Episode 58: How to reclaim your personal power without being a bitch

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So I am recording today’s episode on a holiday weekend. We are at our lake home and it is rainy and cold. And the smoke from the Canadian wildfires is just hanging over the lake and the atmosphere. It looks dark and foggy, but yet hazy. Can’t even see across the lake, visibility is really low. And...

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I couldn’t be more excited for today. And this is such a drastic contrast to the old version of me. This holiday weekend, the 4th of July, is typically our biggest family gathering for my husband’s side of the family. But we have everybody come up to the lake home, his girls, daughters, our daughters fly in from California. We’ve got

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you know, cousins and people, everybody just comes to our lake home, everybody descends. It’s like Christmas in July at the Cashman’s. And in the past, this particular stretch of the month has been absolutely overwhelming because it’s a lot to have and host a huge three, four day blowout.

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you know, everything from the sheets and the bedroom assignments to all of the food and all of the snacks and toilet paper and activities and worrying about, you know, who’s coming and where they’re sleeping and will everybody have what they need? And is this these people getting along? It has been so much stress. And that is how I used to live my life. Thinking that what was happening around me and putting all this pressure on myself to make things quote perfect.

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That was so, so stressful. And to be able to sit here with zero out of 10 on the anxiety scale, be doing what I need to do, which is get this podcast on for next week, and not bothered by my own incessant need to control or to produce or be the...

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you know, productive and make sure everybody else is happy to not be bothered by any of that. That is personal power. And that is what I’m going to talk to you today about how you get to a place where you are living in your own personal power. Personal power is when you have the sense that you are unfuckwithable, unflappable. You know who you are. You know what you want.

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and the busy doings and going on of other people and the world, or even the unforeseen problems that jump out at you, the obstacles and challenges financially or in your career, or the hardships of illness or just problems, life problems. The ability to know that you can tolerate and handle and deal with

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and overcome. That is what personal power is. It is resilience. It is knowing that no matter how many times you get knocked down, you can get back up. And that leads to a very strong sense of confidence and an awareness that you are able to determine your own destiny. You are not a victim of circumstance. What happens to you? What’s going on around you?

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the other people in your life. Do not dictate your ability to stay calm, be happy, and move forward. Personal power is the ability to accept what is, it is what it is, to accept the reality that you’re dealing with, instead of constantly be arguing in your mind that it should be different, and then trying to renegotiate with.

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yourself, the people around you, the universe, mother nature, so that the external circumstances can change to make you feel better. A lack of personal power, to be clear, put this in contrast, a lack of personal power is when you are setting conditions on when and if and how you will be okay. So you have decided that certain conditions have to be met.

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for you to feel satisfied, validated, respected, peaceful, calm, ultimately safe. There are certain conditions that have to happen so that your nervous system will feel safe. And if those conditions aren’t met, you are going to bother yourself with a story that things are not okay. So for me this weekend, the weather is shitty, people are canceling left and right.

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I got the house ready. I’ve got, I know where people are staying, kind of, although I no longer try to control who sleeps in what bed. You know, I do my part and then I let that shit go. But I ordered a whole bunch of food and so I could be getting upset that as people are canceling, you know, how much money did I waste? All that food is going to go to waste. In the past, I would have started

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Applying that anxiety to see who I could recruit to get up here earlier so my stepkids are on their way from another state and probably due to the weather and Also, I’ve met them. They are not going to be here anytime soon. I could be Starting to complain at my husband and say you need to call the kids because they need to get here for dinner Why do they need to be here for dinner because I ordered too much food, I guess

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and being able to just allow things to be what they are and not hold myself hostage with conditions of when I’m gonna be okay. And I look at this, my husband and I were talking this morning and I was telling him that I’m gonna have an amazing, awesome day and we were talking about emotional sobriety and he actually paid me a compliment about how much I have changed.

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from this stressed out shrew that he used to have to deal with. And I put this into perspective for him that, okay, so this week we have all these people coming and he has had a set of conditions that everything has to be perfect. So like he had the yard done, the grass looks like somebody fricking vacuumed it, everything’s manicured. Then we had a storm come in earlier this week, all the sticks are down.

