My primary motivation for quitting drinking alcohol was that I wanted to be a good role model to my son. Today’s video is in answer to question-“If your son wasn’t around, what’s your solid ground when you wake up and in the evening”.
How are you? I’m Kevin O’Hara for alcoholmastery.com. Today I got a question: what would my motivation be if I don’t have children?
The question reads: If your son wasn’t around: this is for the guys that don’t have kids. What’s our solid ground when you wake up in the evening?
If I didn’t have this, I’d find another motivation.
I don’t know what it would have been at the beginning.
I can’t say for sure that it was that thing that kicked me over the edge, that it was my son.
I can’t really say for definite whether I would have quit at that time or whether I’d have waited longer.
If I’d waited longer, it could have been something completely different that motivated me to quit.
Maybe a visit to the doctor saying ‘look, you’ve got something wrong with you and you have to quit now’.
Do you know what I mean?
My father was a big motivation throughout my life.
He was always a hard worker.
He sort of motivated me to become a better person, to work hard, to read a lot, to learn and just a lot of things I wanted to learn.
He was one of the first people that pointed out to me that you didn’t need a college education to get through life.
A lot of the times when you go to college, that you’re learning a lot of stuff you don’t need to know.
So, he was a big motivator for me to sort of learn to start reading self-help books.
He gave me my first self-help book which was called The Magic of Thinking Big by Tommy Schwartz.
I’ll put the link here.
So, later in life, I think my dad motivated me through his own ill-health.
He had problems throughout his life with a lot of different things.
He had a heart attack in his early 50s, same age as me now.
He had arthritis, he had a brain tumour at one stage and had to have that cut out.
He was always overweight, I think since he was 30-odd years old.
He was brought up with the notion that you couldn’t leave anything on your plate.
You had to eat it all.
And once you had a good appetite, you were healthy.
Eating was a big thing for them.
And of course, when you look at the diet they had back then…
My father was born in the 30s.
You had to walk everywhere.
There wasn’t’ much entertainment so people didn’t sit down much.
My father talked a lot about going out walking with his father which we did a lot of when we were kids.
He had a bike.
His father cycled everywhere although he had a car.
My grandfather was in the Police in Dublin.
He was part of the presidential police unit and he had a car as part of the job, but he also had a bike and he cycled around.
When we were kids, we didn’t have a lot of money in the family.
We had a big family.
My mother didn’t work.
She looked after the kids, there were 9 of us.
My father had to do a couple of jobs sometimes so that took a toll on his life.
When he was in the hospital for his second heart attack a few years ago, the same year I quit drinking, the doctor said that a lot of the problems in his body was because of his diet.
So, if I hadn’t quit that January, maybe I would have quit later on in the year.
When I’m talking about my father in this way and the food he was eating, I’m talking about him with a lot of affection because he was a product of his time, same as we are.
Even his drinking was a product of their time.
They drank because that was what they were programmed to do.
When I got to 18 years of age, it was a right of passage to become a man.
You felt like a man when you were able to go into a pub and buy your first drink.
A lot of the motivation for me drinking in the first place way back when I was 12 was because I wanted to feel like I was a grownup.
All throughout the marketing companies, the alcohol companies would never admit that they are marketing towards that end of getting kids hooked to the idea of drinking so that when they do turn 18, they will be drinkers for life.
Then they don’t have to market anymore, just some branding, but overall the rot is set in.
But you can find motivation in opportunities.
When I look at the amount of opportunities available to me now as a 50 year old man living in 21st century, it’s just amazing. We have so many different places we can go, things to do, educational and travel opportunities, just meeting with different people, entertainment.
When you’re a heavy drinker, your life is revolving around this one thing.
The more you drink, the more isolated you become from everything else.
You’re more focused on the alcohol and the lifestyle. That’s another possible motivation.
Another one could be to think about your future children.
If I could go back and quit before I started having a family, before my child was born, I probably would.
But then again I met my wife in a pub.
I wouldn’t have had my son if I hadn’t done that.
So you can’t really go back.
But if it was advice to someone who is young, then it’s to quit drinking before you have a family, before you have kids because I’m telling you now is a lot easier to do it.
It’s easier to be able to pass on good lessons to your children when you’re not doing it yourself.
You follow by example instead of by telling them how to do something.
They’ll never listen to you if you’re just telling them but you’re doing it too.
Another one is to follow your passions.
What is it that you really want to do?
It can’t be drinking.
When I used to drink, I used to be passionate about it.
But that was the bullshit brainwashing.
I was always succumbing to it.
It was always a part of my thinking, just bullshit brainwashing.
I think if you can get a passion for something, if you have a passion for something and you can follow it to the end, just keep going until you get to the place you want.
Everyone’s got something they want to do.
It’s to find it and pursue it.
Nobody is going to be able to tell you how to find your motivation.
My motivation for my son was a very small thing that happened, but it just led me to think about things in a wider context, to see things from a different perspective.
Once I saw things from that perspective, it scared me a lot and I thought I can’t do this anymore.
This is the one thing taking away from every aspect in my life.
The more I thought about it, the deeper I thought about it, the more I was convinced of that.
That conviction became me quitting drinking.
It inspired me to do it.
It made me persistent that I was going to continue with this and would never drink again because I saw the damage I was doing.
Your own motivation is going to come from your own place.
You have to search it out.
It does come from sitting down and thinking about the damage that alcohol is causing, not only to your physical health, but to your mental health.
Look at it from all aspects and I guarantee that you can extract some damage that alcohol is causing in every aspect of your life.
If you can’t find motivation in that, then I can’t help you.
That’s it for today.
If you have any questions, leave a comment down below.
If you like the video, give us a thumbs up.
Come on over to the website, there are a lot of materials on there now, how to deal with cravings and sleeplessness and all the shit you’re going to deal with in the first 30 days.
One of the most important things I think is what to do after 30 days and how to deal with the rest of your life without alcohol.
Go on over there.
I’ll see you there.
BE YOUR OWN MOTIVATION.
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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