Aging Flipped with Debi Talbert

Completing these 3 things each morning will train your brain to see your future. 

• Key to long turn success
• Skills you already have to bring along on the journey
• Why this works 

Podcast Giveaway and 2021 Annual Gift Package

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

Life truly is way more fun without alcohol in it. 

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

It takes time and patience to really do this work. The space between awareness you are indeed drinking too much alcohol for your life and figuring out how to make alcohol small and irrelevant in your life requires  the skills of delaying gratification, leaning into discomfort, being OK with trying new things, and be ok with going against the grain.  

In order to navigate all the way to success, the journey requires resilience. 

• How to apply EXIT to help make the navigation less messy
• Why more than 1 compelling reason is necessary 
• A simple process to create as many compelling reasons as you need. 

The 2021 Annual Gift
Podcast review giveaway

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

First off, know that this happens to a lot of people. We wake up and feel terrible and think "that's it - no more hangovers. I'm done!" But, as the day goes on we start to feel better and the memory of how that hangover felt fades away. Then the usual cues hit and we start to falter. We start to think: "Maybe I can quit next week" or "One drink wouldn't be that bad" and we talk ourselves back into it. 

This is very common and it has a lot to do with our perception of the cost vs the benefit of drinking. Early in the day we can feel the effects of drinking from the night before, and so the costs seem high and the benefits seem non-existent. However, as the day goes on the cost seems lower because we're feeling better and we're encountering all the things that trigger us to drink - stress, work, family - so the benefits of drinking seem higher. And when the benefits outweigh the costs, you guessed it, we decide to drink. 

 

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

I’m talking about motivating ourselves by beating ourselves up. This is a huge issue because it not only hinders us from moving forward, but it’s also something that can be so insidious we don’t even see that it’s happening.

So in this episode, I’m sharing what beating yourself up can look like (it might not be what you think!) and why it’s actually detrimental to your success. 

I’ll be giving you the low-down on why this behavior affects your journey and sharing tools to motivate yourself differently so you can quit the negative self-talk and feel better in all aspects of your life.

IN TODAY’S EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

• What beating yourself up can look like.
• Why we beat ourselves up and how it creates a false belief on the path to success.
• The five components of the thought model.
• Five steps to stop beating yourself up as a form of motivation

FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE:
Podcast Giveaway
Holiday Gift

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

• About my own personal blooper 
• Examples of how I applied the EXIT tools
• How long it actually took me to exit the drinking life
• What I'm discovering from other people 
• What alcohol actually is 
• Why I no longer put it into my body. 

The giveaway
Other free resources

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

Have you wanted to join EXIT & Beyond Life Coaching Membership but you just don't have the money? Do you love the podcast and want others to get help from it too? 

FANTASTIC

I'm announcing the 2021 giveaway plus a way for you to take a step towards helping others receive the same help you've received. 

Detail can be found here - https://www.jumpseatcoaching.com/givin

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

Hey my friend, how are you? So glad to have you here, so glad to be recording this for you today.

Listen, if you want to get started exiting the drinking life and I’m pretty sure you do or you would not be listening to this podcast, I want to make sure that you get my Jumpstart Guide. This is a beautiful starting off point for you.

It’s a really quick easy read with some powerful tools you can start using right away to help you change what you drink.

Simply go to JumpseatCoaching.com

IN TODAY’S EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

• How to get the EXIT Quick Start Guide 
• What happens in our minds that gets us off course, even when we’re doing everything right.
• How to get past the discouragement.
• Why you should expect and embrace the “hard.”
• The benefits of getting through hard things.
• Why you should return to your breath 

Today, I want to talk about when it’s really hard to choose something to drink other than alcohol. I believe all of us have been there at one time or another because if it was always easy, then we wouldn’t still be talking about it, we wouldn’t have all the sober curious books, the mindful drinks movement, the variety of podcasts about getting, staying, remaining sober or drinking less alcohol.

When it feels really hard to make a different choice, our primitive brains, that part of our brain that’s just wanting to keep us alive, just really starts to go into overdrive.

