If you're feeling like you don't know who you are in sobriety, you're not alone.

A lot of us get sober and wonder, "Who am I?"

Or even years into sobriety begin wondering who we are.

The early sobriety identity crises is real!

I had an existential crises at 90 days sober. In public LOL.

Today we're diving into the identity crises in early sobriety that so many of us have and how to navigate your way through it.

This includes a way out of feeling trapped in situations that don't bring you joy.

Yes, you get to feel more JOY in sobriety!

Discovering who you are in sobriety is about finding out what you actually like, what naturally brings you joy, and also it's about choosing who you want to be.

​Then BECOME who you choose to be!

​Transcript:
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​ I didn't realize it at that time, but I was walking myself into a breakdown because that's what the spiritual journey is. So when we go on a deep spiritual journey, The breakdown is a success because what are we breaking down? We're breaking down our false self, our old self, the limited smaller self so that we can expand into the newer self.

If we don't do any work on ourselves, we're likely very limited by our past and things that we've been through that aren't processed and old mindsets, old ideas, old stories, but it's not old if you're still living it.


 Hello, courageous bestie, welcome to the sobriety bestie podcast. I am so glad you're here today. We're going to be talking about discovering who you are in sobriety. A lot of us get sober and wonder who am I, who am I? And this is really common. A lot of people, a lot of my students have felt this way. So if you feel like you're not exactly sure who you are, um, in sobriety, whether it's early sobriety or any phase of sobriety or who you are in general, even if you're not sober, um, a lot of us wonder who am I?

And that's. Really good place to be because understanding, having the awareness that you're not quite sure who you are and that you want to be on that journey of self discovery is a turning point. So this is good news. And especially in early sobriety, getting sober is like, who am I?

Because our old life, if you're like me, the old life is built on a foundation of ice. This is how my sponsor described it my first year sober. It's like, well, you built your old life on a foundation of ice. Now that you're sober, that ice has melted in your house. of your life fell off and it's like crashing, right?

You don't know who you are because it wasn't real. It was based upon alcohol. It's hard to know who you are when you're numbing out your feelings all the time. And you're pretending you're okay with things because you don't really have boundaries in place because you don't know any better or whatever.

Right? So you don't really know who you are. You don't really know what you like. If you're like me, I mean, my hobby before I got sober before 2009. Was drinking. That was what I did. I drank. That was my hobby. That was, you know, it's not going to go have fun. We're going to drink. We're going to go to the park.

We're going to drink. We're going to go to a club. We're going to drink. We're going to have friends over and watch a movie. We're going to drink. My hobby was drinking. And so in sobriety, it was like, well, wait. Didn't I do things before? Like what's life like without alcohol? And I quickly found out like a lot of my friends, maybe this is your experience where I felt like when I got sober, like my friends and I would just do something different, right?

Because these are my friends. Well, a lot of my friends, it wasn't really like it was centered around our relationship. It was centered around alcohol. So if I remove alcohol from my life, they don't want to remove it from theirs, which is totally fine. Right. We, no one was going to get me sober before I was ready.

Um, but. Without having alcohol as a common point between us, there really wasn't much of a relationship left. It didn't mean that I didn't love them. They didn't love me, whatever. But that was the glue that held our relationship together. And I get that because that was true for me before I got sober. So then it's like, you're sober and like, what's the glue and friendship.

What's, what do you like? What do you do? What are your hobbies? It can be quite confusing and it can be even deeper than that. Like for me, I had an existential crisis in early sobriety. I was 90 days sober and I was crying in public to my sponsor at a bagel shop in San Francisco, right on the main street market street at lunchtime.

It's being flooded with all these executives and I'm at this little table crying to my sponsor at 90 days sober. I don't even know who I am. And I was like panicked. And she looked at me and she said, isn't that great? You GET to find out who you are. Most people don't get to find out who they are. It is true that we are left out on a lot when we get sober, we are left in, and I would say on even more, we get to find out who we are in sobriety.

