The main reason people don't create a new relationship to alcohol is because of resistance. Resistance to change. To a new way.
To an idea they thought they had about themselves.
To not being in control.
Being okay with resistance is the most important skill you can learn in life and with alcohol that will create the peace and joy you are desiring so you can focus on what matters most.
Learn why it's important to make peace with resistance and how to do it on today's episode.
Transform your relationship with alcohol by focusing on yourself. Discover how to fulfill your needs without alcohol's help. Understand your body's signals, leverage your emotions, and expand your desires for real, lasting pleasure.
Join "The Naturally Sober Woman" self-study course, where you'll learn everything I teach my clients in a compact, affordable, lifetime access package.
Transform your relationship with alcohol by focusing on yourself. Discover how to fulfill your needs without alcohol's help. Understand your body's signals, leverage your emotions, and expand your desires for real, lasting pleasure.
Join "The Naturally Sober Woman" self-study course, where you'll learn everything I teach my clients in a compact, affordable, lifetime access package.
The main reason people don't create a new relationship to alcohol is because of resistance. Resistance to change. To a new way.
To an idea they thought they had about themselves.
To not being in control.
Being okay with resistance is the most important skill you can learn in life and with alcohol that will create the peace and joy you are desiring so you can focus on what matters most.
Learn why it's important to make peace with resistance and how to do it on today's episode.
Transform your relationship with alcohol by focusing on yourself. Discover how to fulfill your needs without alcohol's help. Understand your body's signals, leverage your emotions, and expand your desires for real, lasting pleasure.
Join "The Naturally Sober Woman" self-study course, where you'll learn everything I teach my clients in a compact, affordable, lifetime access package.
Transform your relationship with alcohol by focusing on yourself. Discover how to fulfill your needs without alcohol's help. Understand your body's signals, leverage your emotions, and expand your desires for real, lasting pleasure.
Join "The Naturally Sober Woman" self-study course, where you'll learn everything I teach my clients in a compact, affordable, lifetime access package.
Do you ever feel like you're outgrowing alcohol, that you are longing for a deeper connection to life? If alcohol is keeping you playing small and feels like the one area, you just can't figure out you are in the right place. Hi, my name is Mary Wagstaff. I'm a Holistic alcohol coach who ended a 20 year relationship to alcohol without labels, counting days or ever making excuses. Now I help powerful women just like you eliminate their desire to drink on their own terms. In this podcast, we will explore the revolutionary approach of my proven five shifts process that gets alcohol out of your way by breaking all of the rules, and the profound experience that it is to rediscover who you are on the other side of alcohol. I am so thrilled to be your guide. Welcome to your journey of awakening. Welcome back to the show my beautiful listeners, it's Mary, I hope you're having a glorious day. This is going to be part three to emotional safety. I hadn't really planned on on extending this, but it really is the most important part of our lives, and getting our willingness to get into the subconscious patterning. And the really what I wanted to talk today about is being okay with resistance, not only are you going to face resistance when you change your relationship to alcohol initially and say no, but the resistance to the change itself, right? We fail ahead of time and quit on ourselves before we start, because we are resistance to change because we're resistant to a new way. Because we are stuck in our ways, right? We're stubborn, we don't, we can't step into beginner's mind to see, you know, into new possibility. Like what if I'm wrong? What if there's a new way? What if there's all the ways, and I find that this is why we don't take massive action. And what ends up happening because of it is we push the availability of what eventually will have to happen further and further away from us. Right? So it's like, if If not now When because you know, you're going to have to make this decision sooner or later. And if you're never going to make this decision, then it's more beneficial for you to just get off of the fence. Because you can actually take some time back that way. Right? Because what happens is when we have these open thought loops, they are taking alcohol is now taking even more of your time away. Right? And thinking about quitting drinking is why you're in alcohol exhaustion, there's the alcohol piece of it, which for a long time, you kind of just have resigned to but now because you want more meaning in your life, and you want more connection, and you're done with the relationship you have with alcohol. But there is still the resistance and that resistance isn't you that resistance isn't your higher self. That resistance is your subconscious patterning, and your ego, putting up walls and it's really the habit of alcohol that is making that decision for you. Right. So when we create when we see in our minds and in our behavior and in our action that we are saying, creating excuses and objections for why we can't change and why it's not going to work. That is the full full awareness, the alcohol is making that decision for you. And it's going to be making that decision for you until you just do it until you do it anyway. Right which is like what you've done with alcohol, you've made the decision in your own brain and then you've said screw it and you've just done it anyway. But all of this is going to require you to be comfortable with resistance and know that when you face resistance to change, that is a sure sign that there is something great and more powerful than you have experienced on the other side of it. I have felt this