We can start to let it take over and run the show, and then it’s all drama, it’s all horror, it’s all, “This is terrible. It’s too hard, I can’t do it,” and then before we know it, we’re back in our old patterns of avoiding our emotions and numbing out of our life with alcohol.

I want to talk to you about what to do when the journey of change really feeling challenging.

When you’re doing all of the things: examining your thoughts and beliefs, processing your urges and your negative emotions, you’re doing the thought work, you’re deciding to drink from a conscious decision instead of an unconscious automatic one, you’re taking care of yourself personally by moving your body more, getting as much rest as you can and choosing healthier foods and it is still just hard.

We often think like, “I thought by this point, it should be easier.” We start thinking, “Something’s going wrong. It shouldn’t be this hard. It’s easier for other people. I wish it were that easy for me. Look at that girl, she’s drinking wine all the time and look how good she has it. It’s not fair. Why do I have to suck at making this easy? Everyone else seems to be thinking this is easy and it’s still not for me. I’ve been at this a long time. It shouldn’t require so much mental effort anymore. I shouldn’t have to work so hard at this. It’s really discouraging that this seems so challenging still. I don’t know if I can keep this up forever.”

These are the stories that our brain offers us. Oftentimes my clients will say, “I don’t want to have to live like this forever. I want to be able to just not want it. I want to be able to have a drink every once in a while and not go off the deep end.

And those are our thoughts about our experience of doing what it takes to exit the drinking life and make alcohol a small and irrelevant part of our lives.

We think we’re just telling it like it is, “Like it is hard. I’m just being real. I’m just telling the truth. I’m just sharing what it’s like for me,” but in actuality what we’re doing is we’re stacking the pain, we’re stacking the discomfort and the difficulty and the challenge. We’re stacking the resistance and making the experience of changing what you drink even more uncomfortable with the way that we’re thinking about it.

So many of us believe life with less or no alcohol in it is too hard or not something that we can sustain.

And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while or if you’ve known you needed to exit the life of drinking, over-drinking, shame, and regret for a while and you just haven’t been doing it, I’m talking to you.

We just have this idea of like, “It’s going to be too hard,” or “There’s going to be a right time to do it,” or “I just need to get through this difficult period, then I’m going to be able to focus on it.”

But what’s actually too hard to sustain is doing all of the things that help us change what we drink while thinking terrible feeling thoughts about ourselves our lives, our bodies, and the process of exiting the drinking.

Focusing on what we’re missing out on and how other people are responding to us making this change all of that.

It’s the way that we are choosing to interpret the journey that causing the true pain and suffering.

One way of approaching this is encouraging yourself to say yes to the process, to all of it.

It kind of reminds me of being pregnant. Saying yes to the entire experience.

The morning sickness, the tiredness, the extra weight, the mood swings, the moving growing human inside of us.

How about that? Say yes to the entire process saying yes to the process, especially the hard parts.

For those of you who’ve never been pregnant. Think of a time in your life when you signed on for something. Something you know would involve saying yes to the sucky parts as well as the wonderful parts.

This is how I like to think about doing hard things.

But….let’s just talk about it in the framework of exiting the drinking life. Ending that over-drinking cycle. I truly do get it. I’ve been on it, in it. I tried changing what I drank for 7 years. Trust me, I get it.”

But this is the way I believe committing to and saying yes to the entire process is a really great way to thinking about it. A way that can really serve you when it feels hard.

Imagine you’ve signed on to get your Masters. You’re there for the degrees. You know you’re going to have to take some classes that you really aren’t going to like it because it’s part of the program. It’s just how it is. You take a certain number of classes every semester or maybe you’re just taking it, one class, at a time…..

And your current class might be allowing urges. Last semester maybe you took Examining Your Beliefs  and maybe you took Fully Dialing in on your emotions.

So if you were taking these classes to get your Master’s Degree would you expect it to be easy?

Most people wouldn’t go into this journey of getting their Master’s Degrees and believe or think things like “What do you mean this is challenging?

