In this episode of the Sobriety Diaries podcast, host Nate Kelly interviews David Greer, an entrepreneurial coach and author who shares his personal journey of recovery from alcoholism. David discusses his upbringing in a family where daily drinking was normalized, his own progression into alcoholism, and the pivotal moment when he admitted his drinking problem and sought help. He also talks about his experience sailing with his family for two years and how it impacted their lives. David emphasizes the importance of finding a community and seeking support in recovery, and he offers hope to those who are struggling with addiction. He also discusses his book, which provides practical advice and motivation for entrepreneurs.
Transcript
Nate Kelly (00:13):
Hey everybody, welcome to the Sobriety Diaries. I’m your host, Nate Kelly, a recovering alcoholic, seven years from my last drink, a recovery mentor and podcast producer. I am so grateful to be bringing you these powerful stories of recovery told by you, those who live them. Please share this podcast with anyone who may need it today. And with that, let’s open the diary on episode 95. Welcome back to the Sobriety Diaries. Friends, I am here with my new friend, entrepreneurial coach, author. Much more that we will get to here this morning. Nate Kelly. David, good morning. How are you, my friend?
David Greer (00:59):
Good morning, Nate. I am doing fantastic. Thrilled to be here with you.
Nate Kelly (01:05):
We were just sort of getting to know one another a bit before the interview started and you’re on your sailboat.
David Greer (01:12):
I Am
Nate Kelly (01:13):
Off the shore of Vancouver on this beautiful Saturday morning. I’m a bit jealous you have your Starbucks. It sounds like a good life.
David Greer (01:21):
It is a wonderful life, a very full and fulfilling life,
Nate Kelly (01:27):
One that I’m sure we can agree wouldn’t be possible without recovery. And we’ll dig into that a bit more this morning.
David Greer (01:37):
Sailing and drinking, those go together and have gone together for me for a significant portion of my life. But I’m very happy I can be on my sailboat today and not worrying about where I’ve hidden three or four or five dozen beer.
Nate Kelly (01:54):
I was in Cancun, Mexico once when I was young and shouldn’t have been drinking anyway, but we went on a snorkeling trip and I just remember being literally hung over the side of the boat eliminating the alcohol that I had consumed. So sailing and boats and drinking don’t mix for me, but I like to start with a personal journey and get to know more about David and how we have ended up with this beautiful life on a sailboat in Vancouver. I want to turn it over to you to walk us through your path to recovery and how things are today. Let us hear more about David.
David Greer (02:45):
Great Nate. So here in the 12 step recovery I practice in Vancouver when we have a year of celebration, we have what we euphemistically call taking a cake,
Which we do bring in a cake, but we’re asked to share what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now. And to really go right back to the beginning. So I was born in Royal Alex Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, to a teenage mom who immediately gave me up for adoption. And I was adopted into an upper middle class family and entrepreneurial family had a very idyllic childhood. I don’t believe either of my parents are alcoholics, but they did like to have a drink every day. So very traditional. Dad goes off to work. My mom is a stay-at-home mom, dad comes home from work and pours himself a scotch and pours mom a gin and tonic. And they probably have one drink, maybe occasionally two. And then they definitely have parties and binge drink. So that’s what was modeled for me is daily drinking. Fast forward high school, I was an academic geek jock, so football, basketball, rugby, track and field. So keg parties in grade 10, in grade 12, drinking after basketball games. But yes, I got drunk, but it wasn’t daily drinking and I didn’t have anything in between. I’m a really big guy, so the legal age in Alberta is 18. So by 17 I could go in the liquor store and buy stuff and would rarely be asked for id.
Nate Kelly (04:46):
Were your parents aware of the drinking at this time?
David Greer (04:50):
I would say probably. I mean, it’s the kind of thing we’d go away to Sunshine Village, which is a ski resort outside of Banff. And I mean by grade nine when there’s the big Saturday party, my dad is offering me to have beer.
