160. One thing I was wrong about

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Hello darling heart and welcome to this 160th episode of the drink less, live better podcast. This is the podcast that helps

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you to see that drinking less doesn't need to be stressful, lonely, or boring. I'm your host, Sarah Williamson, and I decided

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to have a year alcohol free as a little life experiment and haven't looked back. I'm a best selling author, expert speaker,

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and life coach. I'm here to champion you with your alcohol free or drink less adventures. Give me a follow over on Instagram

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at drink less live better, and head to the website drink less live better dot com, where you will be able to sign up to the

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5 day drink less experiment, find blog posts, and you can choose to join the email club where I share resources, wisdom, insights,

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and glimmers of hope and joy. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Let's get straight to it. Here is one thing I was wrong about

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and it is only an example of one thing. I've been wrong about many many things. It was in my 3rd year of university I finally

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got fully invested in my education. Yeah. Yeah. You'd have thought I'd have got the hang of it before then, but I actually

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hadn't. I had had a roller coaster through my education. I was absolutely average, perhaps slightly under, all the way through

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school. I did not gain loads of confidence and self esteem as a child from my educational experience. Well, you know, it was

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the eighties. My GCSE maths took me 4 attempts to get. My a levels were an unmitigated disaster. I sometimes look back and

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don't really quite know how I got into university apart from, let's say, it was the nineties, I did have the most astonishing

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careers teacher just at the end of my schooling, and he was the one who said to me, are you going to go to university? I don't

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think I'd considered it before then. Anyway, I got to university. My first university course was amazing in the 1st semester

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and absolutely horrific in the 2nd semester. If you're interested in hearing about it at some point, ask me. My second semester

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story. It's a cracker. Anyway, I changed universities. I changed courses. In my 3rd year at university, I suddenly realized

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things were going incredibly well. I was working on a piece of group work, and this was going to contribute to one of my final

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marks of the year, and things were looking spectacularly good. I really was on target for a 1st class degree. This particular

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piece of group work that was happening wasn't quite going in the way that it could have. And I was having a tutorial with

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my professor, just one to 1, and we were talking about what was going wrong with this particular piece of work and the group

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of people I was working with. I was clearly getting frustrated and cross with the input that others were not putting in. Professor

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Peter Howard said to me, Sarah, would you allow me to make a comment at this point? And I said, yeah. Yeah, of course. Go

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ahead. That's what I'm here for. And he said, Sarah, you don't suffer falls gladly, do you? And I said, Yeah, exactly right.

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I don't suffer fools gladly and I'm surrounded by them at this moment. People are really holding me back. They just aren't

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putting the work into this group piece of, this group assignment, and this might affect my grade. It is really, really getting

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my goat. And he said, hang hang on a moment. You you don't suffer fools gladly, Sarah, and this is my criticism of you. And

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he let it hang, and I sat there with my mouth open. Up until that point I had always seen 'not suffering falls gladly' as

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a proud boast, as something to feel very pleased and smug about. Like what? Are we superior to somebody else? I really don't

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think that is actually the case. I started to cry, and he very kindly left the room. I remember standing there looking out

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of his office window and feeling furious with other people, with him, but most of all with myself. Of course, he was entirely

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right. Of course, it was a criticism, and, of course, I needed to hear that. This was probably my first experience of having

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some of my harder edges softened off. Although it sounded as he'd delivered something quite harsh, he hadn't done it in a

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particularly unkind way. He'd just done it in a totally truthful way. None of us are fools. We're all doing what we can. There

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doesn't need to be any suffering, fools gladly. The more of us who are tolerant, loving, and kind to each other, the better,

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of course. Thank you for listening in today. Come back again next week. If you fancy leaving a podcast review, that'd be cracking.

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And, PS, I believe in you.