How’re you doing? I’m Kevin O’Hara for alcoholmastery.com.
Today, I’m talking about the benefits of fooling yourself.
In today’s video I talk about the benefits of fooling your mind, positive foolery 🙂 How our brain tries to fool us all the time, how we have a natural aversion for making mistakes, and the benefits of faking it until you make it.
I’m not talking about this in a negative way.
Fooling yourself has a lot of negative connotations.
We fool ourselves all the time about the stuff we do to ourselves, the fact that we eat the wrong foods or drink alcohol.
And, we tend to ignore all the information, all the proof that these things are bad for us.
We tend to read the things and pay attention to the things that are telling us that alcohol might not be so bad for us after all.
When you look at all the stuff about modern drinking, most of it
comes from newspapers.
You rarely get scientific materials about it.
The newspapers and TV shows all want to give you good news about your bad habits.
They all want to go out and say ‘did you know that you need 3 bars of chocolate a day and you can still lose weight’ or ‘did you know that alcohol is good for your heart?’ and all this bullshit.
What they’re doing is, they’re telling you a snippet of a story, and that’s all it needs for most people to latch on to that story and get some hope from it.
So, that is negatively fooling yourself.
I’m talking about positively fooling yourself, in the sense of when you start out this journey, most people don’t know what to do.
They don’t know how they’re going to cope with things, how to explain themselves to people, how to just deal with life in general without their comforter- the alcohol.
The alcohol helps them in many areas of their lives.
It’s very difficult for people to imagine a life without that comforter.
So, a lot of people fear that they will make fools out of themselves in front of other people; their friends and family who are probably drinkers.
They’re afraid of making the mistake of telling people they’re quitting alcohol, and not having the confidence to pull through, giving in to temptation and then having to backtrack and make excuses to these people.
Another aspect of fooling yourself is pretending you can do something you can’t.
And that in the beginning of any big change journey involves faking it until you make it.
It’s pretending you can do something and then putting yourself into the position where you can do it.
A lot of the time, it’s in your head.
If you believe and act like you can do something, then you can do it.
If you believe and act that you’re person who can quit alcohol, then you can quit alcohol.
The opposite is also true.
If you believe and act like you’re a person who can’t quit alcohol, in what you’re showing to yourself in your conscious mind is that you’re full of confidence, but you’ve got all these doubts inside you.
Underneath it all, you don’t believe that you can do it.
That belief is going to come into the surface; it’s going to ruin all your efforts at quitting alcohol.
Your reality is basically your creation.
What you put out into the world from the inside out is your reality.
Whether or not you believe you can do it or you can’t, that’s what’s going to make your reality true.
Another aspect is where people don’t like the shame attached to quitting alcohol.
They feel they’re doing something wrong by quitting alcohol, and everyone else is drinking and drinking normally.
No one else has a problem with drinking.
See, first of all, the big problem is that you don’t know what other people have got, because people keep this thing hidden.
You’ve kept it hidden.
Other members of your family and friends might worry a bit about you.
But no one knows the extent of your problem but you.
It’s the same with everyone else.
People don’t wear it on their sleeve because of the stigma attached to quitting.
The stigma should be in the same case as someone taking Heroin or Cocaine.
When you’re an overeater, and you continuously overeat, you can’t hide that.
You wear that around.
If you’re a crap dresser, you wear that around with you.
But, the problem is with thinking along these lines is that you’re vulnerable in the beginning, because you have to change so much.
People are opening themselves up to themselves probably for the first time in a long time without repressing all the negativity among themselves.
They have to face up to reality for the first time.
This makes them vulnerable.
That vulnerability is projected on to other people and what they think.
People are mainly shocked when you quit because they don’t see it.
They might ask ‘do you really have a problem with drinking?’ or something.
But most people are too busy getting on with their own lives to be worried about yours.
We’re projecting our own vulnerabilities on other people.
Some people just don’t like the idea of others progressing.
If they think that you quitting alcohol means that you’re progressing beyond that relationship that you have with them, or you’re going to show them up or whatever, that’s when they start thinking about you and they don’t like that.
A lot of people behave like that.
A lot of people do think that it’s the only drug where when you do quit, you seem to have a problem.
But, and here’s the big one, when you’ve stopped drinking for 3 months, and you start living the benefits…especially after a month or two into it, and you start feeling the benefits in your body and mind, when you start to feel your thoughts flowing a lot better; you feel ideas coming up, and feel like you can tackle a lot now, then this starts to show from you as strength.
That’s very magnetic to other people.
Other people will start to look up to you.
You’ll always get people who say ‘well there eh goes, holier than thou. He doesn’t drink or smoke. What a choir boy’, and stuff like that.
That’s their problem, not yours.
What I’m saying is, don’t be afraid to fool yourself.
Sometimes you have to be willing to put yourself out there and make a fool out of yourself.
Sometimes, you have to fake it until you make it.
Put yourself into the position where you are acting in a certain way before you can feel a certain way.
You have to put yourself in a position where you feel foolish doing certain things.
There are a lot of things you’ll do for the first time.
Don’t be afraid.
Make sure you’re aiming towards a positive frame of mind.
How many times have you behaved foolishly throughout your drinking life, because you’ve been drinking?
I can probably count on my hand the times I’ve negatively behaved foolishly without alcohol.
Because normally, I’m a very stoic person.
I’m sort of straightforward.
I’m conservative, although I’m liberal in my politics.
I try and do a lot of different things.
I’m trying to get out of my comfort zone in that area, but I’m very level-headed.
But the amount of foolish stuff I did when I was drinking was just unreal.
I just do not miss that at all, because at the same time as you’re doing this kind of stuff you’re calling it letting your hair down. Bullshit.
Positive fool-making of oneself is a good thing.
Stepping out of your comfort zone and being willing to make a fool out of yourself when you know there’s going to be a positive outcome.
You’re stepping out now and making a fool out of yourself; doing things you wouldn’t normally do.
That’s a positive.
You know you’re at the bottom rung of the ladder, and you will step up and get more confidence about what you’re doing.
Step up another rung and see things from a much clearer perspective.
You get to a stage in your life where you start feeling the strength of not drinking.
You feel your emotions, you feel your thoughts are clearing up.
Your life starts to flow better.
So, don’t be afraid of making a fool out of yourself, or of putting yourself out there.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comment section.
If you want to sign up for the alcohol mastery starter pack, it’s on the website.
Leave your first name and email address, and I’ll send that stuff to you.
It’s stuff trying to help you to kick-start this alcohol-free journey.
Until next time, take care and keep the alcohol out of your mouth.
Don’t look for happiness, create it.
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
Off topic a bit i watched a programme the other night about Cocaine it seems its everywhere Gordon Ramsays restaurants all contained traces of cocaine in the staff toilets and the customers toilets looks like its catching up with Booze ,i was shocked at how Cocaine is made the Cocoa leaf is ground up then they add Gasoline and Battery acid and another chemical to extract the cocaine and turn it into powder absolutely shocking good Vid by the way Kev keep it up
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