And that is a gift. That is amazing. The journey of self discovery gets to begin when you realize, I don't know who the fuck I am. Um, and For me, it was my first question, aside from wanting the anxiety to stop wanting to feel comfortable in my skin. It was like, who am I? Who am I? Who am I? What do I like?

What do I do? Like, how do I figure out who I am? How do I figure out what my hobbies are? How do I create hobbies? Like I decided tennis was going to be a hobby. There was tennis courts. I lived in Russian Hill in San Francisco and there was tennis courts like right near my house. And so I was like, all right, maybe I'll go play tennis.

There's just tennis courts here. So I bought a tennis racket and I went out there and started playing tennis with one of my early sobriety friends. I liked it, but it didn't really become a hobby. It was just like my first thought of like, maybe I'll try this. And then I was like, maybe I'll try this.

Maybe I'll do this. So I was actively thinking about what could hobbies be. I thought maybe I'll learn Spanish. Maybe I'll, you know, what do I want to do? What are potential hobbies? Google. What are hobbies? And so we start wherever we are. And I'm kind of like, I'm being really honest, but I'm also like, does like simplifying, like how basic it was for me in the beginning, it was like, I don't even know what I like without alcohol because I like alcohol.

Right. So without alcohol, who am I, what do I like? What am I okay with? What am I not okay with? What do I prefer? What's fun. What's what enhances my life? What expands me?

Maybe you feel like you're trapped in a situation where you're not feeling joy. A lot of people get sober and that's what they feel like. I'm in a situation where my soul is bleeding out, whether it's in a job or in a relationship or whatever it is. Like I'm trapped in a situation where I'm not feeling joy.

That's great. That is awareness. Awareness is always great because awareness is the stepping stone to changing our life. We have to be aware that we want something different in order to take different actions to get different results. So if you're not feeling joy in your life or in these specific areas of your life, start to notice where you are feeling joy.

Bring your attention to what brings you joy naturally. That is a game changer. It is so simple and it is revolutionary. Where are you naturally experiencing more joy? What makes you come alive? What lights your spirit up? When do you naturally feel excited about life? That might be a clue to what you're here for, what you're born for, what's going to make you expand and evolve and, and let you grow.

So notice when you feel more joy throughout your day, this is what I did. And I want to whirl wind it. Cause depending upon where you're at in your sobriety journey, like in the very beginning, I wasn't feeling joy. I was not feeling joy. I was, it was anxious. I had one feeling. It was anxious AF. That was the dial on my emotions was anxious AF.

That's where I was at for like a long time. Like this hot minute was like a long, hot minute. Like it just kept going. Lots of anxiety. And so. I remember those specifically. I was six months. I was six months sober. I was walking down the street in San Francisco and, there was a little pep in my step.

I was like smiling giddy or something like that. And then I had this thought like, what is this? And I, and I was thinking to myself, What is this? What is this? It's happening right now. Is this, is this what they call joy? Is this joy? Am I feeling joy right now? Oh my God. I haven't felt joy in so long. Wow. I feel joy and that's bringing up almost some grief because I'm realizing I haven't felt genuine joy in so long.

That was six months into my sobriety that I was starting to feel joy. Alcohol damages our interoception, our ability to feel what's going inside of our body. Just removing alcohol from our life, our interoception, our ability to feel what's happening in our body can improve. When we add in practices like mindfulness and meditation, that's also Also going to improve our ability to feel what's happening inside of our body.

If we're being mindful of what's happening inside of our body, right. Which is like what I always teach. Notice your thoughts, notice your feelings, where are your feelings going to them, that kind of stuff, right? That's going to improve your ability to be aware of what's happening in your body. So notice where you're not feeling joy.

Notice where you are feeling joy. Start taking, this is micro actions. This is not big stuff here. You can do big stuff. You can do whatever you want, but I'm suggesting micro actions right here. When you feel joy, notice it, and then do more of it and do that on repeat. So when we do, when we, when we do the thing that we want, or when we're having the feeling, or we're creating the thing, or we're taking the courageous action towards our dream, we just keep stacking those.

