You are listening to the Drink Less Lifestyle Podcast with Dr. Sherry Price, episode number 51.

Welcome to Drink Less Lifestyle, a podcast for successful women who want to change their relationship with alcohol. If you want to drink less, feel healthier and start loving life again you’re in the right place. Please remember that the information in this podcast does not constitute medical advice. Now, here’s your host, Dr. Sherry Price.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to the podcast. And if you’re new to the podcast you’ve picked a great one to tune into. But before we dive in to the topic for today I want to tell you that we are having an amazing time in Epic You. If you’ve been following me for a little bit you know that it is my new membership program. And in the month of September, we are diving into the topic of time management. Fall is the time that kids go back to school and we start to establish new routines. And a lot of us want to reengage with our goals again, particularly since the summer has passed.

So, we really want to know how best to manage our time to get the results that we want. So, if you want to learn some helpful tools then I invite you to come and join us. You can find the link in the show notes of this podcast or go to my website sherryprice.com and click under Work With Me. And you will find how to join Epic You.

Alright, so now speaking of using our time to get the results that we want in our life, I want to talk today about a concept that I learned from Dan Sullivan. He is the founder of Strategic Coach and he helps entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses. So, one of the concepts that he talks about for entrepreneurs is how to think about their business and their personal life. And I’m going to talk about this concept but I’m going to actually apply it to our life overall and particularly too as it relates to alcohol.

So, this concept he talks about applies to life and business. And I want to describe it to you. So, he calls it the results economy or the time and effort economy. So, you’re either in the results economy or you’re in the time and effort economy. And what I’m going to do is just swap out that word ‘economy’ and talk about being results oriented or results focused versus the time and effort focus or time and effort orientation. Because as I have been studying this concept and using the skills I’ve gotten better and better results in my life.

And when I use this in my coaching practice my clients get better and better results in their life. So, as we begin do you think you identify more as a results oriented person or as a time and effort oriented person? So, your answer to this question could be either one or actually both. And I bet for a lot of us we are both. But I want to see if you lean towards one or the other more. So let me describe what it means to be more results oriented. So that means you are committed to finding the path that will get you the results that you want.

When you are results committed you are less concerned about the time that it takes to get there. You’re willing to keep trying new things to get to the result. And you also know the exact result you want to create or you want to achieve. And knowing the exact results means that it’s very specific and it’s quantifiable, meaning you will know when you’ve actually achieved it. You will know when you’ve got the result because honestly if it’s not well defined how will you know when you actually get there? How will you know when you actually achieve that result? So, it has to be well defined.

And you know that sounds obvious but for many people they don’t have a well defined result. And we will talk about that more. So, you’re results oriented if you are quick to assess what’s working to get you the result and also identifying what isn’t working and changing quickly. So, you adapt, you’re always assessing is what I am doing, the actions that I’m taking is it getting me to the result that I want? This question comes up a lot for you if you are results oriented. It’s like you’re so hyper focused on getting the result.

And you are also results oriented if you’re focused on getting there the simplest and the fastest way. You’re trying to always optimize to get to the result the quickest that you can. So, notice you are always taking actions that you know will lead to the result. Or maybe you’re experimenting with actions and you’re saying, “Hey, I’m going to try this and I’m going to see if this gets me to my result quick or not.”

So, another way to talk about being results oriented is you’re very outcome oriented. So, I know a lot of people who identify themselves as being high achievers or even perfectionists might be even saying, “Yes, I’m a very results driven person, very much about the outcome.” And it makes sense that you would be because achieving things fuels you. That’s how we identify as overachievers is yes, I like to achieve things, and that motivates me and I really enjoy it so I want to keep doing it. Sometimes just setting the goal ignites us.

Now, we may start off being results oriented but a lot of times what I find is some of even these high achievers and people that claim that they’re results oriented, people like myself, I often fell into the time and effort orientation. So, after I set the goal then I went and I had a different orientation or a different focus. So, let’s talk about some of the characteristics of someone who is more focused on the time and effort component rather than the results component.

So, time and effort oriented people they are focused more on the time it takes to get there. They’re thinking that once they put in a certain amount of time then the result will come. This could look like counting the days or counting the weeks and saying, “At the end of this time I should get the result.” Now, that may be true but it also may not be true. We should be looking as the time is evolving and moving if we are getting closer to our result. Are we measuring our progress?

Here’s another way to look at if we are time and effort focused, it’s that we think that putting in more effort will get us the result faster when actually it may not because there actually may be a way to get there faster that requires less effort or a different type of effort, which can be less effort. But you’re not even aware of that path or you’re not even considering other ways of getting there because you’re so focused on this is the amount of time and effort it’s going to take.