time and time and time again, especially when I'm going you know reaching outside of myself, right. It's like knowing that I can't get to the results that I want on my own when it comes to certain things that I I just don't know. And if I try to how much longer it's going to take me like I think about changing my relationship to alcohol and how much longer it took me than my clients, right once they get here. So I would say that 90% of the people that I work with, have heads had resistance to starting the process. They're not just like throwing their arms up in the air jumping up and down, right, it's like, but they just, they make us a decision. And they just do it anyway, because they know they've been thinking about it. So they have to take their fear and their resistance with them, as a sure sign that this is actually going to help. This is actually a sign that I am on the verge of change, and I'm trusting the process, right, because you there, you don't start by stopping drinking, that's the result that you get, you don't start with your desire eliminated for alcohol, or you wouldn't need the process. And then what you learn along the way, is how to be with resistance, how to be okay, being uncomfortable, because this is the human condition. And if we don't learn how to do this, you're going to either A, never learn it or be do it the hard way. And there's always going to be something outside of ourselves, we think, is going to change how we feel, right? It's like if this one person would just change, if I just do this one thing once I go on a vacation, right, but we're always putting the control then into the external circumstances. And the reason you know, it doesn't work is because you have all of those results already in your drinking, right, like you've been there already. And most of my clients are extremely powerful leaders who have very beautiful lives, and they've made a lot of powerful decisions in their life. And yet, they're still drinking. Right. So we have to question why that is. And all it really is, is you having an unexamined habit, and the willingness to go beyond what you think, you know, your willingness to face the resistance of what it might feel like to not know, everything for to feel like what it might feel like to be a beginner to be a student to take a step back, right? Not because I'm going to tell you what it is. But because it's like, holy crap, there's like 7 billion brains in this world. Clearly, I don't know everything right will die, never knowing anything. And if we always think that we're right, we're really going to sell ourselves short, that has been the best, most powerful part of coaching as a mindfulness modality, for me, is just being like, Okay, we up, I'm gonna just try it this way. And I'm gonna go for it, right? Because what I'm doing isn't working. So why am I going to fight against, you know, another approach, right? Especially someone that has a proven method? So how do you get comfortable with resistance, right? It's like, if you injure yourself, and all you do is tense and focus on that injury, and you're just like, you're in your brain experiencing the emotion or the sensation of the pain and you just like keep reliving the, the trauma experience over and over again, like, say that you like broke your leg, right? And you're just like, so focused on that pain, it's going to exacerbate the pain. But if you can get into your full body, and you can relax and release, and you start to maybe spread that energy, find some nervous system release, bring in some new thoughts that create different emotions, right? And resistance only ever comes from the emotion of fear and scarcity. Right? And so when we can step into any motion of love, and it could just even be I've got to do this, right, I know that this is the next step for me, I know that I'm going to have to walk through this resistance, right, that comes from a place of love, versus fear, scarcity and lack, which is how the human makes decisions evolutionarily. So it's not a higher level of thinking when we think we're making like these best informed decisions to like plan, right? That is a lot of unconscious beliefs about money and you know the difference between like good debt and bad debt, and how what creates more value in your life and how you can build your inner resourcing by investing in yourself. So you want to start to find all of these reasons why the resistance is valuable, why the resistance is worth it? And really understand, are your objections valid? Or do they come from the 80% of their thinking that leans towards the negative bias, because we have this is just like a broad statistic 60,000 thoughts a day, 80% of them, or it's like 90% of them are, repeat the same thoughts we have every single day. And then 80% of those are towards the negative bias. So when you give yourself more time, like if you've been listening to this podcast since the podcast started, and you're still in the same place, like that open loop, you're just giving yourself more time to continue to find more negative thoughts. And that's why in coaching, we learn how to make decisions and make it quickly. Because if you give your habitual brain more time to make a decision, it will take it. So you have to take your fear with you, you have to take your resistance with you. And you have to get comfortable being in resistance, because it is the it is the sign always 100% that on the other side of it is a breakthrough. I have been working with a client, I mean, this happens with all of my clients, right where it's like they face, especially depending on how you know how long they've been drinking for. But it's like they go through waves of resistance. But the best part is, is that they are in the space to experience the resistance. So instead of experiencing it on their own, we're in the past, when they experience it, they just quit and give up on themselves. Now they are in a safe container to confront the resistance to learn how to be with the resistance to know that this is part of the process, and then they move through it. So then they get to the next level. Right. And when you normalize that