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And of course that created a lot of anxiety for him. And I pointed out to him, I said, you have been all week working to create a set of conditions because the story in your head is that this weekend can’t begin and can’t be enjoyable unless the aesthetics are perfect. And in that, we also discussed the relationship dynamic about how I am no longer reacting to his

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pressure so like my husband is one of those people who will not sit down until absolutely everything is done and I am no longer one of those people. I don’t drive myself into the ground I am you know, hey this table needs to be washed off Let’s do that, but I don’t need everything to be perfect before I sit down and I told him as The week has has progressed and he’ll come to me with okay, you know the the

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paint needs to be finished down here, and my son was responsible for doing that, and he didn’t finish it. And so my husband is inviting me to get all jacked up, get on the phone, where’s my son, when is this gonna get done, so that I can give my husband an image in his mind so that he can relax. All of this is mental. Like, it doesn’t matter if the...

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trim on the bottom of the chair on the deck has been finished being painted. Now it is totally okay. And I shared this with my husband. It’s totally okay for you to want those things to be done and to pursue those goals. But emotional sobriety is taking full responsibility that the way you feel right now is not the result of the paint not being finished or the sticks in the yard or the food that might go bad in the refrigerator.

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Emotional sobriety is realizing it’s your mind dictating a set of conditions about when you will be okay and when you won’t. But personal power comes from a decision that you will be okay no matter what happens. Personal power comes from knowing that no matter what the circumstances are, you are going to be able to deal with them.

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pre-defining a set of conditions that you will define as failure and then whip yourself for. Power is the ability to control your mind. It is living in autonomy. It is not being obligated to cater to everybody else’s whims. Like I don’t have to get upset because my husband’s upset because my son didn’t finish the paint or hasn’t finished the paint.

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I don’t have to accept that invitation to join my husband in the anxiety, which in the past not only would I have had anxiety, I also would have been defensive because it’s my son that didn’t finish the paint. Well, you know, last summer when you asked your son to do something, he didn’t finish and you didn’t get all jacked up. Like you were much more understanding or whatever. Like I don’t have to go there. I can see that my husband is experiencing anxiety. And

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I can turn off my mirror neurons to respond in kind with more anxiety. So the personal power comes from not having to cater to everybody else’s whims and not having to cater to your own whims. To realize when you’re upsetting yourself and to stop outsourcing your power in the perception of your circumstances. You know that is...

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That is the big human game. What are we here to do? What are we here to learn? I think we’re here to learn on this human experience that peace and calm and safety are found within, and that we have the ability at all times to create a safe environment for ourselves.

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That doesn’t mean our external environments are always safe or that nothing ever needs to change because of course it does. But until you resolve your own emotional intoxication with your sets of conditions and just deal with the facts of the situation, you can’t actually be effective in managing the circumstances in the outside world. Most of us go through life

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with the misunderstanding that the way we feel is a product of what’s going on around us. And that misunderstanding is what drives us to get the degree and get the job and get the spouse and get the house with the white picket fence and get certain types of friends and get a certain measure of success in the external world. We think that we have to do all of these things in order to feel the way we wanna feel.

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But the inverted truth is that you can’t get what you want in life until you first resolve how you feel in the present moment. It’s why people who do finally find success, you know, they check all the boxes, they do all the things, and then they wake up in midlife or at the top of the ladder or in the big house and they’re not happy.

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because those things didn’t make them happy, because that’s not what makes us happy. What makes us happy is our relationship with ourself. Happiness is actually a product of overcoming obstacles. It is a product of doing hard things, which is why getting everything that you want and having everything that you want,

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You know, you might feel happy for a little bit, but it’s a quick downhill slide because that’s a static moment in time. Once you’ve gotten what you want, your brain’s like, what’s next? What are we gonna go for next? And until you learn how to be satisfied and content and okay exactly where you are with how things are, then you will never be happy, no matter what does or does not happen in your life. This is the simple, but not easy,

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solution to mental health, to discontent, is to realize that step one is always to manage your emotions, to not let them cloud your judgment, to not let some arbitrary set of conditions of the way you were raised to value, you know, status or money or aesthetics, like all of those things are just thoughts in your head and ideas.