Nate Kelly (05:06):
Got it.
David Greer (05:07):
Right. So again, very normalized that it’s okay to drink. There’s a line you’re not supposed to cross. I was more a maintenance drinker. I’d get to a certain point where I had the buzz and coping with stress and the feelings, but I wouldn’t want to go out of control. So things are going pretty well. I’m living on my own. But I did notice Wednesday I might buy a six pack and then suddenly the six pack is gone. I didn’t really intend to go drink a six pack. Right.
Nate Kelly (05:42):
How did that happen? Where did
David Greer (05:43):
Those go?
Nate Kelly (05:43):
Yeah, man,
David Greer (05:45):
Those disappeared fast and on my own, not with other people. So my relationship to alcohol or my story is very much the progressive nature of the disease. I don’t know exactly when I crossed the Rubicon and I became a pickle
Nate Kelly (06:04):
Same. I can’t even, when I try to look back and I’m sure being intoxicated has something to do with it, but I can’t pinpoint when it turned into almost that necessity drinking. Correct. Right. I can’t pinpoint it.
David Greer (06:19):
Totally relate. What I can tell you is that when my wife got pregnant with our first child, Jocelyn, she committed to not drinking during the pregnancy and I committed to supporting her by not drinking. And that lasted 24 hours,
Nate Kelly (06:36):
David.
David Greer (06:40):
And you know what? I don’t even know how I justified it to my wife. I’d made that commitment and I didn’t keep it. And was I a daily drinker by then? I’m not sure, but definitely. And then two years later she got pregnant with our son Kevin and I kept drinking. And I remember by then, because I can kind of remember evenings and Karalee was running around physical therapy clinic and I’m sometimes looking after the kids and I’m like drinking wine while I’m looking after them. I think I’m pretty much a daily drinker by then. So that’s in my early thirties.
Nate Kelly (07:18):
Was there a secretive aspect to any of it or?
David Greer (07:22):
Sure, absolutely. I was very good at hiding. I’ve worked at home since 1982, so having a home office and having a wife who is very okay if I have workaholism. So oh, I need to work for a couple more hours and drink a six pack of beer.
Then we had our third child and then in early 2001.
I joined a young software startup when I was at university. My degree is in computer science, a very technical software background, built an incredibly successful software company and one of the ways I coped with the stress was drinking for sure. I mean, make the lows better, drink the highs, higher drink. So we’re behind on our project, so I’ll drink a six pack of beer at 10 o’clock at night and program this stuff like that. Makes sense. You’re going to do this super intricate, very complicated stuff and get loaded
Nate Kelly (08:23):
With a buzz or more
David Greer (08:25):
With a buzz than a buzz.
David Greer (08:26):
We decide to do something completely different. We commissioned a sailboat in the south of France. We sail. I’ve been a sailor all my life. We’ve had the kids sailing since they were a couple weeks old. So we took the three kids and we homeschooled them on a sailboat in the Mediterranean for two years while sailing 5,000 miles around the Mediterranean basin. So the Disney version would be we went on the boat and I saw the light and I got sober.
Nate Kelly (08:55):
But
David Greer (08:56):
Let me tell you, being in European Mediterranean countries is a fantastic place to be an alcoholic.
Nate Kelly (09:02):
I believe it.
David Greer (09:05):
Every little marina you pull in, there’s like three little restaurants, very happy to serve you. Beer and wine is cheap.
Nate Kelly (09:14):
Was it just the family or did you have a crew on board too?
David Greer (09:18):
Nope, just us.
Nate Kelly (09:20):
Just you. Fun.