We stack those experiences. So if you notice that you feel joy. Like specifically for me, I was feeling joy when I was sponsoring women in recovery. This is like one, two years into sobriety. And I was like, when do I feel joy? And so I noticed that I felt a lot of joy when I was sponsoring women, when I was helping them stay sober with fear, whatever.

And so I was like, oh, okay. So this is a clue to when I'm naturally alive, when I'm doing this, you know, sometimes I'd be sponsoring. Speaking at a recovery meeting, and even though I was petrified and terrified of public speaking, I feel this thing inside me. It was like joy was under the terror. I don't know how to describe it.

Maybe you know what I'm talking about, where it's like, this feels right. This feels like it's an alignment with me and my spirit and what I'm here to do, even though I'm scared. I'm not. This thing is feeling right. And so notice those moments of joy, stack those moments of joy. When we stack the moments of joy, don't look, it's not always going to lead in the direction of joy.

Sometimes our joy leads to a huge breakthrough. And remember breakthroughs sometimes can feel like breakdowns, breaking down what's not us so that we can open up to our next evolution and the next thing for us. And so, Sometimes joy leads to that. I'll tell you real quickly. There's, um, Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey.

You've probably heard of Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey. It's for like star Wars. A lot of the movies, Lion King are based on. And so, uh, he wrote a book called, I think it's the hero with a thousand faces. And so the idea of one of Joseph Campbell's, um, phrases that he's known for is follow your bliss.

And so here's what he meant. In Sanskrit it's sat, chit, ananda. Sat Chit Ananda is the path to enlightenment in Sanskrit. So Sat Chit Ananda, consciousness, existence, bliss, Ananda is bliss.

So, uh, Joseph Campbell said, I don't know consciousness as a path to enlightenment. I don't know, Existence as a path to enlightenment, but I know when I'm in bliss, I know when I'm in rapture. So if I can use bliss at rapture, which is Ananda Sat Chit Ananda as a path to enlightenment, I'll go that way.

So what does it mean when we go on a journey of enlightenment? I don't know. I'm not even going to answer that question. For me, it's about freedom. Freedom. So that's another way to say it, right? I want to be free. I don't want to be blocked by things. I don't want anxiety to block my life. I don't want any specific emotion, any of the emotions to block my life.

I don't want my thoughts to block my life. I don't want my limiting beliefs to block my life. I want to continually believe empowering thoughts. I want to continually expand my life and not believe stories that run through my head about why it's not going to be, not going to work out and not to, you know, Be limited by other people's opinions about me or judgments about me or straight up hate towards me.

I don't want to be limited by that stuff. So I'm going to be very deliberate with what I allow myself to think and allow myself to feel. So when we go down the path of following our bliss as Joseph Campbell recommended from the Satchitananda path and path to enlightenment, it doesn't always feel like bliss.

That was my experience. So I went on that. I did this whole fall, your bliss adventure. When I moved to Bali in 2014, I was following my bliss. I was doing what felt aligned with my heart and my spirit, which is still the way that I choose to live life. I want to do, I want to keep taking, stacking those actions in the direction of my heart and my spirit.

I want to keep being courageous for the sake of my dreams. That's the invitation. Courageous bestie to keep being courageous for the sake of your dreams. And so when I was following my bliss, it didn't always feel like bliss because when we are evolving, we're going to be evolving through everything that had before been blocking us or limiting us. So whether we want to call this, um, mindset or trauma or limiting beliefs or whatever, We're going to be breaking through that. So we're going to be breaking through anything that we believe that was false about ourselves from our childhood, from last week, from today, from an ex lover, from a parent, whatever, a teacher, something.

So we start to, we believe all these lies that keep us small, so as we're like evolving and following our bliss and doing what lights us up, we might hit a patch where we go through That's what happened to me. I went through a breakdown. The spiritual journey is a breakdown. That's a good news. If you're in a breakdown, it's a good news.