I thought this was just going to be something I was going to completely coast through.

Like I’m completely shocked. Why is this so hard? Why isn’t it getting easier? I mean, Gosh, now I’m doing this thing and this seems hard too. Now I’m in this class, this class seems even harder than the classes I took last semester.”

They get harder as you go along sometimes. Of course, we would expect it to be hard. We would, of course, expect ourselves to work hard.

Most people go into this thinking and believing “Okay, this is the real deal. Like I’m going to have to buckle down. I’m going to really have to make sure I focus and study.”

What if that was the way you approached your exit journey. As though nothing was going wrong when it was hard? When allowing urges is hard, you’re like, “Yes,” yes to this, because you know why? Because I want the results of being in control of alcohol instead of it being in control of me.

Yes, I really want to master trusting myself to figure this out. I want to untangle the beliefs and thoughts keeping me stuck. I want to achieve my goal of exiting the drinking life, ending the love-hate relationship I have with myself.

This journey is not one you can “cheat the system” with. You can’t sneak your way through the course or copy your neighbor to get the end results you want. In order to exit the drinking life for good, to make alcohol small and irrelevant, you have to say yes to the hard work. Yes to all of it.

You have to say yes to the days when your urges are pretty easy to process and they’re pretty mild and they’re really not that strong and yes to the days where they feel super intense.

You have to say yes to the days where you are so restless and all you want to do is drink wine to calm your body down and yes to the days where it was really a great day and it was really pretty easy and things were simple for you.

You have to say yes to having your thoughts totally dialed in and yes, to create a creatively constructed plan to attend an event in order to stay with your plan of not consuming alcohol. Probably extremely uncomfortable the first time, maybe even the 2nd, or 3rd time but you commit to making it work because of the end result you want.

You have to say yes to getting enough sleep when you can and yes to sleepless nights and exhaustion the next day. By saying yes to all of it, we’re dropping the resistance, we’re dropping the belief that something is going wrong and then it should be different than it is.

It shouldn’t be any different than it is.

The belief that it should be different, it should be easier, it shouldn’t be so challenging is what’s making it so much more challenging.

It’s the opposite of what we think.

We think we’re just telling the truth, but if it was supposed to be different, it would be different.

It’s not different, it is exactly how it should be.

In fact, the harder it is, the more of an amazing accomplishment it is on the other side when you’ve achieved it.

The more chances you have to evolve as a human being into your highest and best self.

This is how you really grow.

Think about how great it will feel when you’ve come through this class.

Like you’ve gone through this process, this program. You’re going to come out on the other end feeling so accomplished, but this opportunity is only there for you if you say yes to the experience.

What many of you do is you take a couple of classes or maybe you start your first class and then you’re just like, “This seems hard. I’m just going to back out of it. This isn’t a good time. I can’t focus on this.” And then you have to start again. Your credits don’t transfer. You have to start all over again.

Some of you make it to the second semester, senior year, and then you go, “You know what? Forget it,” and then you have to start at the beginning again, and that’s completely fine, but just recognize what you’re doing when it’s the second semester, senior year and you’re just going, “Yeah, screw it.” You’re not saying yes to the experience. The key is to make this journey feel “less hard” is to say yes to the easy and the hard, the wins and the losses, the failures upon failures, the mistakes upon mistakes. It’s all part of the process.

Besides saying yes, what else can we do to keep ourselves going forward in the face of incredible challenges?

Sometimes it’s really, really hard.

Things are happening in your life or you’re trucking along and now there are some significant challenges. Maybe you’ve had the loss of a close family member or friend, maybe it’s something really big that is happening. Maybe you’re having a big relationship change. Maybe there’s some big-time stuff happening at work and it’s so easy then to be like, “I can’t take on one more thing. I barely was holding it together with this drinking less thing anyway. I’m just going to have to take a break,” and you know what taking a break means, it means just getting in the way back.