David Greer (09:21):
Yeah, it was fun and it was an incredible amount of work. I have to be navigator engineer, parent teacher, supply officer hook. I wanted to share about the sailing trip a little bit because I think I started, so a couple things happened. We did over 20 overnight passages in the two years we were in the med. It was the first time I ever didn’t drink for more than 24 hours
And I didn’t have a trouble not drinking when the lives of my family were at stake. Actually I didn’t even think about it that much. I just knew that drinking would impede my decision-making abilities and were an overnight passage, many, many hours from any safe landfall and yet everything is at stake. And our second overnight passage just had an amazing experience where we were in the Western Mediterranean Sea. There’s a big high pressure, so we’re actually motoring, but the sea is like flat. And my son and I, who was 10 at the time, came on watch two in the morning and we looked up and you could see the Milky Way absolutely as far as the eye could see. And I think that was God trying to talk to me. So we come back, I’m very unfulfilled professionally. On my 50th birthday, I hired an amazing coach, Kevin Lawrence. We cleared all of the clutter off the table and all that’s left is the elephant.
And on January 26th, 2009, I had my last beer and I sent an email to Kevin for the topic for our coaching the next day, which was my drinking. And the next day I told Kevin I had a drinking problem and I knew this was the Rubicon because I’d worked with Kevin long enough that I knew once I told Kevin he would never let it go. He’s that kind of person. And we had built that kind of relationship and he coached me to go to my first 12 step meeting, and that was a Tuesday. I committed to go by that Friday. And being the overperforming entrepreneurial guy that I am, I had an event downtown, a networking event that ran till eight. So I went online and lo and behold, literally as I’m driving home, a quarter of a block off the road I’m going to drive home on is a meeting at 8:30. And my network event ended a little early. I was probably there at 10 past eight and it’s in a legion. Legions are founded to support people in the armed forces. So you go in the door and the door to the bar is open and there’s beers on the table and like a deer in the headlights. And then a couple 12 steppers kind of saw me and said, oh, if you’re looking for the meeting, go down the hall and up the stairs,
Nate Kelly (12:22):
Your first test.
David Greer (12:22):
I turned right, yeah, it was my first test. And three quarters of the way through the meeting the chairman says, is there anyone new who would like to stand and introduce themselves? And then just paused and it probably took me 30 seconds. And then just before I started again, I jumped up and said, I’m David and I’m an alcoholic. And I think there was the first admission and 14 years on, it’s still my home group.
Nate Kelly (12:56):
What was the sense of relief? Was it greater when you sent the email to Kevin or when you talked to Kevin or when you said for the first time, I’m David, I’m an alcoholic.
David Greer (13:10):
I’m not certain there’s any relief in any of that. I was too fricking scared.
Nate Kelly (13:14):
Okay,
David Greer (13:15):
Right. What happened was I got sick and tired of being sick and tired and I finally conceded defeat. But I remember I could never, I couldn’t imagine what it was going to be like to have wine with dinner. I couldn’t imagine this life without alcohol. And I just started showing up and others who’d gone before me taught me and held space for me and slowly, and it was probably 18 months until I worked the 12 steps, but I had a Monday men’s meeting, which I still go to today where see grown men share and share emotionally to see a man cry and see 17 other guys, I wanted to leap up and pat the person on the back and say, it’s going to be okay. I eventually realized that was my discomfort with their crying, but I witnessed all these other men just sit still and just hold space for what was happening for that individual. It’s such a strong memory, it’s so powerful
Nate Kelly (14:20):
Holding space for someone because I feel like we hear it a lot these days, but sometimes the context isn’t there. So I love the way that you described that and it’s a powerful thing to do that for someone just to sort of highlight the fact that this deserves this time, this space, these people. I love how you described holding space for someone
David Greer (14:47):
And I’ve had moments when I’ve cried and to be witnessed, but also no one trying to change what I’m going through to just honor exactly where I’m at this minute. So nine years into recovery finally. So one of my other isms is codependency. Her fear of upsetting my mother. I never, which I eventually figured out, I didn’t want to look into my birth families. But after nine years of sobriety and turning 60, I decided to go looking for my birth families and I asked for my adoption file. I found all my birth families and the first person I reached out to was my birth mother. And she immediately, who I’ve since learned is an alcoholic. So her first response was denial. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Her second response was blame those damn people at Alberta adoption registry services never should have shared anything about that thing that she just denied knowing anything about.