This is what I mean. I'm not trying to trigger you. I'm trying to share my perspective here because I think it could be really empowering. So if we go through a breakdown and I didn't really quite recognize this at the time, but when I went on this follow my bliss adventure and I moved to Bali and then I went around to India and Nepal and, um, Uh, Thailand and did all this meditation and mindfulness, lived at monasteries and, um, meditation centers and this whole big Vipassana's adventures, um, through, yeah, I just wanted to learn about meditation in a lot of different ways.

So I didn't realize it at that time, but I was walking myself into a breakdown because that's what the spiritual journey is. So when we go on a deep spiritual journey, The breakdown is a success because what are we breaking down? We're breaking down our false self, our old self, the limited smaller self so that we can expand into the newer self, one that is free from trapped emotions.

If we don't do any work on ourselves, we're likely very limited by our past and things that we've been through that aren't processed and old mindsets, old ideas, old stories, but it's not old if you're still living it.

Right. So we go on the spiritual journey when we follow our bliss, when we go towards Sat Chit Ananda and we wake up and keep. Doing more of what lights us up more of the joy that led me when I did it on a very deep level, it led me into a breakdown, a breaking down of all that is not true for me.

Now, I believe if we're following our bliss in a more subtle way, it's not going to be a big breakdown because you're breaking down every day. You're breaking down every day that you don't tell yourself lies about why the future that you want for yourself is impossible. Every day you don't believe a story that runs through your head, a narrative that is going to, that could otherwise control you.

Every, those are all micro wins. Those stack up, but I was going very aggressively into a spiritual journey and I went through a very big dark night of the soul as a result of that. And it was one of the best things that I ever did really, because I got to be more me after I got to be more authentic after, because I got to go through a lot of the, the old stuff, the old trauma, like, like, I don't know where you're coming from.

I don't know what your nervous system has been through. Probably a lot. I know that mine had been through a lot. I didn't really understand the impact that that was having on me, um, in my life and limiting my joy because of it. And my full experience. So I'm going to talk a little bit about what I was going through when I was following my bliss.

It led me through a dark night of the soul that enabled me to heal a lot of those old feelings and remove a lot of those old beliefs that I made up about myself when I was being very, very disempowered. And victimized, right? And so then as somebody who wants to, um, be on the spiritual journey and grow and evolve and follow my bliss and feel joy and all that, we break down.

It's like mental structures that we live by. If I was living by a mental structure that I'm a lovable, I want that to break down. I was living under a mental structure that I'm not good enough. I want that to break down. Breakdowns are good when we're breaking down old beliefs. We don't want to stay in the breakdown, but we want to break down beliefs that aren't true.

It doesn't always have to feel so bad either. It doesn't have to be dramatic, but we do want to break down beliefs. Like I'm not, I'm not good enough. I'm unlovable. I'm a fraud. I'm fundamentally flawed, whatever it is, the shame, the shame, we want to break down the shame. I want to break down the shame, right?

I wanted to like, I'm so grateful that I got to go through that healing, my shame journey. And the way that I got there was by following my bliss, by doing more of what lit me up more of the joy in a kind of aggressive way, by going to all these meditation retreats. Right. So to not fear the breakdown.

Maybe you need a guide. Maybe if this scares you, trust yourself. Maybe you want a therapist while you do this work. Maybe you want to read a book. Maybe you want to do it in a community of people, whether it's a recovery community of any kind for anxiety, for childhood, this or that, or whatever. Maybe you want a sponsor or a therapist or a doctor or a friend or community or something.

You don't have to do the healing journey alone, but following our bliss can lead to a huge awakening. I've been lighter ever since I've been more tuned into life ever since, like, this is one of, I've had multiple breakdowns getting sober was a breakdown, right? Like we want breakdowns. We want to break it down.

You don't want to live by that old stuff anymore, right? Like you don't want to be dominated by emotions. I used to be dominated by fear, by anxiety. By guilt, by shame, by unprocessed grief from childhood and beyond old relationships, old like disappointments, failures, whatever. So I had all of these emotions that were dominating me.