So, you become more focused on this time and effort component that you’re not so focused on getting the result. And here’s another way you know if you were more time and effort focused is that you don’t even really have a clear defined result that you’re going for. The result is kind of nebulous, it’s really not that specific, you’re really not defining it very well so you think I’m just going to put time and effort in and eventually I’ll get to that result. But it’s not a well defined result. And that makes it hard because how do you know when you’ve actually achieved it?

For a lot of people they say, “I want to get healthy.” Well, how do you know when you have achieved get healthy? It’s not a well defined result. And I work with a lot of women who say, “I just want to get fit, or I just want to get healthy, or I just want to stay healthy, or I just want to be healthy.” Well, that’s great but we’re focusing on time and effort and we’re not really focused on the result because what does that mean to that person? We have to get granular and define that. So that was a quick example that I gave you.

But now I want to go into two more examples of specific individuals that I worked with who once they developed this skill of becoming results focused it really changed the trajectory of their transformation. And I think the stories of these two women will really highlight some things for you and that maybe you can even see some of their ways of doing stuff and how to change that can help you in where you’re at in your journey.

So, the first example I want to talk about is a woman that I worked with, she was really focused on losing weight. And as a certified weight loss coach she hired me as her coach and we worked primarily on losing weight for her. So, when I started working with her she was overweight and it was causing her to be unhappy. She didn’t like getting dressed in the morning, she didn’t like how she looked in her clothes. When she wore her scrubs to work she just felt that they were super tight. She didn’t like how her thighs rubbed together.

She would tell me that she was sad when she looked in the mirror or stepped on the scales, she just avoided doing these things as much as she could. She didn’t want to step on the scales, she didn’t want to look at herself in the mirror. And she started getting angry with food. It became such a battle for her to how much food should I eat, what kind of food? What’s going to lead to weight loss? That she just started getting angry about food and so she’d restrict, she’d restrict. And by the end of the week, she restricted so much that she’d wind up binging.

And as we talked some more she told me how long she has been trying to lose weight, it’s been months and years. She’s had this goal for a long time and she’s yo-yoed up and yo-yoed down. And she just felt defeated. She would even sigh and she just sounded resigned that this process was so arduous, that it took so much time and effort. And she was just really tired about the amount of time and effort it took.

But she wanted to keep going because she was raising a daughter who was pre-teen ish and she was worried that her daughter was picking up bad cues from her around food, around how she felt with her body. And she really didn’t want to teach her to have body shame or to feel bad about her body image, although that’s exactly how she was feeling about herself. So, she knew what she was doing wasn’t good for her and it also wasn’t good for her daughter.

So, when she came to me she said, “I just want to lose weight.” And I said, “Well, that’s great but I want us to be results focused. So how much weight do you want to lose?” And she said, “It would be awesome if I can lose 20 pounds.” And then I asked her, “How fast do you want to take this weight off?” And she laughed and she says, “Well, as quick as possible.” So, we analyzed what was working for her and what wasn’t working for her. We went back and we were looking at where did she get success and where didn’t she get success?

And when we started to put those pieces of the puzzle together she started to understand that she wasn’t on the fastest route to get weight loss success. She had seen how she was more focused on just putting in more time and more effort and working out more at the gym which she thought was going to lead to the result. And it was interesting because the weeks she had good success in terms of following her food plan, in terms of going to the gym she would actually reward herself with food.

So that reward in and of itself could slow down the process of losing more weight. So, we can look at other rewards. And obviously this is not unique to her. We are told this is the way to go about weight loss or we think that this is the way to go about weight loss and we keep going, and we keep going, and we keep going. And if we’re not getting the results we just start thinking I just need more time and effort. And thinking you need more time and more effort, if your current strategy really isn’t giving you the results, maybe we need a different strategy.

So, upon working with me I have taught her this skill of how to be results focused. And when you’re results focused you are less about the time and effort because the results are top of mind, not how much time and how much effort it’s going to take. Now, of course it’s going to take some time and it’s going to take some effort but that is not the major focus. So, we got really clear on that result that she wanted. We got really clear about how quick she can achieve it. We got really clear on how would we reward ourself along the way and everything that was about the result.

So, as I mentioned, for her it was about losing 20 pounds. And we looked at her commitment level to get there and it was rock solid. She had total commitment. She was ready to be done with this weight. She wanted to feel great in her scrubs again at work. She wanted to move more effortlessly and not have her thighs rub together so much. And these were things that were very important to her.

She wanted to look at herself in the mirror And she had this pair of jeans that she wanted to put on her body and feel amazing in again. And she said, “I just want to be that woman, that woman that weighs 20 pounds less.” So, we did our work, I taught her the skill of being results focused along the journey. And here’s what happened, within a quick eight weeks she got there. She lost 22 pounds and she felt amazing. She was wearing those jeans that she always wanted to wear and she was looking at herself in the mirror and felt fabulous.

