I don’t know about you but I don’t wake up everyday feeling all pumped up and excited. Thanks to the fact I hit pause on alcohol I do wake up feeling good most days, which was a much-needed improvement. But excited?

At times we can get pretty down on ourselves and our progress. It can really help to stop and think of the things you truly value and want to be known for. A good starting point is to list what you value in others. Reason being, the things you most want to be true of you, you will see in those you truly respect and admire.

While discussing what I do in the realm of habits and addiction, I recently told a friend I’d give him $5000 to give up pizza. He said although he likes pizza, of course he would take it—”Pay me!”. Then I asked, if I offered him $10,000 to agree to never drink alcohol again in any form, would he take it?

...So how experimental are you? Willing to test your assumptions about your drinking?

Alcohol is good…at what it does.

I think all of us who drink can agree on one thing: we believe alcohol is good. Right? It is good. I want to go on the record and say that.

Now to be clear, we don’t all agree that drinking a lot of alcohol is good, or that drinking it every day is good. Some may, but not all of us. For the most part, all of us who drink believe it’s good on some level, or else we wouldn’t drink it.

You know, there are moments in time where something happens or you experience something that changes everything. Something that hits home in a way that just flips the script. Then suddenly you see things differently. 

I spent a number of years at New York City working with guys coming out of addiction, homelessness, and incarceration. One of my roles working at the Bowery Mission Residential Center was managing volunteers who wanted to mentor, tutor, or do whatever they could to contribute to the guys’ process of recovery.

The most frequent questions they asked were like, “What do I say to these guys?” or “What should I talk about?”.

It’s incredibly helpful to ask the question nobody wants to ask. Maybe it’s the question you’ve been wrestling with yourself.

In my last couple of newsletters I’ve offered something to answer the question, “Am I an alcoholic?”. If you haven’t signed up for that, do it. I don’t mind giving you a spoiler alert: You’re not an alcoholic. Nobody is.