I was being oppressed by them because they were still living in my body in a way, because I had never really, uh, A lot like grieved. I'd never gotten rid of them. But I'm also living by the beliefs that came from those traumas and dramas and old experiences where I felt like that were less than loving.

So I had those shame internalized. And so we don't want that. We want to go through the breakdown. This podcast is not going the direction I thought it was going to go, but welcome to the, um, the words that are coming out. And hopefully if it's something that's vibing with you, let me know .

Let me know if you're relating to this, if you have any wisdom you want to share that can help somebody else going through this journey, write it down. Um, but the point is that we get to discover who we are in sobriety. It might not be who we thought we were when he got sober. In fact, it probably isn't right.

We can get rid of the fake self. We can break through and then we can rebuild our life. No longer on a foundation of ice, which is the drunk self. We can build our new life on a foundation of who we really are.

And that might evolve. It's not like who we are is stable. So let's just throw another like thing here to think about who we are isn't stable. The fundamental truth that is like the deepest truth that I know to be true for me. And maybe this is true for you or not, but this is really what I believe at my core is like the primary belief of my life is we are souls inside bodies here to evolve.

So what we think we are and how we have been, how we've acted, this isn't who we are. We are souls inside bodies here to evolve. I believe that to my core. I believe that more than I believe anything else. That belief, honestly, it came from when I was 16 years old and I took way too many mushrooms because I didn't know what mushrooms were.

I didn't know. Uh, I didn't know what a hero dose was. I just got a bag and we ate them all and it was way too much. And this is before the internet. So I had no idea there was no Google before Google was invented before it was a thing. So this is in the 90s vibes. And so when I was on this hero dose and I was like consciousness floating through space, I was no longer human.

I was no longer Kirsten. And I was no longer anything that was familiar from my current life. I was, Consciousness existing in space, and it was so clear to me after coming back from that experience, which in the moment was terrifying. Like, I don't like psychedelics. I find them terrifying, but I like what they teach me.

I like what they open me up to about life. I like what I learn from those experiences that I had. For me, I don't think I can get those lessons any other way. Now, I haven't taken mushrooms since the 90s. I'm not saying let's all go, you know, like do things or not do things. I don't know what you should do.

I think you should trust yourself. That's what I think you should do. Actually. That's the only thing I think you should do is trust yourself. That's the invitation. So anyways, when I was on all these mushrooms at 16 years old in the nineties, before the internet, with no reference, I thought, I thought mushrooms would be like drinking a beer.

I had like drinking a beer before. I was like, it's going to be like drinking a beer, right? No, it wasn't. No, no. When you are consciousness existing into a galaxy floating through space and you don't have a body and you don't have a personality and there is no I when there's no ego, that is not drinking a beer.

I've never had a beer like that. But what was really clear for me after I came down to that, like for six months, I was like, Whoa, what the hell was that? What went on there? And so as I was integrating that experience, Just kind of as a teenager with no reference points, I just never, like, it never left me.

It never left my consciousness that there's more than meets the eye here. That whole, we are a spiritual being having a human experience. So. That's how I see it. I see that what we really are isn't who we think we are necessarily, if we're going to go really deep.

So the following our bliss can lead to a breakdown, which is good. That could be a small breakdown, like breaking it down a belief that is limiting you. It could be a big breakdown, meaning breaking down a big belief. Like I'm unlovable belief. That would be a big breakdown. I would welcome that to everyone to embody the breaking down of I'm unlovable or I'm not enough, or I'm not good enough, or I'm a fraud or I'm there's something fun.

The one. Fundamentally wrong with me. Those are good beliefs to break down. We want those breakdowns.

We can choose what identity we want in a way that we are not limited, like our minds are so more, much more powerful than we realize. My mind is more powerful than I realized. I can like, honestly say that. Cause I get blown away when I remember. That most of life is created from the inside out.

