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How to Make the Final Decision to Stop Drinking Alcohol Stick?

by | Stop Drinking Alcohol | 6 comments

Today I want to talk about how to make the decision to stop drinking alcohol.

First thing I’ll say is that remember that everyone is not the same.

Everyone is different.

What works for one person is not going to work necessarily for another person.

What motivates on person is not going to be the same for everyone else.

Another thing is that this is a long term view.

You have to look at this not in terms of just the next day or how you feel right now in this moment, but how you’re going to feel in a week, a year, what are the consequences of your actions today.

Either way, whether you look forward with positivity because you’ve stopped drinking and how that’s going to be a consequence in your life and how it’s going to affect your life, or, when you look forward in your life and you haven’t stopped and how that’s going to affect your life.

You have to look at things from both perspectives.

First thing I’ll say to you is that you have to keep in mind that your decision in this moment is something that will affect you for the rest of your life.

Quitting drinking alcohol in this moment will affect you positively for the rest of your life. Not quitting will affect you negatively for the rest of your life because it’s not just that you’ve put it off or that you might go back in a week and quit permanently, or you might go back in a month and quit permanently.

Every time you delay the decision or go back on your decision to quit you’re doing damage to your self-esteem, your abilities, your belief in your own abilities.

There’s a lot of damage in the long-term.

It can stop your intentions in the future, not only in this but it can put a bad light on everything.

It can affect everything else and have a snowball effect, just the same way I keep saying that that one decision to stop drinking for me has had such a positive snowball effect on so many areas of my life.

It’s improved my life in so many ways.

It has been beneficial in my life, and it just keep going like that.

You get two beneficial effects, and those multiply to four, and the four multiplies into eight.

It’s positive in itself.

You feel that you can do more, that you can achieve more, that you can have different things that you didn’t think about before.

And unfortunately, it works exactly the same way the opposite way around.

Every time you fail doing something, if you don’t learn and move forward and get a positive result out of it that way…When you fail, when it’s not your fault.

You’re trying something and pushing yourself forward but you’re trying different things, this is a positive result even though failure is often looked at as negative.

Failure in this positive sense moves you forward into a different area or a different way of thinking or perceiving things.

So you try one thing, you fail at it, you think about it, you try another thing, you fail at it, you think about, and eventually you’ll get success.

All these failures are building ultimate success.

When you fail at something simply because you can’t be arsed to do it or because you don’t feel good at it in this moment or because you haven’t got the stamina, you’re failing through weakness.

This builds on your weakness.

It’s a negative foundation for everything else, and that stats snowballing into other areas of your life.

If I’m not succeeding in this and you know the reasons why, at the end of the day, you ca kid yourself.

You can tell yourself all these reasons why you’re failing, it’s not really your fault, it’s someone else’s.

But deep down inside you know it’s your fault.

You know that you’re failing because you’re giving in, because you’re not staying strong to yourself or your future.

So, know that in the beginning, that there’s two different areas of failure.

Positive and negative.

These two areas can really be sort of identified by the person who sort of looks back or the person who looks forwards.

The person looking forwards is looking forward to what they’re moving into.

I’m not telling you not to live your life in the moment, I think you have to and you can’t sacrifice the moment for the future.

This is ludicrous as well because tomorrow’s not guaranteed.

But, you’ve also got to live like there is going to be tomorrow.

If you don’t then what’s the point?

We might as well all take drugs, smoke, drink.

The other person is the one who looks back.

This fear of missing out is the person who thinks that what they have done before is better than what will be tomorrow.

This is a negative attitude, and you’ve got to face forwards and be that person who looks into the future and sees brightness, sees that with their own efforts and mind, building their own mind, building their own database of knowledge about themselves, that they can change anything.

They can alter their own destiny.

I don’t like the word ‘destiny’ or any of these things that sort of suggest that what’s in the future is predestined, that you can’t change it.

You can change everything.

It’s totally in your power to do whatever you want to do.

I keep saying this about karma.

You are where you are at this moment because of what you’ve done in the past.

You will be where you will be in the future because of the things to only that you’ve done in the past but what you can do now to alter the things going forward.

It’s up to you.

Really, truly.

You’ve got to push yourself forward into something you think is worthwhile.

You have to really build a love for the things you’re replacing alcohol with.

If you’re building something you don’t like, then it’s not going to be the motivation that will pull you forward.

You have to build something in your life that you really love.

You only get there by having a big goal at the end of it.

Keep your eye on that big goal.

The basis of getting there is doing things in small increments and you only do the steps n the moment, and that’ the way you build to the big goal.

You might not be able to figure out all the steps.

It doesn’t make a difference at this moment because all you need to do is figure out the next step that will move you forwards in that positive direction, from where you are now to where you want to be.

Keep our eye on the big goal.

Once you get this step, you figure out the next step.

It’s all about the steps.

If you can figure out the next 2 or 3 steps, all good for you.

That’s how chess is played, on the basis of trying to figure out what the next few moves re going to be, not the next 50 moves because there’s no way to figure that out because you’re playing against someone who is doing their own plan.

If you can do the first 3 moves and think about these steps while you’re doing them, then good for you.

Eventually you’ll get to that goal.

What is that goal?

For one person it could be to have a billon quid in the bank.

That’s not my goal.

I don’t give a shit about having money in the bank.

I don’t want to have a big yacht or a big car.

I would like to have a halfway decent house, but my ultimate goal in life, once I stopped drinking was to be a better father.

Pure and simple.

That was my number 1 aim.

To no longer give my son a bad influence.

I wanted to be the best influence I could possibly be. That one idea has got expanding consequences.

