Episode 256 Minisode: Adjusting Expectations For The Holidays (Part 1)
00:00
One of my favorite sayings is, life’s a bitch. She gives you the test first and then follows up with a lesson. And that’s a problem for those of us who identify as perfectionists because we set the bar too high. Retraining your brain to drink in moderation is a lot like training a puppy. Of course the puppy will sit when you’re in the kitchen and it’s on a leash and you’re holding a treat. But you don’t take that puppy to the dog park and let it off leash where there’s squirrels and people and pee-pee to smell.
00:29
and then yell from 100 yards away, sit, and expect the puppy to sit. It’s just not going to happen. And here’s the truth. The holidays are your dog park. It’s not the cookies or the cocktails or even the chaos that make drinking in moderation during the holidays hard. It’s going against old habits that come roaring back when you’re stressed and busy and distracted. So in this episode, I’ll teach you how to set realistic expectations for the holiday weekend.
00:58
Because the real test is not whether or not you can avoid making mistakes. It’s whether or not you can learn from them.
01:09
I’m 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.
01:45
When it comes to changing your behavior, changing your habits, breaking bad habits, creating new habits, you have to understand and truly get this in your core that it is not the behavior itself that is hard. It is the change. It is doing something different. It is taking your brain off autopilot that is hard simply because you have to pay attention. You have to stay aware.
02:15
You can’t just go through the motions. And this is why when I work with women, I see the women who are having the hardest time changing are the women who have not made any space or time to change. Their feet hit the ground in the morning, the moment their eyes open, and it’s fricking go time, and it’s peddled to the metal all day long.
02:40
When you are performing at a very high level, when you are doing so many things, you are by definition on autopilot. You are not thinking about all of it. You have built habits that push you through your day. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to make different decisions. And this is why, by the time you get into an evening, if you have made no changes prior to the evening that’s allowed you to go through your day,
03:09
in a more relaxed state, in a more connected state where you’re experiencing yourself in any given moment, as opposed to letting your brain drag you and run out ahead three minutes, three hours, three days, three months ahead of you, you’re actually synced up in your mind and body. It is not drinking less, or not at all, that is hard. Having a hangover, running through life like a chicken with your head cut off, that is way harder.
03:38
than living in a regulated nervous system, experiencing peace and calm and big picture thinking and not living in a survival mode stress response and a trauma response. Those things are hard. That’s why you’re here. You want to change those things. And we get stuck on the behaviors themselves that need to change, not realizing it’s the upstream thinking.
04:05
that is driving these behaviors, the perfectionistic mindset, the performance-based mindset that I have to do all of these things so that I can be OK, that is preventing you from being OK so that you can do the things you want to do. And that’s what you’re in this program to learn, to learn how to experience the being OK that allows you to do whatever you want and to achieve whatever goals you want.
04:33
But the being OK comes first. And we’ve been living in this culture where we think we can’t feel better or safe or secure or happy or validated until we’ve proven it, earned it, gone and gotten it, closed the deal. And it just doesn’t work that way. That’s why it feels like a hamster wheel. So in this episode, I want to talk to you about how to adjust your expectations for the holidays or any stressful period of time.
05:04
The more stressed you are, the more distractions you have, the less focus you are able to give yourself and your goals of what you want to be thinking and doing differently, the less bandwidth you have to dedicate to the changes you want to make, the less you’re going to be able to do it. It’s just that simple. And so setting realistic expectations is how you make it through.
05:31
periods like the holidays where everything is coming at you at once and if you go into that expecting yourself to demonstrate at the highest level all of the changes that you’ve been making over the last few months if you expect yourself to demonstrate at the highest level you’re setting yourself up for failure and failure is the slippery slope back into old habits but failure my friends is an illusion
06:01
It is a story you’re telling yourself. It is a mismatch of your own expectations. What if there is no such thing as failure? All of your results are just neutral. They are what they are. They are not good or bad or right or wrong. Your results are informing you of how well you are doing, making space and time to dedicate to the change process.
06:30
And even if you have had months of mindful drinking and feeling like I’m doing it right, I get it, this is so wonderful, I love the new way that I am, even if you have had months of new habit development, those new habits are still baby habits. They are like the little sprout that comes up out of the garden. Meanwhile, the old habits,
06:56
where you were one year ago at this stressful time of the holidays, those are driven by neural pathways that have not gone away. Those are fully formed bushes with bark on them in your garden. And you simply cannot expect your baby sprout habit to stand up against stress 100 % of the time and execute perfectly without any reoccurrence of the old habit.
07:26
because it’s still there. And when you are in periods of stress, you are less able to catch the upstream indicators that the thinking patterns are coming back, or the assumptions and the biases, or the black and white, all or nothing thinking mindset that creeps back in. You’re just less able to pay attention. I want you to imagine that this process of change, there’s periods of learning, and then there’s a period of testing.
