In this episode, I explore the freedom that can come from stopping trying to make everyone understand your choices, particularly when you’re changing your relationship with alcohol.

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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.

An idea: what if you stopped trying to make everyone understand you? I wonder how much energy we spend every day trying to explain ourselves, why we made a particular decision, and we go with it and then we want to explain it. Why we've changed, why we're saying no or yes to something new, why something that seems perfectly reasonable to us doesn't make sense to somebody else.

And sometimes, of course, explaining is useful. Communication matters. If we're in a relationship, at work, or navigating something important, being able to explain ourselves and understand each other is part of being human. But there's a point where explaining becomes an attempt to get somebody to agree with us.

Someone can understand what you're saying and still disagree. They can hear your reasons and still not like your decision. They can know you very well and still see things completely differently from you. And sometimes we keep explaining because underneath it all, we're hoping that if we just find the right words, they'll finally say, "Oh yeah, I get it. That makes complete sense to me."

But what if they never do? What if you're allowed to make a decision that somebody else doesn't understand? You might find that people have questions. Why aren't you drinking, for example? Are you ever going to drink again? Did you have a problem with alcohol? What's wrong with just having one? And you might feel a pull to justify your decision.

But you do not need to build a courtroom case for your choices. You're allowed to say, "This is something I've decided to do because it feels right for me." And you can leave it there. Be comfortable with someone else not understanding. Accepting that you cannot control how somebody else interprets you, ever.

There will be people who understand you deeply. There will be people who understand parts of you. And there will be people who simply don't get you at all. And that won't mean that you've explained yourself badly. It means that they have a different life experience, different values, different priorities, or a different way of looking at the world.

And your job is not to persuade everybody around you to your way of thinking. Your job is to know yourself well enough that you don't need universal agreement before you trust your own decisions. You can explain when an explanation is useful to you. You can have conversations. You can listen. You can be interested. And you can also stop.

You can let the conversation end without achieving complete understanding of each other. You can let somebody think what they think, and you can get on with living your life. I wonder whether part of growing into ourselves is becoming less interested in being universally understood and more interested in being honest with ourselves.

So today, can you take a moment to notice where you're overexplaining, where you're trying to convince someone that your choice makes sense, and what would happen if you simply trusted yourself enough to let them have their own opinion? You do not have to be understood by everyone to live a life that makes perfect sense to you.

Thank you for being here with me today. You can find me online at Drink Less, Live Better, 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.