as a part of the experience, not just with alcohol, but with life in general, then you normalize that by talking to someone about it, who only ever has your best interest in mind. Because I know, every all of this is going to face resistance, like the reason that people say no ever to go to doing coaching is because they have resistance to change. Now they might try to convince themselves that it's something else. But the truth is, is that it is such a deep subconscious patterning, that alcohol is going the habit of alcohol has so many ways for for it to stick around. It's like I'm just not ready, right? And so the question is like, how, how are you going to know you are never going to be in a place where you don't have resistance to making this change? I will tell you that 100% Right now, so check that off of your list that like, I'm just going to feel so good about making this change. I'm so ready. Like when I made this change, I was in the depths of despair. I mean, I was like, it was like fear of not living into my potential. Right. But I mean, I was giving up a huge part of my identity, a huge part of my life, there was resistance, but I knew that that was the doorway. And I knew the worst thing that could happen was a sensation, right? Like literally nothing had gone wrong. And so when I started applying the tools of the five shifts, and the ETA practice and the sacred pause method, I was able to feel really confident and comfortable using those again and again and again until that resistance slowly started to dissipate. And actually, once you give yourself permission to honor the truth of what you really want outside of your resistance, you're like yep, I see that there's resistance here, but we're just gonna do it anyway. Not a big deal, right? Like you validate that concern for yourself. And you become the woman that takes massive action anyway. Like 50% of the resistance goes away because it's been in that kind of ignoring and invalidating that process that has really created so much more of the resistance. So when we can validate your first hand experience, which is resistance which is discomfort, which is confusion, which is scarcity, which is lack Right, like fear, like I see you're having all of that, I totally get it. This is a big change. But I just want you to know nothing has gone wrong. And we're gonna make it through to the other side of this, right? But it's the consistency to the commitment to learning a new way that's going to create the lasting result. And really honoring your time in the long run, right, like expediting your time, so that you can focus on what matters most because spending all of this time in confusion about alcohol is just not necessary. Like it's just not necessary anymore. Like, you know, alcohol is what it is. You've been there, you've done that. And like, I don't really want to buy I don't really buy into the narrative that like, we can do hard things like the truth is, is that that thought alone is part of the problem. Like, what if it wasn't that hard? What if it was simple? What if your thoughts are making it feel harder and scarier? Because that's what our thoughts do? Right. So if we continue to tell ourselves this same story of why it won't work, even if it's true, like even if there is trauma, even if there has been neglect, even if there's been a bunch of stuff that you feel really shameful and guilty about reiterating that story isn't going to create the emotions that you need to get to the other side of it, and to take massive action, because what you need to do is focus on being in pain more, being in the same predicament in one month from now, one year from now, and wondering what was possible, right? And focusing on all of the amazing things that you're saying yes to like, just being having access to the fullest potential of who you are. And a woman who really dedicates and makes time for herself? Like, that's what this comes down to? And there is the question of why isn't that available to you in your life? Like, why are your desires unmet? And you have to inhibit your emotions in your thoughts with alcohol? Like, that's the other question to ask. So I really, really want you to think about this piece of resistance in with alcohol and with every other thing in your life and to know full well, that it is not going to go away with more time. Less, listen to these three episodes again, and really get a good feeling for why taking massive action now is so important, right? And really be honest to yourself about all of the thoughts that you've had again, and again and again, that have kept alcohol in the headlines of your life for this long, and have kept you on the fence, looking for solutions all over the place, versus spending that time to just get it up, get it over with right and not just get it over with but get it over with from, like a perspective that's literally going to enhance your life for every other thing that you do, and really shift your identity really, really reshape the way that you show up for yourself. And in the end find so much more peace, from the willingness to be wrong from the willingness to not know from the willingness to have some wonder and awe in that beginner's mind and your life. And bring back some of the innocence and the innocence of wisdom. Right. It's like that is what wisdom is to know that we don't know everything and we're willing to just experience all of it, including the resistance. Have an amazing day and I'll talk to you soon. Imagine taking the podcast every week to the next level, with achievable goals and an action plan tailored specifically to your needs. Finding personalized support is how you gain control of your destiny. And my private one on one coaching program. Fast Track to freedom from alcohol, you get your own personal cheerleader. That's me every week helping you get clear, stay curious and committed to what matters most versus resigning again and again to your habitual patterns. Every big change starts with one Next Step. Schedule a complimentary call with the link in the show notes or on my website Mary Wagstaff coach.com to get a new perspective on an old habit