Failing so that you can win: The foundation of rethinking drinking

As the founder of Some Good Clean Fun, I’ve talked a lot about rethinking drinking but haven’t had the chance to really dive deep into what that means. The name is pretty straightforward, but at the same time, it’s not something we’re used to: re-assessing our drinking. I thought I would start with one of the main premises which is failing so that you can win.

When I started to reassess how much I was drinking and truly learn and understand WHY it was so hard to quit, the next step was to try to go dry. It was February or March and I had just started reading This Naked Mind by Annie Grace. If you’ve picked up this book yourself, you will see that Annie Grace actually discourages quitting cold turkey. By the time you finish the book though you won’t want to drink ever again (or at least I felt that way).

I’m going to take a big leap here and say that I was failing. I was failing at everything - life, health, marriage, parenting, self-care, friendship, family relationships and career.

What happened when I actually began the 30-day alcohol experiment was I was given permission to fail. This might seem counterintuitive but the entire premise of becoming alcohol-free is that you need to give yourself permission to be human and learn from your mistakes. If you do grab a glass of wine during your journey, you have the chance to rethink how it’s making you feel. You can’t really rethink drinking unless you are occasionally drinking. The best part is that it’s not even considered a failure - it’s a data point. A DATA POINT!

Rethinking drinking was born from this premise that if you really want to remove alcohol from your life for enhanced wellbeing, you need to fail to win. You need to get those data points to learn more about yourself. I learned a lot about what my triggers were, that caused me to desire wine. I learned a lot about how i cope. I learned where I was mentally failing in my own approach to health.

The disclaimer here is also that the word ‘failure’ is not a popular word in ANY health related quest, so please take this with a grain of salt.

In the end, this adaptation to success created a formula for me that allowed me to fall and fail, in order to win.

If you’re starting this rethinking drinking journey, start with just a checkmark whenever you can!