Like I say, it’s a snowball effect.

Because I want to be a better father and I’m doing everything I can possibly do to be that better father.

I’m no longer the father that I was years ago in the sense that my son is not with me anymore.

He’s living in Ireland.

I talk to him every second day.

I’m still a big influence and consequence in his life.

But it’s in how I act.

So, me building my own health, knowledge, my own life is influencing him in a positive way.

That has ongoing snowballing effect in other areas of my life.

I’m also helping other people as a natural consequence, and helping my family, helping my friends, you out there who is listening to this video.

These are all natural consequences of me trying to be a better person for that one specific reason.

And, as a result of that, I’m making better career choices, better life decision choices, better health choices, better education choices.

All these things are expanding outwards, the consequences of that one decision. There are tips and tricks I can give you to overcome the cravings, the discomfort, how to get not it in the long term but at the end of the day, it all boils down to this one thing of your rewards.

You’ve got to change the immediate rewards of what drinking gives you and expand that out into the rewards you’re going to get throughout your life as a natural consequence of pushing yourself to be a better person.

That is more powerful than any single tip or trick.

As you move forward with this, you build a new life and you build one thing out, that one ultimate goal out, and as a result of that construction, everything else in your life will start to pop together in ways you never imagined.

If you’d asked me 3 1/2 years ago where I’d be now, how I’d feel about myself what kind of psychological or physical state I’d be in now, I know that it would’ve been positive, but I couldn’t have told you where I was going or what I would be doing or what I would’ve achieved in 3 1/2 years.

But it’s a day to day thing.

It takes hard work but it’s worth it.

The more you go into this just as your cravings and your symptoms and all these things will disappear, dissipate over the time, over weeks and months that you get into this, so will the hard word start to pay off.

And it will get easier to live this new life you’re building for yourself.

You will become more and more comfortable in the skin that you’re in.

That’s what it’s all about.

Getting outside your discomfort zone and feeling the discomfort and pushing on regardless. It’s hard work in the beginning.

Moment by moment, push yourself towards the positive and away from the negative.

There was a guy called Cortes years ago who was the conqueror of Mexico.

Basically what he did was he landed on the shores of Veracruz with his ships, and as soon as they landed, he ordered all his men to burn the ships and send them to the bottom of the sea.

He did this because he didn’t want to have an alternative to turn back. He knew that he had only one choice from then on, move forward, conquer the land and get on with it.

That’s basically what you have to do.

You have to find a way to scuttle your own ships so that you’ve got no fucking retreat, that this is it.

There’s no way to go backwards.

This is going backwards.

This is only quitting drinking, taking something out of your life which is shit and replacing it with something which is good.

I’m not talking about amputating your leg here, or brain surgery.

It’s stopping doing something, stopping putting this poison into your body.

Burn your bridges.

Make sure you put things in whatever you can think of.

Think about it and dwell on it until you have the idea.

Burn your bridges and make sure there’s no way of you going back.

For me, that is always going to be to build this up in the future.

Build yourself something in your life which a drink can’t be a part of.

There’s no escape strategy for me.

In past times, I could go back and have a drink.

Whatever I felt, I could go and have a drink.

Bullshit.

That was the type of thing killing me slowly, making me a fat, lazy person who just didn’t want to do anything because alcohol, that lifestyle was just sapping my energy slowly every fucking day.

Now I’m at a position where there’s no way I would drink.

There’s just no fucking way.

I know how much is at stake.

I know how much the alcohol has done to me, what my drinking has done.

It’s not the alcohol, it’s my choice to do that over those years.

That’s the one sure-fire way that you’re going to get to that stage where you’re looking back and then you can build a future, to have a dream as MLK said, and to follow it with results.

You’re just not going to go back on it.

I’ll leave it there.

Until next time subscribe to the channel.

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WHEN YOUR PAST CALLS, DON’T ANSWER. IT HAS NOTHING NEW TO SAY.

Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!

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6 Comments

  1. Julie D

    Thanks, Kevin. This video helped a lot.
    I’m trying to get out of the habit of reliving the past & to burn the bridges.
    The story about Cortes & his flotilla really hit home, never heard it before. Thanks again. Julie

    Reply
  2. Debra Simmons

    really enjoy

    Reply
  3. Sadko

    Hi, I have found your u tube videos helpful. I would like a new video each day as you mentioned. I am now 16 days without alcohol and do not ever want to go back to it. It is as you say the past. Tried for long enough time to try it a differnt way. SOBAR!

    Thanks.

    Reply
    • Danilo Palim

      Sorry my bad english. I’ll never ever found a help like this. I am having a fucking destructing life. I have 34 years old and drinking every day since 29 years when happened my divorce. I appreciate your experience. From this momment i decided to quit de alcohol. This cant fit anymore in my life. I have two kids thats loves me, and you are responsible for change his lives. Thank u my brother.

      Reply
  4. Cameron Byrd

    I like the analogy of burning the bridge and that being the only way. So, i will ponder that and finally make a concrete decision with no other alternative path.

    Reply
  5. Cheri

    So many of your videos are empowering and inspirational but I must say, this one is a favorite. Powerful and brilliant. You have really thought about all facets of the *relationship* with alcohol and it shows in your work. I think it’s what makes you so effective, because you “get it” and tell it like it is without preaching. Those who have been or are in this place know what you’re saying is true. Appreciate your gift, my friend – and happy to be a patreon so you can share this path of health and wellness to others. What I would spend on a bottle of wine, I happily give to you and my new classes in school! Best of luck on pursuing your degree!

    Reply

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