Nate Kelly (15:57):
Right.
David Greer (15:59):
And then “:I want nothing to do with you.” And just that outright rejection, which I’ve learned, she doesn’t even know who I am, so she can’t be rejecting me. She’s rejecting the experience of having me
Nate Kelly (16:13):
And
David Greer (16:13):
What happened in her life and I found my birth father. I know where my size comes from, I know where my voice comes from. I have three half brothers who are all bigger than me and I’m like 6’ 2”, 240 pounds.
Nate Kelly (16:30):
So these are some big Dudes.
David Greer (16:33):
I’ve practiced my program recovery. I’ve done the steps multiple times. Four years ago found adult children of alcoholics and or dysfunctional families. That has been a really powerful growth tool for me. I just finished a workbook in it called The Loving Parent Guidebook. Has just been phenomenal work, hard work, really hard work, but really phenomenal for being at peace with myself. I continued to go to three meetings a week and then a couple years ago I made the decision that I’m an entrepreneur. I have been since I was 22 years old. I’m an alcoholic in recovery. And there’s certain things about being a business owner and being an alcoholic. Like sales often involves drinking, networking involves drinking, and I understand that journey and I understand a lot of things to do about it. And so I went out publicly and now I specialize in helping entrepreneurs that are challenged by alcoholism or addiction to share my experience, strength and hope in kind of those dual capacities as an entrepreneur, a coach and a person in recovery.
Nate Kelly (17:47):
Have you gotten to the level with your half siblings about perhaps their childhood or their relationship with your birth mother and whether or not her alcoholism played into their upbringing?
David Greer (18:03):
I would say not the alcohol piece. I have talked to them. It’s a good reminder. They live a province overnight, get a lot of face-to-face time and we don’t talk a lot on the phone. These are conversations you need to hang out with your siblings like face-to-face for a while until you, so I’ve had some really good ones that relationship to alcohol, not totally would like to do it more. There was other, my birth mother separated from her husband, which was not my birth father, my birth father, my birth mother went in completely different directions and both married other people.
Nate Kelly (18:44):
Got it.
David Greer (18:45):
But my sister was only in grade 10 when they separated and it was really ugly. And it turns out I have a brother. So I have these two maternal half sisters. I have a maternal brother, but in 2015 he died of liver failures, a direct result of his alcoholism. So I never got to meet him.
Nate Kelly (19:07):
David, I’m curious how far into your own recovery did you start to sort of piece together that you would be able to marry these two aspects of your life? Being an entrepreneur and perhaps putting this plan together of coaching or being able to help other entrepreneurs that were perhaps challenged with alcohol use disorder or alcoholism, however we want to sort of highlight that.
David Greer (19:42):
So my coach started bugging me about it probably a [few years ago]. Nan O’Connor, a master coach from Atlanta who I’ve now been working with, I think seven years. Nan is amazing. She’s a sexual abuse survivor. We have very deep conversations about personal recovery. It’s a different path, but we’ve had to both do a lot of inner child work and a lot of personal growth. So anyways, she is like, anytime you talk about your recovery, your energy is so pure and just so wonderful. And so she kept kind of nudging me, but it took a couple years of nudges until I finally, so it was almost a dozen years into I really wanted to protect that anonymity piece. And then I made the decision and very typical of my entire life, I’m an all-in or all out guy. It might surprise you, there’s not a lot of gray in my life.
Well, I’m much better in recovery. There’s many more shades of gray. So once I made the decision, I recorded a video about it and I published a bunch more videos and I started writing about it. And I’ve gone on a lot of podcasts and I’ve just become very public about business and entrepreneurship and recovery and the challenges of trying to run a business and how we use alcoholism, drug addiction, workaholism as coping mechanisms for something that’s very high stress. And is it more prevalent in entrepreneurs than the general population? I’ve done a lot of research around that no one knows, but even if it’s the usual, we generally say 10% of the population is alcoholic. That’s a hell of a lot of entrepreneurs.