Another tool you can use when you catch yourself wanting to break away and quit moving towards your desired outcome is to bring the focus back to just this one present moment. The easiest way to do that is to focus on your breath.

Truly focus on it. Bring your mind to your breath and let yourself notice right where you are right then. When we are in the “I can’t take it any long” mindset, we’ve taking our focus too far out into the future. We’re projecting the worst case in our heads, even if we aren’t saying it out loud.

By bringing yourself to your own breath, this brings you into the current, present moment.

Because when it’s hard we can tend to catastrophes about the challenge.

We think, “Well today was really hard, so there’s no way I’m going to be able to keep this up long term,” or “This whole week has been hard,” or “This whole month has been hard. There’s no way I’m going to be able to keep this up on going.” “I can’t see myself being able to do this month after month, week after week.” “I don’t know how I’m going to hold it together while I’m on vacation,” or through the holidays or over the summer or whatever is a challenge.

What I want to offer to you is that you don’t have to entertain any of those concerns in your head. They seem really important and necessary to think about, but I promise you, you really don’t. All you need to think about is what you’re going to do today.

And when your brain tells you it’s too hard and you’ll never be able to keep it up, you can just agree with this.

That’s again saying, yes, you’re not it, you’re not going, “Oh, I shouldn’t be thinking that I’m not going to be able to keep it up,” instead going, “Yeah, maybe I won’t be able to keep it up forever, but I will keep it up today.”

That is saying yes to the hardship and the difficulty. It’s acknowledging your experience and not asking yourself to think any differently about the future. You’re not saying that the way that you’re thinking about it as wrong or that it ought to be different. Instead, you’re just reminding yourself that you don’t have to make any of those decisions today.

Some people will say, “We'll wait, if I decide that I’m not going to really drink anymore, seriously, I’m not going to like have a champagne toast at my daughter’s wedding?” Well, considering that she’s three right now, we probably don’t need to worry about it. It’s probably not something that you have to decide on right now, but your brain is going to go to that. Like, “What about this? What about that? You’re never going to have this. What if you go to Italy, you’re not going to have any wine?” I don’t need to know. I don’t need to decide that today. When that opportunity and that experience arises, I will make the best decision for myself for that day.

Many of us talk about living in the present and all you have is the present moment. And there’s a lot of truth to that, and we can apply that to our experience of changing what we are drinking too.

because so much of what feels the most uncomfortable is when we’re looking into the future and creating a story of how awful it’s going to be and/or when we look to the past and we tell ourselves a story of how awful and horrible and difficult it was and uncomfortable. And then we project that into the future and go, “Well, that’s exactly how it’s going to be. I wasn’t able to keep it up then so I won’t be able to keep it up in the future as well.”

This way you don’t have to resist your experience so much. You say yes to today. Today is an unplanned day. The end. That is what you’re doing. Combine saying yes to all of it, the whole experience, to dropping the resistance and then to just committing to doing what you said you were going to do today and knowing that you don’t need to worry about the rest of that. When your brain offers up, “What about this? What about that? What am I going to do here? What am I going to have then?” Just remember, “I don’t need to decide that right now. I will decide when it’s necessary for me to decide that.”

This is huge, huge stuff. Really, really helpful.

Remember to get that Jumpstart your Exit Guide by heading to JumpseatCoaching.com/jumpstart.

Right now EXIT & Beyond Life Coaching Membership is not accepting new members but we will be opening up again the first week of January. The best way to make sure you are notified when we are accepting members again is to get on my email list. By getting your own Jumpstart Guide you will be added to my email list. PLUS the Jumpstart Guide will get you going on your own unique exit journey.

Have a wonderful week and I will talk to you very soon. Take care of bye-bye.

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

Keep noticing the thoughts that come up for you when drinking shows up in your consciousness - they all point to your beliefs. You may notice it in the patterns of thoughts or how your moods shift throughout the day. 

Make sure you are journaling and recording how you feel each day. If possible, record your thoughts and emotions around the parts of the day when you experience the most triggers. Being aware of how you're reacting mentally and emotionally can go a long way toward getting a sense of your beliefs. 