She told me she was getting compliments from her coworkers at work and her productivity at work even went up. So much so that I actually got a call from her boss to thank me for helping her lose the weight. And that she had another employee in the office that desperately wanted to lose weight and can she sign her up for my program and she would pay for some of it. So why was she able to do this? I’ll tell you why. It’s because she developed the skill of being results focused.

When you become results focused your distractions fade away. You become committed to the results that you don’t want to distract yourself away from getting those results. And guess what you also do? You also stop believing it’s going to take more time and effort. And here’s the thing, she was working out four to five days a week and it wasn’t getting her the weight loss she wanted. So, when we looked at the weeks where she was working out less we saw that she dropped more weight. So, what did we learn from that? Is that she had to work out less.

She actually had to expend less effort working out to get the results faster. But when you are thinking it’s going to take more time and more effort, oftentimes we don’t see that it’s not the fastest way to get to the results that we want. So, we modified her plan along the way and she was committed to this process because she wanted to be that future version of her. And so how do you know what you are committed to? You absolutely know what you’re committed to. You’re committed to whatever results you have in your life right now.

You’re making a certain income, you are committed to that. You are at a certain weight, that’s what you’re committed to. You’re at a certain number of drinks per week. That’s the type of drinker you’re committed to being. What you’re committed to shows up in what you have in your life right now. So, if you want different results you have to develop a different commitment, which means you have to change otherwise you’ll keep getting the same results.

And here’s what a lot of us think, it just takes more time and effort. And sometimes that is true, but is that the right question you want to be asking yourself? Because if you’re putting in more time and effort we should be looking at is that really getting you the result that you want? That’s the question. If the answer is no then we move to what’s going to create the result faster and quicker, just as this client had done. Because we know that doing more of the same thing and thinking it won’t produce a different result is just the definition of insanity.

And that’s why I think a lot of us start to spin out. We just think more time, more effort will create the result. And doesn’t So, we’ve got to be careful to analyze what are we putting time in and what are we doing in terms of effort because is that really producing the result we want?

So, for the next example I want to use a client that I worked with who wanted to drink less. So, when I started working with this client she said it just feels so good when she didn’t drink that much and had a number of alcohol free days. Because she loved being clear headed, more vibrant, having more energy, felt good about herself, her self-esteem went up. And she just felt it was a healthier lifestyle.

So, she wanted to get back to that place because over the past few years her drinking had picked up. And she just noticed that during that same amount of time over those past few years she became more depressed, more anxious, more stressed, her life wasn’t going as smooth as it used to. She felt like she couldn’t handle the small stresses in life, everything got to her. She was more emotional about things. And of course, a lot of this comes from dousing your body with a lot of alcohol.

So, she said, “I really want to really look at my relationship with alcohol and change it because it feels like it’s gotten to this place it’s just too much.” It’s too much for her body. She wasn’t feeling good about it and she just wanted to drink less and really establish a different relationship with alcohol. Because she was saying that she just felt really bad that when she was drinking that was the part of the day that she looked forward to most. That became the most joyful, most pleasurable part of her day.

That’s when she felt like she can unwind, and relax, and not worry about the stress of work and her never ending to do list and just all the things going through her head. So, when she started working with me she was around 30 drinks per week and she said, “It just feels like too much, I just want to drink less.” She wanted to have those mornings back where she felt good about herself and she wasn’t hungover or affected by alcohol in any way. She felt like all this alcohol was just weighing on her.

And she began to not like her job anymore and started looking forward to the days when she could retire. She also noticed that the people she was working with seemed to get under her skin a little bit more. They just irritated her. And if they weren’t so irritating she wouldn’t want to escape at all at the end of the day, if it just wasn’t so stressful. She even mentioned she thought about getting a different job just to escape that work environment.

So, I invited her to work with me inside the Drink Less Lifestyle program and she started doing the work, learning the skills and within a few weeks was drinking much less. Now, I’m very committed to getting my clients the results that they want. And I remember asking her on a coaching call if she was getting the result she wanted, did this feel good to her? And I remember her saying, “I am drinking less but I don’t know if this is the result I want. I don’t know if I’m there.”

And as I was coaching her she realized that drinking less wasn’t well defined for her. And so, she didn’t feel like she could celebrate her progress because she didn’t have a clear definition of what success looked like for her. She didn’t know what hitting the result would look like so she delayed celebrating because she didn’t know when to have permission to celebrate. So obviously when this is happening I know that the client has not well defined their goal, they are not results oriented.

So, when I taught her this tool on how to become results oriented and how to apply this to her life we found out that drinking less was just a small part of the goal. A bigger portion, and it is for most women is not only do they want to drink less but they also want to feel better about their life. And for her it was particularly that she wanted to feel better about her work. She wanted to derive some pleasure and some meaning from her work again, which makes total sense. Humans want to have meaningful work and work that is pleasurable.

