How Developing a Growth Mindset Is Helping Me Live a B+ Sober Life

Depositphotos: enjoys Getting sober is no easy task and living a sober life is no walk in the park. To navigate both, you're going to need a growth mindset.

A growth mindset is like money in a high yield account. It's just going to keep growing and compounding. It's gonna provide for you in unimaginable ways and change your life for the better.

In contrast, if you stay with a fixed Drinkers mindset and keep on feeding your body poison, nothing good will come of it. There is no such thing as a free lunch and there's no such thing as drinking alcohol without paying for it.

You might pay with a hangover, your relationship or with cancer. But, there will be a price. As Einstein said,"Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The overwhelming evidence of alcohol's incredibly powerful destructive capability is out there if you choose to look. Brain damage, cancer, liver disease, to name a few.

All in all, there's 200 nasty diseases you can get from alcohol. The scary part is, you can't predict if or when you are going to be a victim of alcohol.

However, thanks to the research of Carol Dweck, you can predict that if you develop a growth mindset, you will be a lot better off.

Stanford psychologist, professor and best-selling author Carol Dweck is a changed the world with her groundbreaking research into fixed and growth mindsets.

https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve

Carol Dweck is a pioneering researcher in the field of motivation, why people succeed (or don't) and how to foster…www.ted.com

She defined a growth mindset as the belief that intelligence can be developed, for example, through effort, good strategies, and input and mentoring from others. In contrast, a fixed mindset is the belief that intelligence is fixed.

If you adopt a growth mindset to your drinking behaviour, it will help you to see a bigger picture so that you make progress. 

Falling off the wagon won't be an unforgivable sin. It will be a growth opportunity. When you keep growing one day, you are going to wake up and discover you're living your best sober life.

How a Growth Mindset Helps Build a Sober Life

Finally, thanks to my newly acquired growth mindset, I am on the right path to a better, healthier and more fulfilling life.

To get to this point has been a stupid, epic journey. I would set myself targets to reduce the number of units consumed each week. Or make promises to myself not to drink so much when out with friends.

Inevitably, I would fail and then beat myself up for breaking the promise to myself or not having the willpower to stick to my targets. I dragged my body through painful hangovers, gut ache and endless cycles of exhaustion. All of this piled on the guilt and created a never-ending cycle of pain.

What I didn't realise is that I was creating a pattern of failure.

I was conditioning my subconscious to always expect failure and guilt and to never expect improvement.

As Joe Dispenza says, "Where you place your attention is where your energy goes."

I was focusing on the very things I wanted to avoid. The more I focused on my failures, the worse I felt. The worse I felt, the more I wanted to drink.

In a weird way, I was also becoming addicted to the pain of guilt and shame.

"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you." ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

I had it all wrong.

I should've been focusing on getting healthy and my successes, which is exactly what doing the Wildfit Challenge helped me to do. The challenge taught me how to reframe failure, which is a huge part of developing a growth mindset.

When you can develop the ability to reframe perceived failures, you can begin to shift your perspective.

I began to understand the cliche that failure is not final and it's not fatal. It's just a part of the process.

There was no shame in falling off the wagon. Instead, I had to recognise my courage and praise myself for starting the journey.

Curiosity- Your Secret Weapon

The next step was to be curious and learn from what was happening. This was a challenge because the whole point of alcohol is to stop you from thinking in an intelligent way.

Don't think - just drink! This is the motto the big booze companies want you to live by.

We have all been conditioned to surrender our problems to drink. Ironically, it is the very things that we run from that we should be running to.

Drinking allowed me to escape from problems or put them off to another day. But, here's the thing about tomorrow. The old saying is true. Tomorrow is always promised, but it never comes.

When you get curious, you can start to see problems in a different way. When this happens, you are developing a more proactive approach to life which gives you the power to face your problems and not run from them.

Final Thoughts

If I had to make one recommendation to anyone wanting to quit, I would say forget about judging yourself as a failure and instead focus on getting curious about how good your life can be without alcohol.

Discard the old model and move forward to create a new improved version better equipped for living a soberlife

If you want to change, you must first be the change. It may be another cliche but it is true. Developing a growth mindset will help you be the change.

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