the problem in your head. But again, the solution is actually a feeling. If you felt confident,
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and strong and powerful and purposeful in your life, then your behavior would manifest as an expression of that feeling. I don’t dive deep into manifestation in this program. I prefer to keep my feet on the ground with neuroscience and nervous system regulation and the researched evidence-based
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mindset strategies, the shifts and the reframes and the higher level questions and the neuro-linguistic programming. That is my preferred method of delivery because I think I’m attracting people who are also heady and nerdy and like logic and reason. But manifestation as a practice is also very science-based.
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It just gets a bad name from the dipshits that are sitting on their couch trying to manifest a million bucks or looking at their vision boards with the boats and the homes and the travel and thinking that you can just manifest that into being. The truth is, what I’ve really understood is that, actually you can manifest about anything you want if you understand two things. Manifestation is not visualization without action. And the second thing is manifestation takes time.
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And what happens for most of us is that we don’t like the three-dimensional timeline that we’re in. And as soon as we don’t get instant, perfect, mind-blowing results, as soon as our expectations are not met, we are disappointed. And we don’t know how to process our disappointment. And because we don’t process it, we think that it’s telling us the truth. And we agree that it’s not going to happen. It’s not possible.
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I knew this wasn’t going to work out and I shouldn’t have dared to dream, dared to hope because hope and confidence always bite you in the ass. But let me remind you, it takes faith to believe in anything, including nothing. Even atheists who say they have no faith because they do not believe in anything have chosen to put their faith in the belief that there is nothing to believe in. And this is where I want to remind you, it’s all bullshit.
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Nothing you think is real because thoughts are not real. They are words that represent ideas and ideas are an attempt to express the experience, an energetic experience in your body. Your thoughts, your beliefs are no more real than the words on the menu are the food that you’re about to order. I get a lot of people on calls at some point that they’re trying to implement the
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looking for evidence of improvement and progress and giving themselves credit for their wins. And they get on the call and they’re like, am I just bullshitting myself? Yes, you are. That’s true. But you would also be bullshitting yourself to look for evidence of failure and reinforce the beliefs that tell you you can’t change because it’s not possible. It doesn’t happen for people like you.
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You’re too far gone. This has gotten too bad. It’s too late. And if it hasn’t happened yet, then it’s not going to happen. Like step outside of yourself for a minute. Those are also words and your words and ideas are how your brain is interpreting the energy of your body. Remember your brain speaks English, your body speaks energy and so much
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gets lost in that translation and the habits that you have of translating the meaning behind what you feel. Remember that your thoughts are habits too. Your thoughts are just the expression of the raw data that is the energy in your body. And the more often you respond to the energy in your body in a particular way, diagnosing a certain problem or believing something is true,
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or telling yourself that you need or want something specific like alcohol. The more you get in the habit of translating that energy in your body into thoughts in your head, the more you get locked in that habit and pattern and behavior. And you think that what you think is true, but it’s not. The energy in your body could be expressed and interpreted in infinite number of ways. And this is what I do as a coach.
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is I help you look at the raw data and extract different meaning, different possibilities, different perspectives and angles and action steps to take in response to it. So you just have to learn to respond differently to what you’re feeling and stop letting the thought habits that tell you everything you think you already know and move into what else could be true? What if I didn’t actually know? What do I?
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not even know that I don’t know. Like, what am I not even aware of out there? And honestly, it’s not what’s out there, what’s going on out there that you need to be tuned into. Your feelings are your superpower. They are reflecting the quality of the mindset that you are using to interpret the energy in your body. They are reflecting the quality of the questions you’re asking, the beliefs that you’re holding.
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which if you’re not having a positive emotional heart opening experience, then your body is beautifully divinely guiding you and telling you, offering you haptic feedback in real time, biofeedback that your interpretations of what’s going on out in the world or even in your own body are not serving you. They are not in your best interest.
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Your feelings are an invitation to re-examine your own thought processes, to examine your own reaction to whatever’s going on for you and see if you want to change what you think you know. So what I’m about to share with you is a very simple shift. And I got this idea off of a TikTok from my friend.