So, if she wasn’t finding pleasure at work no wonder why her drinking kicked up over time. She was turning to alcohol for her pleasure and for her joy. And now that became the best part of her day. So, when I showed her how this was all happening she became results focused. She developed that skill and let go of putting in this time and effort to get there. Because yes, putting in the time and effort is one criteria but that wasn’t just the result she wanted. She wanted more. Not only did she want to drink less, she wanted greater pleasure coming from her job.

So, once she started putting this skill into practice, she started to see ways that she can love her work again and she decided to stay at that job rather than look for a new one. And because of this one skill, being results oriented, guess what? She started to create the results that she wanted in her life.

And if you recall from the beginning of this podcast, to be results oriented that means you’re committed to finding the paths to get you to the results that you want. Maybe there’s one path, maybe there’s two paths, maybe there’s three. But you’re committed to finding those to get the results that you want. So, you’re willing to try new things. And now you see we made the result more specific and more measurable to her.

So, I want you to see this, ladies, it is so common that we say we want something but we don’t fully clarify it. We don’t fully think about it in terms of if I achieve this will this be the thing that changes my life? And that’s exactly what we do inside Drink Less Lifestyle, we just don’t fix your drinking, we fix your life. Because what happens when you drink, you increase the amount you’re drinking, it’s highly correlated with sometimes the unhappiness that you have in your life.

And if that is the case then we have to fix the unhappiness in your life so that you can begin to experience joy outside of the glass. This is why some programs don’t work. If you don’t fix your life and what’s wrong and you’re just told to drink less and that’s your only source of pleasure, of course it makes it hard for that to be sustainable without the skills to improve your life.

Without the skills to change your desire and your relationship with alcohol, without these skills it makes it almost impossible to stay compliant and not want to binge and not want some pleasure coming in, in the form of alcohol. Especially if that’s how you’ve trained your brain to experience pleasure and joy. So, whatever you don’t like or whatever you’re done tolerating, we have to be done tolerating it. We have to change that. And when you have a life that’s so amazing you won’t want to drink to escape it. You will want to live that amazing life. You won’t want to miss a moment of it.

And if you do decide to drink you can easily stop because it’s not because you’re drinking, because you want to escape or your life sucks. So, this is one tool I love teaching my clients. And we’ve been really focusing in on this tool a lot in the past couple of months because it’s gotten so much traction in the lives of my clients. And although I teach a variety of tools, this is one tool that I find so transformational. And right now, in the Drink Less Lifestyle program we have women transforming their broken marriages with this tool.

We have women finding meaning and fulfilment in their jobs again with this tool. And we have women finding joy outside of just alcohol with this tool. And we have a woman who says, “My life is good, I just want to make it great.” And just by using this one tool and learning this skill she’s getting that great life that she wants. My friends, I have to tell you, this tool is so transformational. This skill once you learn it is amazing.

You stop sitting on the sidelines of your life and waiting for time and more effort to achieve something, you actually create the result because you become results focused. And let me ask you, how does it feel to you if you just fixate on time and effort it will take to get there? If you’re fixating on the time it will take to lose the weight, the time it will take to change your relationship with alcohol, the time it will take to change your marriage. How motivating is that? That is not very motivating. Does that keep your head in the game?

Does that keep you learning, and growing, and developing new paths to get to your goal? I’ll tell you what, I’ve been applying this skill to my life and it has exploded the results I’ve been able to create in my life. I have three programs now. I have created such transformation in my household and I’ve been sharing that with the ladies inside Drink Less Lifestyle as well as inside Epic You and it is so golden. And that’s why I encourage all of you to become results oriented, listen back to this podcast, take notes, print out the transcript from my website.

Learn how to become results focused and watch your life explode. If what you’re doing feels empty and like a slog, maybe you’re counting alcohol free days and you just don’t feel like more time and more effort doing that is going to get you to the result, consider becoming a results oriented person. Because here’s the thing, when you hit your result, you should feel amazing about it. It should transform you. And transformation means you don’t want to go back to your old ways. Your life now is so much better.

And if you want to learn this skill and apply it to your life to get rapid transformation then I invite you to check out Drink Less Lifestyle. You can find out information about this program on my website, sherryprice.com and schedule a consult call with me. On that call we will clarify your goals and the results that you want for your life as well as the skills to get there because I’ll tell you what my friends, it is so fun when you can get the results that you want. I can’t wait to see you on a call.

Alright, have an amazing week everyone and I will see you next week.

Thanks for listening to the Drink Less Lifestyle. If you’re ready to change your relationship with alcohol, check out my free guide, How to Effectively Break the Overdrinking Habit at sherryprice.com/startnow. That’s sherryprice.com/startnow. I’ll see you next week.