Today I just wanted to talk about the concept of your destiny and your destiny being in your hands.
It doesn’t matter whether you are trying to change your habits; trying to quit drinking alcohol; trying to remove any other bad habit in your life or if you are trying to build a good habit in your life – it all comes down to the same thing – ‘Your destiny is completely and totally in your hands.’
When I quitted drinking alcohol – almost four years ago, now – I didn’t go to the AA or my Doctor, nor did I have a magic potion to attribute to my success in quitting. I quitted drinking alcohol, because I had to. Whatever was happening in my life was just pulling me backwards, I was going one step forwards, two steps backwards and I was feeling this way in so many different areas of my life, including my family – especially with my Son with my wife – my spiritual life, my finances, and my health. Everything was just taking a step backwards instead of moving forwards and it was because of that that, I eventually got myself out of the mindset of thinking alcohol was a part of my life and who I was – part of the core person that I am. I think it was this moment, when I started to break down that core belief of believing that alcohol had a successful part to play in my life, that I started stepping back. I started thinking about how alcohol was effecting my life and how it was destroying me, from the inside outwards, from a health point of view to every other aspect of life in general.
There is no point in waiting for the right person to come along, your Doctor to give you a magic pill or waiting for the right time and the right circumstances to quit drinking alcohol, because the time is never going to be right and that person is never going to come along. You can listen to these videos and get inspiration from them, but at the end of the day it all comes down to you.
My life has improved so much, in every single aspect of it, since quitting alcohol and it was because I made that initial choice, followed through and committed myself to keep going and refusing to have a drink. I refused to think that I needed a drink for anything in my life – for relaxation, for sleep, for sex – for anything. I realised that the things I thought I was getting from drinking alcohol could be gained by other means, that I was able to make much better choices and that the things I thought I was gaining from alcohol, the relaxation and sleep, were much better without it. I didn’t realise that without alcohol I would have the best night’s sleep than I had in a long time. I didn’t realise that there were much better ways to relax without drinking alcohol.
I didn’t realise what a dick I was – when I was using alcohol as a social tool -what a dick I was being. I was spending my life acting as a Child. As soon as I drank alcohol, I turned into some kind of fourteen stone, bald headed, Child. When I look back the words, the stuff that used to come out of my mouth was atrocious and part of this behaviour. Not from the perspective that anything that I was saying was wrong, but when you get to a certain stage in your life you want to be a certain person and when you are a drinker, a drug taker or when you’re doing anything that involves momentary gratification, that short term thinking is at complete odds with the other part of you that wants to the be grown up, the person who wants people looked up to. I want my Son to look up to me, I want my friends to think – “Yeah, this is a guy I can trust. This is a guy I can go to for advice. This is a Guy I can go to with anything I need and he’s going to be there to help me out, either with his time, his knowledge or whatever.”
When you’re a drinker, you lead this double life and I was sick of leading that life. It wasn’t even a double life because when I was thinking about being that person that I wanted to be, the alcohol was always dragging me back, so in my mind it was saying how can you be that person. Even though I might not have been logically saying it to myself it was there at the back of my head. It’s there chipping away at self belief, self confidence and that has dramatic long lasting consequences. You can drink as much as you want but at the end of the day once you start eroding your own self belief and your own self confidence, that’s a recipe for disaster.
In one way, where I was at the time I gave up drinking alcohol, was a blessing in disguise. I worked myself down all those years, I’d try and pull myself up with one hand and then this other thing pulled me back down again with the other. And the more I tried to pull myself up, the further back down I went. It’s spiral of control, that Alan Carr talks about in his books.
I think getting to that point where – I wasn’t on base level or the lowest point I could be – but at a stage where there were some serious problems in my life, I didn’t have the money to do a lot of things. I didn’t have the time to do a lot of things because I had to work for the money that I needed to pay my bills. The rest of the time I was drinking, so it’s like a catch 22 situation.
I can see, for some people, if you’re a rich person with a lot of money in the bank that you may choose to sign into a rehab clinic. Most are based around the 12 step principles of AA which you can be taught by the AA for free. All these clinics are taking this model and giving it to you and selling it to you for thousands and thousands of dollars, euros, pounds, a month, and a lot of the time, it doesn’t work, because you go into a cloistered environment, it’s a very managed environment. There’s no alcohol, it’s not real life, and when you come out of that environment and you get back into your real life, your real job and you’re friends that you associate with – you’re back into your real life and it’s very easy to go back into your old life again.
When I decided to quit, I didn’t have the money to do that, I didn’t want to go to the AA, I didn’t’ want to go to the Doctor and I didn’t want to embarrass myself and do the things which I knew I had to do, which was just stop drinking.
Once I stopped drinking – the problem of drinking and all the other associated problems disappeared – period. There was no other problem. Yes, I could have caused damage to myself after all those years of drinking, but luckily and very fortunately, I haven’t caused any damage. I had a lot of flab that I needed to get rid of and there was a lot of thinking that I needed to do to get rid of the thinking drinking, all that kind of stuff, and that takes time but time’s a great healer in that sense.
Once you’ve quit drinking, I can’t tell you what to do. I can tell you what I’ve done, I’ve just thrown myself into a different stuff including the Website and trying to do different things in my life. A lot of stuff is healing old wounds or just trying to build my relationships up again with my family and with my Son, not that they were bad relationships in the first place, but there were always suffering because of the drinking. My side of the relationship always suffered because of my drinking.
You’re after life may be completely different to mine, I just wanted to do a quick video today about your destiny being in your hands, regardless of what you do in this life, whether you try to get rid of old habits or try to construct new habits in your life, it’s all up to you.
There’s nobody else who’s going to do it for you or can do it for you. It’s like trying to get somebody else to do press ups for you and still gain the benefits, it’s not going to happen. You have to go through the pain in order to get the benefits from it, you need to go through the pain of quitting drinking and the discomfort that causes and then push yourself forwards.
If you have any questions please leave a comment below. If you have any questions that you would like to see me making a video about then please also leave your comments down below. If you like this video give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, come on over to the website https://www.alcoholmastery.com and sign up for the newsletter.
Take Care.
“You are the Creator of your Own Destiny”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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