BTW - If you didn't already know, I'm Sarah - Drink Less; Live Better founder, best-selling author, expert speaker, life coach and, as you already know, podcast host!
We don't have to hit rock bottom, we're allowed to want something different and we can CHOOSE to improve our lives from this point onwards.
I work in the magic space where doubt, hope and action meet... oh.... and
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Transcripts
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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Drink Less, Live Better podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Williamson, and I'm really glad you're here.
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Congruence — mm-hmm — something I've been giving a bit of thought to over the last few weeks. Congruence is about things matching up, lining up: your words matching your actions. What you say you value matches how you actually live. What you tell yourself matches what you genuinely know to be true, or what you really believe in. And I've come to realize that when someone's words and actions don't line up, I find it incredibly hard to trust them. And maybe so I should.
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Someone can tell me they care about me, but if their behavior repeatedly tells me something different, I'm going to believe the behavior. Someone can say, "You can trust me," but trust is not created by saying the words. It's created by the consistency, or the what they show you. And I think the same thing happens internally. We can become incongruent with ourselves.
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We can know that something is not working for us, while repeatedly telling ourselves that it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. We can feel uncomfortable in a situation and insist to ourselves, "We're being ridiculous, just push on, this doesn't matter." We can know that we're exhausted, while telling ourselves we should be able to cope so much better than this. We can recognize that our drinking has become something that we're unhappy with, while telling ourselves we don't really have a problem because somebody over there is drinking more than us.
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And perhaps we think we are reassuring ourselves, but I wonder whether it's something else entirely. If you repeatedly tell yourself something is safe when you know full well it isn't, you will be doing the opposite of building self-confidence. In fact, maybe what you're doing is building self-doubt. Somewhere inside you know the truth. Your body knows. Your instincts know. Your gut feeling is telling you, and your experience knows whatever it is to be true. And then there's the voice in your head saying, "No, no, no, everything is fine." It's trying to override. And this increates a really weird internal split.
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So let's think about what would it look like to practice congruence with yourself? Not catastrophizing. Not assuming the worst. Not turning every uncomfortable feeling into some kind of emergency. Maybe it's about being honest with yourself. "I don't feel comfortable here. I'm more tired than I realized. This relationship isn't feeling good for me. I keep saying I'll have two drinks and then drinking more. I actually feel better when I don't drink."
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These statements haven't got any drama attached to them. They're just observations. And there is something really powerful about becoming someone whose own words can be trusted. When I think to myself all of those a million times I said, "I'm never drinking again," and what I actually meant was, "I'm never drinking again until Thursday," "I'm never drinking again," became a completely meaningless sentence.
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Let's say you're at a party, and when you say you're going to leave, you leave. Let's say you're tired, and when you say you need to have a rest, you have a rest. When you say you're not drinking tonight, you are supporting yourself in keeping that promise. When you notice something isn't quite right, you listen to yourself rather than immediately talking yourself out of it. That is self-trust.
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I made a decision recently that I knew as I was making it, it was a wrong decision, but I carried on anyway. I made the decision, and then I had to live with the terrible consequences. I'm out the other side of it now, but I really wish I had listened to my instinct, my intuition, my gut. That would have saved me a lot of heartache. Let's self-trust.
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If you believe that you're always going to make the perfect decision, you're going to be disappointed. But trust that you will listen to yourself, that you will take yourself seriously, that you won't continually override your own experience just to make something easier, more comfortable, or more acceptable in the short term. Because congruence is not about having everything figured out. It is about bringing your words, your actions, and your behaviors, your inner knowing, a little closer together.
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And if we ask ourselves, "Where in my life am I believing something that my own experience is telling me isn't true?" that is a good question. It might not be comfortable, but it will be useful.
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Thank you for being here with me today. You can find me online at drinklesslive better.com, where you'll find lots of supportive resources. Check out today's podcast show notes for a link to a hidden episode that will help with your 5 p.m. cravings, and details about my one-to-one life coaching and sober coaching programs. And P.S. I believe in you.
