Alcohol Minimalist: Change Your Drinking Habits!

Hey, it's Molly from alcohol minimalist. What do you do in this October? I would love to have you join me in my more sober October challenge. What do I mean by more sober October, it simply means that we're going to add in more alcohol free days than you currently been doing, whether that's one or two or 31. It's up to you, you get to set your own goal and that's why it's more sober October. You can check it out and learn more at get got sunnyside.co/molly It's totally free. I've got prizes, I'm going to be going live every week to announce the prize winners. And it's just going to be an awesome event. So I would love to have you join me. You can learn more at get.sunnyside.co/molly and you can get registered today. Welcome to the alcohol minimalist podcast. I'm your host Molly watts. If you want to change your drinking habits and create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, you're in the right place. This podcast explores the strategies I use to overcome a lifetime of family alcohol abuse, more than 30 years of anxiety and worry about my own drinking, and what felt like an unbreakable daily drinking habit. Becoming an alcohol minimalist means removing excess alcohol from your life. So it doesn't remove you from life. It means being able to take alcohol or leave it without feeling deprived. It means to live peacefully, being able to enjoy a glass of wine without feeling guilty and without needing to finish the bottle. With Science on our side will shatter your past patterns and eliminate your excuses. Changing your relationship with alcohol is possible. I'm here to help you do it. Let's start now. Hello, and welcome or welcome back to the alcohol minimalist podcast with me your host Molly Watts coming to you from well, it's a warm Oregon. But I think that if I were recording this when I'm typically recording it, it would be like a burning hot Oregon because the forecast ahead is that the weekend is going to be really, really warm here. But I'm not going to be here to check it out. I'm out in the Midwest. So hello, all you Midwesterners up your way up enjoying some family time in the lakes region of Wisconsin. And hopefully I'm not being eaten alive by mosquitoes. But you know how it goes up there. So I just wanted to jump in here quickly to give a little backstory here on this week's edition of the summer content series. So if you listened last week, you heard that during August, you're gonna get to hear from some of my favorite podcast guests, some of my favorite podcast hosts podcasts that I listen to as well and share some of their great inspiring words of wisdom. And none more popular than with my group of listeners. I know so many of you listen to her. And I just cannot give you an give enough kudos to my friend and fellow coach Monica Ryan Nagel. Monica is the host of the change Academy podcast. And if you haven't listened to change Academy, you really need to, it's all about behavior change, and so much of what we talked about here, I mean, it's all applicable to the other areas of your life, right. And Monica is focuses on nutrition, but really her her, her skill set and everything that she brings to the change Academy is all about changing any habit that doesn't serve you which is just exactly what I talked about. In this episode. She's giving you some some really tough love on if especially if you're one of those people that likes to learn, but not take action, right when the gap between intention and action seems to keep spreading because learning feels like you're doing something valuable, but you aren't really making any moves with what you're learning. And this episode hits home for me hits home for so many of us. I think you're really going to enjoy listening to it and getting everything you can out of it. Before we get there. I do want to mention that I'm doing a free masterclass coming this Friday, if you're listening to this in real time, I don't know it drops on Wednesday, August 16. And then I will be going live on Friday August 18 at 10am You have to be registered for it. There's no live live link to it but go to webinar dot Molly Watts dot com that's webinar dot Molly watts.com. To get pre registered for that, you can always watch the replay as well. It's called How to Stop Worrying and start changing your drinking habits. In it, I'm going to be sharing not only the the framework that I use with my students to help them create a peaceful relationship with alcohol, but for thought errors that might be holding you back from making sustainable change, you'll get a lot out of it. And I'm going to share information about making peace with alcohol, my new program and community that's just getting opened inside of it as well. I invite you, I would love to have you webinar dot Molly watts.com to get signed up or email me, Molly at Molly watts.com to ask me any questions that you have. All right, my friends. Without further ado, here is my friend Monica Ryan Nagel and the change Academy podcast. A lot of the work that I do with the people that I'm coaching centers around helping them better understand what is really driving their behaviors. And I say really, because often it's not what we initially think or say when asked the things driving our decisions, and our behaviors are frequently invisible to us or unacknowledged. And this can result in our acting in ways that aren't aligned with what we say we want. Without insight into why we do the things we do change, especially lasting change can be very difficult. But the point I want to make today is that insight alone is not enough. Psychologist Laurie Gottlieb in her book, maybe you should talk to someone put it this way, you can have all the insight in the world. But if you don't change when you're out in the world, the Insight is worthless. Insight allows you to ask yourself, Is this something that's being done to me? Or am I doing it to myself? And the answer gives you choices, but it's up to you to make them. Now, you may have heard me talk about the attention intention action cycle before, this is a framework that I use in my coaching programs. And there's also an episode in the archives that I'll link to. And in that episode, we talked about making sure that we're not getting stuck in a tension or intention, but actually moving through that cycle, to taking action. And then of course, paying attention all over again. And it's really easy to confuse consuming content, whether that's in the form of books, podcasts, or other media, with taking action. It really feels like you're doing something you're researching or learning, you're thinking you're planning and all of those things absolutely have their place, namely in the attention and intention parts of that cycle. But you have to actually take some action, if you want to see progress, because action is where the change actually happens. Everything up until then is just preparation. And preparation is good. It's just not sufficient. I think when we find ourselves feeling resistant to taking action, for whatever reason, and we can talk about what some of those reasons are, but when we're resistant to taking action, we think we just need a little more inspiration to motivate us. Another podcast episode another article, another illustrated journal. My former co host Brock Armstrong has a great name for this he calls it inspiration porn. And you know, it does sort of have that addictive quality. But inspiration