Now there are some things we can't control that are happening in the world, like a lot of things we can't control, but we still have the power within ourselves about how we react to things, how we think about things, what we choose to believe, what beliefs we want to implant into our own minds, which beliefs we want to remove.

from our minds. And when we remove beliefs from our minds and we plant new beliefs in our mind, I am powerful. I am a conscious creator of my life. I am courageous. I commit to courage.

We got to choose that. We get to choose what we want to plant. Like you can discover who you are, which is the journey that we're talking about right now, but you can also choose who you are. You can choose what you want to be. When I was choosing to try to have new habits and I was choosing tennis as a habit, I could have chose to be athletic.

And if I had a body that would allow me to do that, and I had the resources, like near a tennis court, the money to buy a racket, whatever, then I can actually choose to be athletic. Now, I'm not going to be Serena Williams, but I can be a tennis player. I can go play tennis at the local tennis little place, right?

And so we get to choose a lot of this discovering who we are. There's a lot of it is some of it's hard wiring. Some of the, some of how we are is more or less fixed ish, right? I don't believe anything is a totally a hundred percent fixed, fixed. ish, harder to change. Maybe it won't change, but a lot of it is changeable because we have neuroplasticity.

This is science. Neuroplasticity is not, it's not woo woo. It is yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Say it with me. I can change. Yes. Yes. Yes. Say it. Yes. Yes. Yes. Ah, but it's true. We get to, we get to decide in a lot of ways who we want to be. We get to decide that we can be things that we've never been before and we could start to move in that direction of those new things.

I decided in early sobriety, I am a speaker. I had a phobia of public speaking when I decided that I'm a speaker, I am called to speak. I am here to share a message. The reason why I decided that the reason why I chose that it was a bit of a discovery of myself. We're talking about discovering yourself in early sobriety.

I discovered that something in my spirit lit up in a way that was really like, Compelling to me. That was kind of like, this is what you do. When I was speaking in these recovery meetings. Even though I was petrified, even though I hated it, even though I was embarrassed and humiliated and had all sorts of feelings that were not pleasant, something in me had another feeling of, this is it.

This is the way this is who you are. And I decided I made a very conscious choice that that feeling I was feeling deep inside me was who I was supposed to be. I could have easily decided something else, but that felt like my calling. And I decided this is my calling. I'm going to do this. Didn't matter that I was, well, it sucked that I was petrified of it, but also I'm here to be courageous.

So sometimes what we're meant to do, what feels right at the deepest level inside of us is something that we're petrified of or terrified of, or have a phobia of. We get to fall in love with our phobias. If we want, I had a phobia of public speaking. I would have never made a podcast for you back in the dizzy, right?

Back in the day. Never. No, no, I don't want to be seen. I don't want to be heard, but just know it's too much. I don't want to be vulnerable. I don't want to be judged. I don't want to, I'm, I'm, I'm too consumed with what people think about me. I'm a people pleaser. This is the old mindset I had, but when I had that feeling inside, like, this is what I want to do.

This is what I feel called to do. I want to share my. My story about getting sober. I want to share my story about anxiety. This almost killed me. I want to help people. I'm a speaker. I chose to be a speaker. You get to choose, discover like what feels right for you. Discover when you come alive, discover what, when you feel joy, know that it might break down some old stuff, some old lies, some old stories, some old traumas and dramas and stuff that's, you know, can be shed.

So be willing to like break down these old beliefs and through finding your joy and doing more of your joy and find following your bliss. And also you get to choose. What feels right for you, what felt right for me in my body, not in my mind even so much, but what felt right to me in my spirit, my soul was like, girl, you're a speaker.

You got to overcome that phobia of speaking. You're a speaker. I was like, damn, I don't want to ignore that. I don't want to ignore my gut, my intuition. Like to me, what we recover. is our intuition. If I'm in recovery, what I'm recovering is my intuition, my connection. Well, there's other things that we've recovered too.

That's a whole nother podcast. What we actually recover. Cause there's a lot to be recovered when we get sober. But the main thing that was my addiction was self betrayal. That was the main, like, Vibe of what addiction is in my mind is self betrayal. I want to betray how I feel. I want to betray like my intuition.