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Aliyah Frederick’s. I think she’s at law of attraction or something like that on TikTok. And she runs a program similar to mine, does the same kind of business model. We’re in a program together, but she teaches manifestation. She did a reel on the difference between wanting and waiting energy and what’s working now energy. And the what’s working now energy that she’s talking about is a lot like
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the exercises that I have you do where every single day you are making a list of things you are doing right, noticing areas of improvement, always looking for evidence of progress because that evidence of progress is what fuels you to take the next step. And the habit that is alcohol use disorder, also perfectionism, is where you only see the failure, the lack, the proof that
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reinforces the idea in your brain that’s actually perpetuating the problem. It’s the how you got here idea. And I really like the contrast of these two ideas in terms of interpreting the energy in your body, wanting and waiting versus what’s working now. Because wanting and waiting, by definition, mean that you are looking for something you don’t yet have. You are not experiencing what you want as a reality.
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It’s more of a pipe dream or a mirage in the desert. And this wanting and waiting energy is different than the energy that might be associated with anticipation. You know, the package that you know is going to be here later and you’re wanting and waiting that package to arrive, but you believe that package is coming. This is a completely different energy and I want to make a distinguish between the two. Wanting and waiting as I’m talking about it in this is believing that you’re not there yet.
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and wondering if and when or how you’re ever gonna get there. So you’re not experiencing what you want as a reality. You see yourself as separate outside of the version of you in this moment is not the version of you that you want to be. And this is the mind blowing part. Like you do not wake up and become the version of you that you wanna be. You have to practice feeling like the version of you you want to be. And that’s where
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Of course you can’t hold the feeling state over time as you go through your life because you’re stressed and there’s distractions and you’ve got other things to pay attention to, which is why the change comes slowly because you have to create the habit. But you can create the experience of feeling like the version of you that you want to be right now. And then you just practice holding your connection to that emotional state in your regular life.
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and in greater stressful situations, practice it under duress, and then see the evidence of its power, which will further motivate you to hold that connection, to not let go, to understand that that connection is what your whole life depends on. And so often we abandon ourselves because we’ve got caught up in the false fake fact that, well, I’ll feel better as soon as. If this happens, then I will feel good. If that doesn’t happen, then
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I’m going to lose my shit. I will feel better when external circumstances match my internal expectations. But that’s not how it works. Because what you see about what is going on with you is a projection of how you feel. And until you truly understand this, you’re going to be stuck in want and waiting mode. And if you could get to a place where you recognize this energy, want and waiting, as your
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body telling you to switch internal gears. If you can get to that point, you are free. You now can use your emotions as a superpower and move about your life. You will not always execute it perfectly, but you will always come back to the reset, which is the internal connection to your own sense of curiosity and hope and power and capability and purpose and meaning and all the things that you want to feel.
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Aliyah sends her clients a What’s Working Now journal as soon as they sign up for a program. And I’m probably going to steal that idea. But don’t want and wait for me to take the action. Get your ass to the store and get yourself a What’s Working Now journal. And start filling it out like your life depends on it, using the same principles and questions that I ask you to notice every single day. What’s working? How am I improving? And detail the evidence of your transformation.
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in the here and now. It’s already happening. Even if you wake up with a raging hangover, it’s even more important. What is working now? What did I get right? Because you have to train your brain to see what you are not used to seeing, which are small incremental steps. You don’t change who you are in all of your habits overnight. 95 % of everything that you think
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and feel and do every day is a repeat, which means you’ve only got a 5 % window, only 5%. And that number can decrease if you’re super busy, go-go, stressed out, really packed to the max person. Like, you need to give yourself the bandwidth to take the time to look at everything you are doing and notice the good. Notice what is.
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working because what you pay attention to grows and what you neglect dies. And the habit you have to shift away from is paying attention to everything that is going wrong and buying your own negative bullshit. That’s the bottom line. This is an inside job. If you felt calm and peaceful and relaxed, you would drink like someone who feels that way. And the fastest way to change is to simply
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practice feeling that way because the more time you spend in that emotional energy the more your thoughts align and your perceptions align you you see what you think you see you only see what you think you see and so you only can think how you feel and so how you feel becomes the bedrock of your transformation this is how we manifest is we decide first
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the energy that we want to experience. And then we start looking out in the world and looking for evidence that it’s already working now. So your takeaway from this is to get yourself a what’s working now notebook and take time every single day as often as you can to add to your growing body of evidence that you are in the process of transformation.
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You do know what you’re doing. You do have the resilience and the stamina and the support and the guidance and the community and the content. You have everything you need. And here’s the evidence. My brain, my busy, bad brain. Here’s the evidence of what is working now. Go get yourself a notebook. Let me know how it goes. All right. Thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving coachable woman,
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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.