Nate Kelly (21:43):
So I got to say the title of your book makes so much more sense to me now. Getting to know your story a bit more, interviewing you on your boat this morning, wind in your sails, you highlight the fact that if you spend one hour with this book, you’ll be able to take away three action items to sort of accelerate your business, accelerate motivation, being an entrepreneur. Let’s talk about the book a little bit
David Greer (22:10):
With the help of coach Kevin. I got into as kind of series of senior executive gigs, always working with entrepreneurial friends of mine. So usually it was senior marketing and sales roles. And then behind the scenes I was often working on strategy with the entrepreneurs. So I came out of that last gig in 2014 and I told Kevin, I’ve worked harder in the three years I’ve been with Webtech Wireless. That was the company I was with then I have in my whole career and I don’t need to prove to anyone I can work hard. So that was one aspect. And then the other aspect was, Kevin, I want to give to other entrepreneurs the gift that you’ve given to me. I didn’t at that point realize it was the sobriety gift. I was thinking more my business scar tissue. And so I decided to launch my coaching career. And the goal, it’s designed to be the kind of book, when you’re really stuck, you pull it off the shelf, you look in the index and you look it up and you read two pages and go, oh yeah, okay, I know what the next thing is. I can try.
Nate Kelly (23:16):
I love that style. It’s more sort of like a reference book or to your point, if you’re stuck or you need a little motivation or a couple takeaways, pull it off the shelf. I love that.
David Greer (23:29):
And others have told me they’ve got a lot of value from reading a cover to cover. So it’s designed to work wherever you want it to work for you.
Nate Kelly (23:37):
I’m super curious. I can’t quit thinking about what your kids took away or how they now describe their sailing for two years during sort of formative years of their life.
David Greer (23:53):
So a couple of years ago we asked each of them individually, what’s the most memorable experience of our two years of living together on our sailboat.
All three of them had the same story In our second summer we were in Croatia and our middle child, Kevin was being an incredible brat. You’d ask him to do something helping on the boat. He wouldn’t do it. And like Karalee and I tried so many different things. We put boundaries, we put consequences, and he still was not doing things. And then finally we were at anchor and we were getting ready to leave for a 24 hour passage from Croatia to Venice. And Kevin is still fucking around, pardon me, but is not doing things.
Nate Kelly (24:39):
And
David Greer (24:40):
Finally we chased him around the boat until he is standing on the swim platform at the back. And while my wife is pulling on his hips backwards, I’m prying his fingers off of the push pit until he goes in the water and then we start lifting the anchor and going away from him. No, obviously we weren’t going to leave him there, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.
Nate Kelly (25:02):
Right.
David Greer (25:04):
And after that he was much better behaved
Nate Kelly (25:08):
And
David Greer (25:09):
His two siblings were. So they still talk about that incident because they had been so frustrated at our inability to get him to do equal to what we were asking them to do. It’s so life impacting. You can’t even now we talk about world events after living in Tunisia for five months, it always has a different perspective. We went 18 months without being in an English speaking country. We get to Malta and we can actually read the ads on the bus shelters. I’m serious. That was a big deal. We pointed it out to each other.
Nate Kelly (25:44):
I bet.
David Greer (25:46):
Right? These things you don’t think about. So
Nate Kelly (25:50):
This sort of culture shock of it.
David Greer (25:52):
Yeah. I mean what we saw in their late teenage hood, early twenties was there were much more assured about themselves and who they were and what they wanted to do in life and where they wanted to go because they each had long periods where all they had was each other and they get tired of that or us.