07:55
just like you would experience in an educational setting, okay, where you have quarter one and then you have a test and then you have quarter two and then you have your semester final and then quarter three and then the comprehensive at the end of the year. I want you to frame this process of change with the same thought that you do good for a little while and then there is a test and then you can do good for a little while provided
08:23
that you learn from the test. And life, a little bit of a bitch. You get the test, then you get the lesson. And where the mistake comes with alcohol use disorder and any other behavior change that is linked to self-sabotage is that when you take the test and you perceive that you failed the test, you go back. You go backwards. The test, my friends, as you move through the holiday season,
08:52
is when you experience a setback, a relapse, a reemergence of the old behaviors, a slippery slide, if you will, when you experience the test and you get the results and there has been some backwards progress, the test is in how you respond to that. If you catalog the relapse as a failure, then you’re going to continue to relapse or struggle or
09:22
frantically paddle around what is wrong with me. Okay, the test is actually when you experience a setback to find the lesson in it. Treating yourself with dignity and respect. You are a smart person. You are perfectly capable of figuring this out this puzzle of your behavior. You are perfectly capable of continuing to improve treating yourself with that attitude and then looking at
09:51
the test results and saying, all right, what caused this? Where did I fall short? Where did I blow through a stop sign? Where was I not taking care of myself? What thought processes were triggered in which environments and I wasn’t paying attention? If you find the lesson, then in your mind, the test that you didn’t get good results on will be worth it because that’s how you learn. You’re always learning.
10:20
as opposed to the way you’re reacting to the test, which is to see proof that you can’t change, you haven’t changed, something is still wrong with you, and you’re never going to get it right. This is the moment of truth. This is the test. How you respond to your setback determines whether you’re going to stay setback or whether you’re going to leap forward with your new information and the motivation to try again. Put me in, coach. I get it.
10:50
I see it. I know where I got off track. I know how to get back on track. And I just want you to stop and notice how each of these approaches feels in your body. When you look at a setback, we just came through the week of Thanksgiving. And I’ve heard from some people, you know, I’ve been doing great for months and I drank through the week and I wasn’t taking care of myself. I didn’t work out like I wanted. And this is the test.
11:19
Are you gonna beat yourself up and say this shouldn’t have happened? This proves that I’m weak. Are you going to see that as a failure and diagnose yourself as broken and always in need of improvement and you just can’t get it right? Or are you going to find the lesson? Are you gonna dig through the shit and find the gold nugget? When you can identify the learning, the lesson, your heart
11:48
opens, it feels motivating, because oh, I see something I didn’t see before. I’m smarter than I was yesterday. I believe in myself. I’m so proud of myself for all of this effort that I’m putting in and I’m excited that I’m still in the game, that I’m even talking to myself in this moment about this and planning for my next strategy. I’m not going to give up on myself.
12:18
because there’s no need to give up on myself. There is no failure here. It is impossible to change years of habits, decades of habits, with a single, simple, conscious decision. And I’m no longer the type of person that expects myself to be perfect and then freaks out when I fuck up and then gives up. I’m in this with myself for the long haul. And I’m going to take the lesson every time I get results that are not
12:47
what I had hoped for. I’m gonna learn from those results and I’m gonna see that as a gift, as an invitation to dig deeper and expand my self-care practices and compassion and love and kindness to myself and with myself. I’m my own best friend. I’m my own cheerleader and that feels so good and I love learning because it is safe for me to learn.
13:15
I’m no longer afraid of how I’ll react when I don’t get everything right and everything I want the minute that I want it. It is safe for me to learn. I trust myself to learn. And I’m grateful to myself for putting myself in a program and in a community where I get to do this work of becoming my own best friend. So I no longer have to fear my shadow.
13:42
I no longer have to worry about self-sabotage. I just get to go through life accepting my humanness and setting realistic expectations for myself instead of being held hostage by this head shrew that doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about when it comes to change. Like I’m smarter than this. I’m bigger than this. I deserve better than that. And I’m no longer going to live in that bullying and hate speech and
14:11
harassment from my brain, I’m going to take control. And I’m grateful that my drinking habits brought me to a point where I decided I’m going to get some help with this. So my help for you now is to set realistic expectations through the holidays. And when you wake up and realize, uh you know, I didn’t get perfect marks and a perfect 10 on all of my drinking and the way I’ve shown up over the last week or whatever.
14:41
time period you’re looking at, I want you to first ask yourself, how could that have been worse? How could that have been worse is the first question that will allow you to not see that as a failure, but to give yourself full credit for the improvements that you’ve already made. Because let me tell you this and listen to when I say this, trust me, you will not continue to make improvements until you give yourself credit for the improvements you’ve already made.
15:11
You got to drop the all or nothing perfectionistic bullshit. When you have a setback and you do not perform as expected, as desired, the first question is, how could this have been worse? Where did I get it right? And give yourself credit for that. Give yourself credit. Then you can look at, all right, next time I’m going to run that obstacle course, what am I going to do different? What have I learned?
15:39
How could I get better results? And you’re just guessing, right? These are just strategies. So you’re going to run the obstacle course again with the next week of parties or the holidays or stressful time. You’re going to run the same obstacle course. And each and every time, you’re going to remember three things. Number one, high stress periods of time are your weakest link. You should expect the least out of yourself in high stress periods of time. Number two, you’re going to look and say, how could that have been worse?
16:08
Where have I improved? And then number three, what have I learned? How can I improve upon these strategies so that next time I do a little bit better? If you want, stop and write those three questions down, listen to it again, and then just know that those three questions are your exit ramp out of alcohol use disorder. All right, thanks for listening. And if you’re a high achieving coachable woman,
16:38
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.