We monitor what is important to us.
Monitoring means we pay attention and check the progress of something or keep it under systemic review.
We monitor what our kids do, what they eat, and the grades they get.
We monitor our finances, our bills, and our retirement accounts.
We monitor our weight and how our clothes fit.
We notice when the grades slip, the bills run higher, and when our clothes get a bit tighter.
This data signals to us that something needs to change.
Things that are important to us require systematic review and tracking.
And we can only improve what we track.
Tracking give us the data we need to make a change.
Cutting back on drinking requires that we pay attention to it and do a systematic review.
Most times, we prefer to tune out and continue drinking, instead of tuning in and do the tracking.
But learning why we overdrink and how much we drink is vital to the process of cutting back.
When you just focus on the drink, you miss the bigger picture of what is going on inside that is causing the overdrinking to happen.
Once you understand what is going on inside, you can work on the real cause and the drinking pattern will change.
Changing your drinking behavior is an inside job.
It requires monitoring it.
Investigating it like a scientist.
Making decisions about the data.
This is the process I take my clients through.
Go inward, my friends.
It is the way out.