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You can think anything you want and being able to manage the ideas in your head and decide how you want to show up right now in this moment and valuing your own peace, valuing the peace in your nervous system, being able to be calm and clear and tolerate whatever it is that’s going on around you. That is what allows you to pursue goals because you’re not telling yourself you have to wait.

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You’re not waiting for the achievement. You’re not waiting for the approval. You’re not waiting for everything to go right and having all this anxiety that it’s not gonna go right. You’re able to just deal and accept with what is, it is what it is, and you are going to be okay no matter what. That is personal power. And so to answer the question, how do you achieve personal power?

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It’s to understand what it is. It’s personal power comes from the ability to regulate your nervous system without relying on people and substances and circumstances to make you okay. Personal power is the ability to be okay no matter what. So how do you get that? First is to realize that that’s the key, and then to decide that that’s how you’re going to pursue happiness.

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That is your journey. All the other stuff you’re doing is just secondary. It’s logistics. It’s survival skills, managing your money, managing your time, managing your people. But to realize that your primary focus needs to be on your nervous system at all times and to take full responsibility when your nervous system gets dysregulated to not blame that on the circumstance. That is personal power.

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And step one to achieving that is to begin to notice and interrupt your emotional reactions. To become conscious of your own emotions and to become conscious of your own body. You know, most of us are so often just completely disembodied. We are living in our head, we are living in our stories, we are just a bundle of nervous system responses.

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You said this, I feel this, I say this, you feel that. And we are completely driven by our emotions and are completely unaware of that. And so shifting your awareness, or at least always having an eye on, like what I teach it is like an anxiety dial or the RPMs. Like when you’re driving a car, the moment you realize that there’s a weird sound or,

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there’s a weird sensation or there’s a catch, what do you do? You look at your dashboard and then you can notice, oh, like my RPMs are in the red, what do I need to do? Do I need to apply the brake? Do I need to let off the gas? Do I need to pull over on the side of the road? Learning how to manage your nervous system requires you to be aware of the state that it’s in at all times. To be having one eye on

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the anxiety dial or whatever you want to call it to be the RPMs to have to always have an awareness of how your body is responding to your thoughts and to the circumstance of with other people or whatever is going on and to be able to understand that you are controlling your response. It is not something you can’t control. I’ll be honest. It’s hard to control. And most of us mistake.

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managing our behavior for managing our emotions. So we get really upset, we get anxious and jacked up, but we’re walking and talking like Stepford wives. Everything’s fine, we’re pretending to be okay. And that is where early sobriety gets intrusive because this ability to manage your nervous system is a physical skill. You don’t have to be born with

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high levels of emotional intelligence or a natural calm disposition. This is a physical skill just like, my best analogy is like learning how to drive a stick shift. Like knowing when, you know, having your foot on the clutch, always being aware of the tension and knowing when to give it the gas or press off the gas or push on the brake or let off the brake. This is you learning how to drive your own body. And in the beginning,

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That’s hard and it’s a new habit that you have to build. Awareness is the biggest part of it, realizing that you are having an emotional reaction. That is 80% of it. How you respond to that, that is, those are coping skills that you build over time. But shifting your belief system that the circumstances are upsetting you.

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and into realizing that it’s your own mind that is upsetting you. The stories you are telling yourself are what are pissing you off. The set of conditions that you are placing, that is what is causing you distress and making you upset, not the other people, not what is happening. And so that requires a lot of attention and investigation when you do have an emotional response. And I’ll tell you, this is much easier practiced

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on smaller, less intense, less personal situations. Being emotionally sober in the relationship with your partner when you’ve got history and trauma and all sorts of tangled cords in your brain that everything that happens is actually about what used to happen or what might happen in the future. That all can be sorted, but it doesn’t get sorted overnight.

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This is kind of like chipping away at the iceberg, or if you are doing the analogy with the cords in your junk drawer, your thought and feeling cords, it’s pulling out the easiest ones. So getting emotionally sober when you’re driving your car and realizing that the guy that cut you off is not the problem, your response to that is the problem. And interrupting that adrenaline rush, that cortisol rush, and just breathing.

