45. The place where doubt, hope and action meet

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Hello, darling heart, and welcome to the drink less, live better podcast. This is the podcast that helps you to see that drinking

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less less doesn't need to be stressful, lonely, or boring. I'm your host, Sarah Williamson, and I decided to have a year alcohol

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free as a little life experiment and haven't looked back. With my experience and training, I now help other women with their

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alcohol free or drink less adventures. You can find out more about me and sign up to my 5 day drink less challenge at drink

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less live better dot com. I'm here to tell you that you can relax, connect, and have fun without alcohol in your life. Join

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me here each week to find out how. 1 of my really good friends asked me a question recently. We were talking about change.

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Well, actually, we were having a brilliant conversation about values, but I'll come back to that another time. We were momentarily

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talking about change, and she asked me, how do you do it? How do you get the agency to change? And I flippantly replied, well,

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I think I just decide and then I do it. Then I paused. There's more to it than that of course, I said. We started to draw

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out a spidergram because that's what we'd just been doing when we were playing around with our values conversation. I wrote

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action in the middle. Action felt like a good starting word. Action is where the change started to happen physically for me.

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The change had been happening inside my head for a considerable time before I thought about the action. There'd been a long

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period of doubt before that. Can I do this? Do I need to do this? Do I even really want to do this? I'm not that bad. I've

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not hit rock bottom so I'm probably fine really. My thought process went through a protracted time of adjustment, readjustment,

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checking out my feelings related to my thoughts, following through on behaviors I wanted, and reconsidering behaviors I kept

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slipping back into, but somewhere along the line, I got hopeful. I sensed that change really was possible. I saw people who

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had some of what I wanted and I endlessly copied them. I consciously chose new behaviors and, even more consciously, left

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old ones behind. I moved forward. I aimed for progress, not perfection. When I couldn't be kind to myself, I sought out others

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who could be kind to me, who believed in me. I made a goddamn massive effort. I made my change, my full time job. For a while

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back then, I threw the kitchen sink at it. If something worked, I applied more of it, and if it didn't, I left it to one side.

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To be successful, to get the agency to change I wanted, I invented a process, a system, a framework. I took those early glimmers

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of hope and acted on them. I applied everything I was learning, I took action and I believed the change I wanted was possible.

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We could apply all of this to anything, changing our drinking habits, fitting in in exercise, eating a more nutritious diet.

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Listen again and again to this podcast and hold a different change thought in your mind each time. Thank you for listening

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in this week. Please listen in again next time. PS, I believe in you.