doesn't get the job done. Because you can just keep soaking up inspiration indefinitely and it's not getting you anywhere. A just a quick break to talk with you for a minute about Sunnyside. You hear me talk about it on the show often. And it really is my number one recommendation for a mindful drinking app. People use this tool in my groups in my classes and they tell me all the time, how much they really appreciate the fact that Sunnyside is a very positive reinforcement. And what I mean by that is that when you track your drinks, and let's just say you planned for one drink and you ended up having to if you're honest and you track that second drink, you're not going to get a message that shames you in any way or reprimands you, you're actually going to get positive reinforcement for tracking a drink that you didn't plan on and some ideas of some suggestions for going and grabbing a snack or getting some water Sunnyside is like having a coach in your pocket. And I love that you can try it for a 15 day free trial go to www.sunnyside.co/ Molly that gets started today. Okay, let's talk about some of the reasons that we do feel resistant to taking action. I think that they break down into two big categories. The first is fear. We're afraid of taking the wrong action, or we're afraid that we'll fail, we're afraid that we won't get the results that we're hoping for. And what I want to offer there is that failure is not something we need to be afraid of failure is evidence that we've tried that we've taken action. Moreover, failure gives us valuable information that we can use to try again, and eventually succeed. And the other category of resistance is confusion. We're not sure what to do or how to do it, which really, when you think about it is the fear of doing it wrong. But it keeps us frozen in that information gathering mode, in the hopes that we will finally learn the thing that will make it clear. And what we're really looking for there is a guarantee, and that doesn't exist. And I'm going to channel Brock again here, because he likes to remind us that often the best way to get more clarity is to actually take action. Action breeds clarity, not research, not inspiration, action. Now, as most of you already know, my area of expertise is nutrition and behavior change. And in addition to this podcast, I have another podcast called The nutrition diva, where I talk about the science of food and nutrition. So I share a lot of information. I also include a fair amount of advice on how to take action based on that information. But I'm aware that a lot of people that listen to my podcasts, don't take that step. They're just indulging in some inspiration, or maybe information porn. But I also get to work with people in group coaching programs and some one on one coaching. And the interesting thing is that I share a lot of the same information in those programs, as I do in the podcasts. But the people who enroll in programs or decide to work with me as a coach tend to get different results than most of those who simply attend a free workshop or subscribe to the podcasts. Part of it, of course, is that I can offer more individualized support and feedback to my clients and group members than I can to our wider audience. And the programs also offer more structure and some tools and resources that I only share inside of those programs. But it really is more than that. I think part of it is the commitment that people make when they sign up for a program, they're committing to do the work in a specific way. And in a specific timeframe, which is really different than browsing a variety of approaches and picking up a little thing from one place and then trying something else for a little while. And there's also the accountability of tracking and measuring outcomes. But I don't just mean external accountability, like to a coach or to a group or to a buddy, although that may play a role. I really mean the internal accountability that happens when we have a clear and meaningful goal. And we make a commitment to that goal. And not just to a specific approach or tactic. What that means is that if that first thing that we tried doesn't work, we don't give up. We just try something else. We iterate, we learn. But most people stop short of making that commitment. They just continue to graze, or even binge on self help content, but they don't put in any consistent concerted effort. They continue to dream about that outcome that they want to create. But month after month, year after year, they're not really getting any closer. They also tend to collect a lot of excuses and justifications for why they can't take action. They might even occasionally take a few steps. But then they get discouraged and they lapse back into that passive consumption mode. So here's the tough love part of this episode. My goal here is not just to offer or to gather insight or information. My goal for you and for myself is to take action based on that information and insight to learn the things that we can only learn when we try something new. If you're thinking but not doing if you're learning, but not taking action. If you're inspired, but not actually progressing. Then you are sitting on the sidelines of your own life. And that's not what I'm here for. So here is how you can actually take action and what we're talking about today, you can send me an email and tell me three things. Number one, something you want to create or accomplish that is not yet a reality. Number two, tell me how long you've wanted this. And then number three, and this is the tricky one. What action are you going to take this week to move toward that goal? So at the beginning, I said that this episode was as much for me as it was for you. And in that spirit, I want to share with you my answers to those three questions. But look, listening to my answers enters you into a pact of reciprocity. So if you're not going to email me with your answers, you have to stop listening right now. Okay, number one, something I want to create or accomplish is an in person retreat with members of my community, that includes listeners, current clients, past clients, a place where we could work together on creating the changes that we want to make in our lives. Number two, I've been wanting to do this since the summer of 2018. That's when the first cohort graduated from the year long coaching program that we launched in 2017. And by the time we finished that year of work, it just seems like an in person event would be such a natural and joyful thing. And number three, the step I'm taking to make that a reality. I just took it, I just told you, and a few 1000 other people that this is something that I want to do. It's on the record now. So look, as long as you're going to be emailing me anyway, with your answers to those three questions. Tell me whether and in person retreat with me, is something that you'd be interested in and where your ideal location might be. You can email me at hello at change Academy podcast.com. That's it for me. I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the alcohol minimalist podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping you change your drinking habits and to create a peaceful relationship with alcohol. Use something you learned in today's episode and apply it to your life this week. Transformation is possible. You have the power to change your relationship with alcohol. Now, for more information, please visit me at www dot Molly watts.com