I want to betray the truth of who I am. Not necessarily that I want to, but that's what the alcohol does. It numbs out everything. It numbs out who we are. How can we be ourselves when we're numbed? We don't know who we are. And so for me, the recovery is to not live in self betrayal anymore. And I felt deep inside speaker.

So I decided to be a speaker. I chose to be a speaker and I stacked up those courageous actions. You know, we talk on this podcast about stacking up courageous actions and walking yourself into a brand new life through your courageous actions. That's it. This is courage. You're a courageous bestie. That's why I start every show with hello, courageous bestie.

Cause I know you're here to be courageous too, just like me. And it doesn't stop. I'm still working at being courageous, just like you are. We're doing this together because it's going to recreate our entire life over and over and over again. We're going to keep expanding our comfort zones. We get to be more of ourselves.

We don't have to slowly kill ourselves with fear and alcohol anymore. If that was what was happening for me, at least we get to expand our life through courageous action. We get to decide what do you want to decide what feels right for you discover your intuition uncover Recover your intuition and then listen to it.

Listen in what is it telling you to do mine said you're a speaker I'm like, what the hell I'm so scared of speaking like petrified I legit changed majors in college to avoid public speaking legit the day of a speech We the day I was supposed to get up and give a talk in my major in college I Did not go to class.

And I went and changed my major to something else to math. I was like, math is more friendly. I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. I'm going to study numbers and things that don't require speaking. It turned out I did have to do some speaking in college anyways, in order to graduate and to go to grad school.

But I was doing anything I could to avoid it. My mind was very confused that what I felt called to do was going to require me to overcome a phobia. But what would my soul say here? What would the soul know here? Wouldn't it make sense that what you want to do, what you feel called to do from a deeper level, is going to require you to walk through a crapload of fear?

Doesn't that make sense from an evolutionary perspective that what the deeper purpose here is to evolve into your greatest capacity? How can you evolve into a greater capacity to walk through your biggest fears to not be limited by phobias? It makes perfect sense to me now that oftentimes our callings are on the other side of our deepest fears.

It makes sense that we get involved. There's so much potential there that we get to live. So we get to decide, even if you're scared, you can decide to be a speaker or something like that, like I did.

What is something that you've already discovered about yourself in sobriety? Cause this discovery yourself or being on the self discovery journey can seem big and vague and you know, what the fuck, but there's already things you've discovered about yourself on your spiritual journey, on your sobriety journey.

So what is one thing that you've discovered about yourself that maybe was surprising? Obviously like a big thing that I discovered was that I'm called to be a speaker, that it felt like I was called to be a speaker. And then I chose Being a speaker. And I chose to work through my phobia of public speaking so that I could show up and give a message which I felt called to do.

So that was something I discovered in sobriety that confused my mind like crazy, but it also allowed me to be quite courageous. Because it took a lot of courage to go through that, which I think those are the best things to discover about ourselves, the ones that are going to require us to be really courageous to achieve.

What is one thing that you have discovered about yourself already in your spiritual journey, in your sobriety journey? Let's acknowledge how far you've come. How far we've come, how far everyone else has come. We've come a long way. You look how far you've come. Seriously. If you think about how far you've already come, what you've already overcome that you thought maybe there was no way that you could have gone through.

Like if you're sober, if you've gone through your anxiety, if you've gone through emotions, if you've started a business, whatever it is that you've been doing, you've already come so far. Can we just take a minute and honor how far you've already come? Like, it's pretty far, isn't it? Like, if I was gonna sit here and think about how far I've come, or I was gonna think about any of my students, it's like, we can radically transform our lives by taking those small steps that add up.

So, imagine how much further you can go by how far you've already come. It's so cool. You are so courageous. You can do this. It's been great having you here today. I wish you so many insights as you discover who you are and choose who you want to become. And then you move into living that life that you've been dreaming of.

​All right, I'll see you on the next episode. Bye.