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and not going into the story, not responding unconsciously, but saying, okay, I’ve just had a nervous system response. What do I need? I mean, the answers are always pretty simple. It’s you need to breathe, you need to slow down, you need to distract yourself in a healthy way because you’re letting go of the story. And so give your brain a different story to focus on. Distraction is not an unhealthy coping mechanism.

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unless you’re distracting yourself from feelings that you don’t understand the source of and you have not yet resolved them. Once you’ve resolved the belief that came up, you know, so let’s say you got cut off in traffic and you had that big surge of anger, rage, then once you realize that the call is coming from inside the house, it doesn’t matter what that guy did, you know, like,

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It was just a response, probably habitual response. You’ve trained yourself to drive like a race car driver. And when you get in that mode, somebody cuts you off and you get pissed. I mean, it’s not rocket science. But that’s a really easy one to resolve. That just takes the desire to say, I don’t wanna feel like this in my body. This is not actually a problem here. I might have to stop at a red light, whatever, it’s fine. Once you...

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are able to let go of the story, it’s a lot easier than to just manage the habitual nervous system response until you get a new habit. You know, this is building new habits take seven days, takes 21 days, takes 63 days, I don’t know, depends on the habit probably. But this takes more time and effort to untangle when the wad of thoughts and feelings and history and trauma and all of that is bigger. And that’s okay. Like what else are you going to do?

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What else are you busy doing besides letting your subconscious emotions drive your bus and then trying to use your willpower to manage your behavior when the easy route, the easy button is just to go into the feeling that you’re having, figure out the thought or the belief that’s causing it, decide what you want to believe, and then decide how you want to feel and move in that direction. And practice, rinse and repeat.

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So I’ll give you a step-by-step process for this. So it makes cognitive sense, and you can walk yourself through the steps when you get into a situation that you wanna apply emotional sobriety so that you can restore your personal power. So you can take notes if you want. But the first thing I’ll have you do is just think of a situation that predictably upsets you. Start with something small. So for me, using my own example, I might choose the situation that

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You know, July 4th weekend typically upsets me because I have to do all this work and nobody really respects me and nobody cares and nobody’s on time and nobody properly appreciates my efforts and everybody’s just jacking up my weekend. So think of a situation like that for yourself. And the first thing you need to do is to, number one, separate fact from fiction.

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If you don’t like the word fiction, use the word story. So in my situation, the facts are really simple. Facts are always neutral. They’re not personal. They’re not right or wrong, good or bad, fair or unfair. It just is what it is. So for me, the neutral situation is that it’s a holiday weekend, we have people coming to the lake, and I ordered a bunch of food. That’s it. That’s the only thing that’s happening.

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Everything else would be my stories about what used to happen, what will probably happen, and for sure what needs to happen so that I can give myself permission to relax. So when you’re looking for your own facts, these are the facts that are only admissible in a court of law. Nobody cares about your story. It’s just times, dates, number of people, you know, basics, neutral situation. No judgments, no opinions, no standards, no assumptions.

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no values of right and wrong, just what the basic details are. Number two is to use the emotional ownership statement, which I’ve created. It’s basically a form statement where you fill in the blank. The emotional state ownership statement is blank is not the problem. My thoughts and feelings about blank are the problem. So for me,

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what time we’re having dinner and how many people are going to show up and eat it are not the problem. That’s not the problem. My thoughts and feelings about who’s showing up and how much food they’re going to eat, that is the problem. And then you just got to sit with that. Like if you don’t believe that, then you can’t proceed. So as your brain comes up with, yeah, but you know, I could let this go if like

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stop. You cannot proceed to step two until you truly believe that your thoughts and feelings are what are causing the emotional distress in your body. You are the one that is making this a problem. And think about the word problem. Problem is inherently judgmental. It means something is wrong. So as long as you are under the impression that something is wrong, either with the external

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or with your own reaction to it. Like that’s a problem that needs to be fixed. It’s not. So step three is acceptance of both the external world and your internal world. Stop judging the present moment as wrong. It is what it is. Both what’s happening outside of you as well as what’s happening within you. There’s nothing wrong with your emotional reaction.