They had to spend quiet time with themselves and either just read or our daughter, we’d put in a chair and put up to the top of the mask when we were in passage sometimes and and I learned recently that she would actually see turtles and she would see other sea life and she wouldn’t tell us. She just enjoyed it from her perch on top of the mask,
Nate Kelly (26:34):
Good for her own growth
David Greer (26:35):
Thing and had that experience for herself. Yeah.
Nate Kelly (26:39):
David, I always like to provide our listeners a few takeaways or tangible things. And let’s say that we have some listeners who are still struggling or hesitant to take that next step or start their road to recovery. What are a few things that you can offer to take that step or to do today to start them in that direction?
David Greer (27:06):
I guess the two messages I really like to leave with anyone who’s still suffering is one, there is hope. There is hope for you no matter where you are, no matter how deep your struggle, there’s hope. And the other thing I’ve learned about recovery is, and something I believe really deeply is it’s impossible to recover on your own. Find your community.
I read some background, I believe you’re a fellow 12 step program member, so try that. But if it doesn’t work for you, find another community. And even if you start online, but I really believe you need that face-to-face time and that face-to-face accountability and sharing to recover. So there’s hope. Find someone else who’s on the road to recovery and hopefully a group of people on the road to recovery and get into the middle of that.
Nate Kelly (28:20):
Those are great. We can’t do it alone, right?
David Greer (28:24):
I certainly can’t.
Nate Kelly (28:25):
Nope.
David Greer (28:26):
Didn’t I know that I tried for a long time. I was an isolationist, a drinker hiding away and hiding my booze.
Nate Kelly (28:38):
David, will you retell the story, David, before we hit record on today’s episode, we were talking about your entrepreneurship and you’ve been working at home since 1982. And tell us about the bottom drawer of your desk.
David Greer (28:57):
So a couple things. One is the person I’m married to. Working more is always okay.
That made it really easy to be in my home office and drink. And in fact, usually especially towards the end of my drinking by four, like I pop my first can of beer and I have that six pack by six o’clock so that I get that nice buzz. So yeah, I have a big file drawer at the bottom of my desk. I actually still have that desk. It’s now actually filled with file folders. But it was a great place to put the empties and not have them be visible. And then eventually I’d have to find a way to sneak them out.
Nate Kelly (29:38):
Right?
The hardest part, right,
David Greer (29:40):
The hardest part. Like damn empty wine bottles really make a lot of noise when they’re clinking together and all those empty beer cans,
Nate Kelly (29:49):
They sure do.
Nate Kelly (29:51):
Blowing their cover, right?
David Greer (29:52):
Yep. So getting rid of the empties was harder than actually getting the full ones in the house. And even getting the full ones in the house meant a lot of sneaking around. And I do crazy things like here in Vancouver, you can’t get liquor everywhere. You have to go to a public or private store, which there’s only a certain number. And so Mondays I would go to the local liquor store, but Wednesdays I would go to one farther away and Fridays would be a different one again because after all, if the same person saw me at the same store three days out of five, they might think I was an alcoholic. I was in denial for more than 20 years. Like deep denial. I needed to keep up the facade of that denial. However I did it, it doesn’t make any logical sense because it isn’t meant to.
Nate Kelly (30:41):
Right. David, thanks so much for your time today. We will link everything in today’s show notes, how people can find you on the web services that you can offer a link to the book. Thanks so much for your time today. It was so good to get to know more about you. I so enjoyed our time together today.
David Greer (30:59):
Thank you Nate. And thank you for the privilege of being on your podcast and allowing me to share my experience, strength, and hope. So thank you very much for that.
Nate Kelly (31:10):
My pleasure. We’ll talk soon, my friend.
David Greer (31:12):
Take care.
Nate Kelly (31:14):
Thanks so much for listening today, friend. Hopefully you heard something that resonates with you and if we help just one person, our job is done, make sure you check today’s show notes for all the information discussed in today’s episode and how to connect with our guests. Until next Wednesday, try your best not to drink and be good to yourself. Bye everyone.