• ​List your triggers and get very curious about them - what is it about that situation, that triggers you? The belief is underneath the trigger, and it’s driving the conscious thoughts of alcohol that are creating your urge to drink.
• Ignite curiosity while hanging out with friends. Notice their conversations, verbalize the thoughts you have about alcohol, discuss it all with someone. 

Have questions - Bring them to me at here - https://www.jumpseatcoaching.com/AskDebi

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment. 

The idea for this episode came to me while attending a networking event this morning. As I record this it’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving here in the United States. The episode will go live on Thanksgiving day. In addition to sharing what you do and who it is you help, the coordinate of the meeting asked people to share something they are grateful for.

For me, I’m actually grateful for all the changes 2020 has brought into my life. When I pause and truly think it through, COVID has forced me to re-decide a lot of things in my life. The company I’d worked for since 1983 offered an amazing retirement buyout package, this was actually offered in the exact same year they’d paid out 2 months of pay for a bonus. The highest bonus payout in the companies history.

WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER

• What a decision is
• The power of making decisions
• What happens when we prolong decisions or procrastinate.
• Why we leave decisions unmade.

FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

• Last week’s Episode - 6 Steps to Jumpstart Your EXIT from the Drinking Life 
• Learn More About My Program
• Subscribe to the Show Over on YouTube 
• Free Resources

If you think about how most people live their lives – most is not even an exaggeration either – most people live their life on default. They are living at the effect of decisions that were made by no conscious choice. They’re just defaulting into previously made decisions or un-thoughtful decisions.

People keep drinking as they have, they eating in ways that adversely affect their bodies, live in the same house, stay married to the same person, have the same job because it’s something they decided oh so long ago.

We aren’t taught to pause and rethink these things unless something forces us to.

2020 has forced many of us to rethink plenty of things in our lives.

I believe that decisions are where we can find the power to create the lives we want to create and evolve into the highest version of ourselves.

Unfortunately, and inexplicably, most of us stop making decisions on purpose as we get older.

We simply fall into patterns of living out the decisions we have made in the past or think if we don’t decide, then we can avoid the discomfort.

This pattern we allowed ourselves to fall into is part of the reason everything happening around us right now feels so darn hard.

A decision is simply a commitment to a thought, feeling, and action that creates a result.

First, everything is optional.

The longer I apply and coach using EXIT principles - uncovering my thoughts, bringing in awareness as to how the thoughts make me feel and how my feelings are affecting my actions, reactions or my nonaction, create the results in my life, the more I realize that the most painful trap we can fall into is the thought/belief that there is not a choice.

When we forget there is always a choice, we get stuck in suffering because we believe we have to live out the “negative” decisions of our past. We start to feel like our life is a list of “have to-dos”.

When I remind my clients there is nothing they have to do and that they have complete free will, they are often very confused. 

Many of them have not considered that much of what they are currently doing is something they either really want to do (take care of their kids, work the job because of the paycheck, clean the house because they like how it looks and feels, cook the food because they like eating healthy) or that they could stop doing if they chose to (clean the house themselves, spend time with family they rather not, follow someone else’s manual for them)

The process of evaluating your life in a way that gives you your power back is imperative

What’s interesting is that it often doesn’t mean you will change what you are doing, but it will change how you feel about it and how you think about it.

This can be one of the most freeing exercises to take your power back in your life

When you understand that there is always a choice.

That you don’t have to continue the decisions of your past and you don’t have to follow anyone else’s idea of how you should live you change the question you ask yourself.

Your power question then becomes - Would I choose this again today?

When you understand that there's always a consequence to every thought you think (the result that comes from thinking the thought), you can take ownership of the results, desirable AND undesirable, that you currently have.

Then from that place, you can decide if you want to keep signing up for mandatory suffering, or if you want to take advantage of an opportunity that involves voluntary discomfort but also the promise of less suffering for the rest of your life.

agingflipped.com for more resources on aging with ease and more fulfillment.