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If you want to change it, you first have to allow it and to stop judging it. You’ve been conditioned and you’ve practiced reacting in the way that you have and thinking the thoughts that you do. So give yourself some compassion and space. The acceptance allows you to just have the awareness that there’s a different way to be and that you have power to change your experience in life.

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Acceptance leads to power. And once you have gotten yourself to a place of, at least cognitive acceptance, right, where this is your story and you’re gonna go with it, that this problem is inside, not outside, then step four is to ask, what would change if I stopped making this a problem? What would change if I stopped making this a problem? And 9.9 times out of 10,

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nothing would change in the outside world if you stopped making it a problem. You know, let’s say you had a big vacation planned and something happened and financially you are now no longer able to go on that vacation. Like it’s just not gonna happen. Well, separating fact from fiction there is that a trip costs X amount of dollars, your bank account has X amount of dollars, and that’s not a viable option.

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getting upset and throwing yourself a pity party and looking and telling yourself a story that life isn’t fair and you deserve something that you’re not getting. Like your feelings of upset do not change the circumstance. So your options are to stay upset about something that you can’t change or to not make the circumstance a problem. One suggestion I have is to substitute the word problem.

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in your vernacular, like the way you think, for the word challenge. So that you take the negativity, the judgment, out of the question, out of the diagnosis. What would happen if I stopped making this a problem allows you to ask, what is the challenge that I’m facing here? What’s the challenge? What’s the obstacle? If this isn’t where I wanna be, how do I get where I wanna go? And...

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What’s the resistance? What do I need to overcome? And start looking at that as a challenge instead of a problem. And I think this is an easy step to get caught up on, is because once you move into the emotional ownership and you’re like, OK, I get it. My thoughts, my own crazy, I’m my biggest problem, got it, check mark. But then we start judging ourselves for being human. We judge ourselves for being disappointed that we’re not going on vacation.

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We use toxic positivity to trick ourselves into feeling gratitude and pretending that we don’t have a negative side, that we don’t have negative thoughts in our head. We shame ourselves for not being able to just snap out of a bad mood. And that’s where emotional sobriety can be layered and complicated, because it’s not just your feelings about the outside world. It’s also your feelings about your feelings.

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your feelings about yourself. And that can feel like a really foreign concept. We’re not used to prioritizing ourselves. We’re not used to caring more about our internal experience than we are about the external optics. So claiming my personal power has come from me understanding that it’s not the external world that’s causing my feelings. It’s not the circumstance making me feel bad. It’s my thoughts about the circumstance

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as well as my thoughts about my reaction to the circumstance and what I’m making it all mean. And so the only thing I need to deal with first is my emotions. What would change if I stopped making, A, the external circumstance and, B, my reaction to it a problem? What would change is I would be at peace. I would be standing in my personal power. I would be able to take actions that move me forward. And in the meantime, I would be feeling safe.

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and calm connected to myself right where I’m at in the middle of this storm. I would no longer be suffering from the urge to escape my own body, either using substances to numb or change the way I feel or reacting emotionally to other people screaming or yelling or manipulating or grasping and trying to change things. Like I would just be okay.

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everything a problem, I would immediately be okay. Even while I’m uncomfortable, maybe circumstances aren’t okay, maybe I’m gonna have to struggle, I’m gonna have to make some changes, and that’s hard. I can be okay with hard. I can accept that I am and life is a work in progress. I can be okay in the middle of messy. And that’s the ultimate, right? Because the alternative is not being okay, and

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not being okay doesn’t change the external circumstances either. For me, being anxious about how much food I ordered and when everybody’s going to show up and if everybody’s going to eat it, that doesn’t change the fact that people will get here when they get here and do what they’re going to do. Except for my ability to make other people miserable, my emotional state doesn’t have

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to be okay. And then from your state of okayness, that is when you are able to ask the question, how do I want to feel about this external situation? So you’re able to move from internal management of your mind because you did it, and look at the situation as it is. How do you want to think about the situation? So that is step five, to ask yourself,

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How do I want to feel about this situation? And then step six is, what would I need to think to feel that way? What thoughts do I need to program into my brain, practice thinking? What do I need to think so that I can feel the way I want to feel? And so in my situation, how did I want to feel about my holiday weekend? I wanted to enjoy it. I wanted to feel grateful for.

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people and I did not want to be all jacked up and anxious. I just wanted to enjoy it because I can’t control the weather. I can’t control who arrives when. I can’t control how much food they eat or if they show up at all. I can only control my own nervous system. That’s it. So for me, I wanted to feel peaceful, grateful, maybe productive doing my own thing. I wanted to feel independent.

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be feeling like I’m on pins and needles waiting to see if things are gonna go whatever way my crazy brain wants them to go. So in order to feel that way, then the last question, what do I need to think? I need to think it is what it is. I need to think thoughts of gratitude. I need to think that it doesn’t matter when people show up or what happens with all the food. It doesn’t matter, I can give some away.

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Some of it may go bad, I don’t want that. So I may look into sending doggie bags home with people or talking to the neighbors or connecting with somebody to get rid of the food. But ultimately it’s only my story about what happens to the food that’s gonna cause me distress. So I get to decide. I get to decide what I think because I know from an emotionally stable, sober standpoint, emotionally sober standpoint, that there is no right or wrong. There’s just what I do and what I don’t do and how that works out.

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And I can adjust when I see the consequences that something went well or not and apply what I learned to the, apply the lesson to the future. But I don’t have to judge myself or make myself miserable because I’m not happy with consequences. Like this is personal power. Giving myself permission to not let everything bother me, to not set conditions on when I will be okay, and to not have to react to other people’s conditions. I can just see.

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oh, you’re upset right now. Like, I don’t have to participate in that. My first and primary focus is always on the RPMs of my nervous system and keeping those in the green and not letting them go into the red. And when they do, dealing with myself instead of trying to change other people. This is what personal power is. This is how it looks, this is how it works. So I’ve given you, I think, six steps. Number one, separate fact from fiction. Number two,

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Apply the emotional ownership statement number three accept it sit with it as long as you have to number four What would change if I stopped making this a problem? Number five. How do I want to feel about this situation and number six? What do I need to think to feel that way? So I encourage you to practice these six steps on smaller, you know

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burrs in your bonnet, smaller rocks in your shoe. But as you do this with smaller things, you will want to start applying this to larger issues in your life. You will want to start untangling all of these emotional cords and emotional reactions and stories that you have in your head and all the conditions that you’re placing on yourself because this is transformative. This is what allows you

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to completely change your personality. You are not victim to your own habits and beliefs. A belief is just a thought that you stopped questioning a long time ago. You believe it. You believe it’s true about you, but this is what I think. Well, that’s what you believe you think, but you can think something else. Separating fact from fiction is the ability to understand that

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Real truth, big T truth, because we use the word truth to define our thoughts and feelings as well, and that’s fine, but I separate it into little T truth and big T truth. Real truth, big T truth, doesn’t need words to be explained. It is what it is. It can’t be argued with. It’s not right or wrong. It’s not good or bad. It just exists. In this present moment, the truth is more of an experience than an idea.

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It’s when we have our reactions to that, judgments, that becomes our little t truth. That becomes our beliefs. But all of your beliefs are just thoughts. At some point, they were just thoughts that somebody told you and you accepted it as true. And your body believes whatever you think. So it gets hardwired into your nervous system. And you don’t even, you may not even realize, well, I guarantee you don’t. I’m still uncovering.

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I don’t think I’ll ever be done uncovering my subconscious beliefs. You know, your subconscious beliefs get buried and embedded in you. And so, you know, you have your superficial beliefs about this particular situation on the surface. But the real beliefs that are causing you distress are the beliefs you have about who you are, your identity, what, who you are, who you should be, who you should have been, what type of person you want to be.

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good or bad, right or wrong, strong or weak, powerful or a pushover, all of these internal beliefs that you have about yourself, those are really where eventually, after you practice managing your road rage and standing in line at the grocery store and using emotional sobriety to deal with your feelings there, and then you upgrade to your feelings about the food for the holiday weekend, then you gotta go into the...

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then you’ll be ready to tackle the subconscious beliefs that are associated with your identity. Those are a lot harder to let go of because we believe them. We believe them, we think they’re true. And so that is, that’s the goal, that’s the journey, that is recovery, is eventually you get to decide who you are. You get to choose a new identity. And I will say,

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You know, my husband complimented me this morning. He’s like, you are a completely different person than you used to be. And yet I’m not. I still have my quirky personality and my sense of humor and the way I like to do things. But all of those things now have become a choice, a conscious choice. I get to decide who I am. Nobody’s telling me who I am. I’m not bound to live with who my parents think I am or wanted me to be or.

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didn’t want me to be that I want to be now. Like, I’m not bound by all of these conditions. They’re just thoughts in my head. And so the real game changer when it comes to personal power is being able to question your beliefs about your identity and decide how you want to move forward after you’ve accepted the circumstances you’re dealing with. Obviously, I can’t decide to be 22 or a different, you know,

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body style, I can’t change my hair, you know, those are the things I got to change my thoughts about about the things I cannot change. But the rest of it, the way I feel truly is just my judgment of it. So that’s it for today. Thank you for listening. Go get started practicing your emotional sobriety and standing in your power. I promise you that owning your shit is the most powerful thing you can do.

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And if you’re listening to this and you’re struggling to implement these concepts, like it makes perfect sense. You listen to the podcast, you’re like, whoa, yes, I am doing this, put me in coach. And then you go out into the real world and all your shit falls apart and you’re struggling. That is so normal. This is a skill. And I can teach you how to do this in real time. This is the work we do in the next chapter, which is my group.

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program, my 12 week mastermind for women who are ready to move into emotional sobriety. A lot of my clients come in because they have they need to and they are ready to take action to quit drinking and my program is a is designed to move you from drinking into emotional sobriety and I accelerate that process for you so that you’re not bumbling around

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through life trying to do this on your own. I compare trying to do emotional sobriety on your own, in your own head, the equivalent of trying to put on makeup without a mirror or trying to put together a desk from Ikea without the instruction manual. You know, your bullshit detectors are in your ears and you can’t hear the craziness of your thoughts or the conflicts of your conflicting beliefs or

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you’re saying one thing, but you’re doing another and you’re arguing that that’s not how it really is, it really helps to have feedback and support and accountability and instruction. So if listening to this podcast isn’t enough for you to supplement whatever it is you’re doing and you would like to work with me directly, in the show notes, there is a link to my Emotional Sobriety Masterclass, where I lay out the

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big picture approach that I take for women in recovery, whether you are still drinking or whether you’ve been struggling in sobriety because you’re doing the AA thing, or you feel like you’re getting stuck in cycles of sabotage where you keep doing the same thing and you get some results and then the results fall away. I explain why that is and how the cycle of self-sabotage works in the masterclass. And then at the end of the masterclass, I explain...

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all of the details about my 12 week program, which is all inclusive, immersive, kind of like taking a college course, it’s not just listening to a podcast here and there. We have group calls, I have office hours, there are modules to work through, but it really does put you on the path to recovery so that you can immerse yourself in these ideas and get where you’re going a lot faster because you have the support and guidance and accountability of somebody who’s walked in your shoes.

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and who has the map and I can show you how to get where you’re going. So click the link in the show notes if you’re interested in working with me and you wanna know more about the process and the details and all of that. Thanks for listening. If you liked what you heard, please take the time to rate and review the show so that other people can find it. I really appreciate it. And check out the show notes for any resources I’ve mentioned, including links to follow me on Instagram.

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and join my private Facebook group where I connect with my tribe every day. I love it in there and we have so much fun. And finally, if you’re ready to redefine sobriety so that you can feel excited about quitting drinking, follow the link to my 10 days to spontaneous sobriety course where I will help you eliminate, eradicate, obliterate, cancel your desire to drink. Because looking and feeling