A gift to the recovery community are the more than 250 episodes of Hard Knox Talks that Daniel Hearn has created. It is a testament to what can be achieved in sobriety and in life, by focusing on one area and sticking to it. I was fortunate to be interviewed by Daniel and his wife Donna, as we discussed my journey into alcoholism, business, recovery, and personal growth.
This includes the challenges faced by entrepreneurs in maintaining sobriety, such as social events and high-stress situations. I emphasized the importance of setting goals for personal well-being and finding coping mechanisms that do not involve alcohol. We also touched on my experience of reconnecting with my birth family and the personal growth that came from that journey.
Transcript
Daniel (00:01):
We don’t all end up homeless and in prison due to our addiction. In this episode, Donna and I talked to longtime entrepreneur, business coach, and alcoholic and recovery, David Greer. We talked about building relationships, personal growth, and learning to think differently. But before we get into that, what’s up? My name’s Dan. Podcaster, keynote speaker and advocate. And this is Hard Knox Talks your addictions podcast. If you’re interested in fostering productive conversations about substance use in your community organization or event, reach out to me at daniel@hardknoxtalks.com to learn more about our public speaking and live podcast production opportunities. Now let’s get into our talk with Coach David Greer.
Donna (00:44):
This is Hard Knox Talks.
Daniel (00:47):
So David, something that really interested me when someone on your team reached out to me and you are a business coach in recovery and you have a story to share, and I can’t wait to hear it, but it sounds to me like you work with a lot of people in recovery who are also entrepreneurs or who would like to be entrepreneurs. Is that accurate?
David (01:11):
Yeah, so as a business coach, I specialize in helping entrepreneurs that are challenged by alcoholism or addiction. And I’ve not found another business coach that focuses in that way. And in addition to being a business coach, I’m a 40 plus year entrepreneur. I know what it’s like to drink as an entrepreneur and I know what it’s like to recover as an entrepreneur.
Daniel (01:44):
Oh, I was going to say something. I’ve heard it said before, and I would believe it because I have the alcoholic or the addicted mind that once we find meaning in our life and we find a productive way to point that desire to feel better, we become unstoppable. Like some of the biggest entrepreneurs in the world have had struggles with alcohol, interestingly.
David (02:08):
Well, and part of my story, I built a very successful software business. Well, my disease progressed and while I was a very active alcoholic and fuel, fuel the business with alcohol.
Daniel (02:22):
Well, why don’t you tell us about it then? Where did this all get started for you?
David (02:26):
My story is very much the progressive nature of the disease and while I had aspects of myself that didn’t fit in, I was also a super high performing individual. One of the top academics. I was sports student of the year, my graduating class. So had a lot of things going for me and a lot of my story is the story of being a high performing alcoholic. My father wanted me to take over the family business and in grade nine I visited Edmonton is the provincial capital. And I remember going on a field trip where we visited some IT services for the government of Alberta. When I was 18, I did one term of computer science at the University of Alberta, and then I was tired of school, I was in love, I quit university. I followed my high school girlfriend who had moved out to Vancouver. And January of 1976, I left home and moved out to Vancouver and nine months later she broke up with me. So first heartbreak of my life. And how old were you?
David (03:34):
I was 18.
Eventually I went back to university and I got a job with two brilliant entrepreneurs. They were way, way ahead of their time. I had no idea, but it’s kind of a story of my life. I’m always kind of with people that are on the bleeding or leading edge of things and I don’t even, it just becomes my norm. I get my computer science degree. I got a part-time job with the cable company, which at the time was the largest cable company in North America and there was an IT system that wasn’t working. It was getting rewritten. And this consultant was leading the rewrite and he had just launched a product for this computing platform made by Hewlett Packard, which became a very successful computer company. But I got to know him and eventually they agreed to hire me before I graduated from UBC as the first employee of their company.
Daniel (04:30):
When did things start to go sideways for you?
David (04:35):
I wasn’t an alcoholic yet, I don’t think. But I went to that conference. I remember one night there was a really big dinner and there was a fellow there from Hungary and I tried to out drink him with wine and got just pissed that I walked back to my hotel and this car races up to the curb and two girls lean out and they’re asking if I want their services and I don’t notice that they completely pickpocket me. I get back to the hotel and everything’s got stolen and I got to talk to the police. I got a call American Express to get my traveler’s checks canceled.
Daniel (05:19):
You went with them, what I’m saying?
David (05:21):
No, I did not go with them.
Daniel (05:23):
Oh, they pick your pockets then, Dave. I They pick your pockets. Nope.
David (05:27):
No, but I walked up close enough to the car and they were reaching out, shall we say. There’s an early example. So when did I become a pickle is a few years later, my wife Karalee got pregnant with our daughter, Jocelyn born, committed to firstborn and Karalee committed to stop drinking during the pregnancy. And I committed to support her by not drinking. And that lasted a day, I don’t know to this day how I squared it with Karalee, how I made it whole, but I just went back to drinking. By then, I was probably daily drinking, not in the quantities that I was drinking at the end. Now I’m sure it was a pickle before then. I just can’t tell you exactly.
Daniel (06:21):
There was no pinnacle moment where you turned into a pickle.
David (06:26):
That’s why for me, it’s very much the progressive nature of the disease and just the cumulation of drinking and drinking and drinking.
Donna (06:34):
Well, it sounds like you have a lot of social engagements and different things where that sort of a thing is accepted and it can go undetected as
Daniel (06:43):
Well. Well, and just thinking now you’ve sort of piqued my own interest and I looked introspectively here and I don’t remember the exact moment where things, I mean they definitely got super bad, but it was like putting the toad in the water and then turning the heat up slowly. When is one point where you’re actually in trouble? I don’t know. But it definitely got hot.
David (07:07):
And for me, there was even really to the end, there was no consequence to my external consequence. There was internal consequences. There’s no external consequence to my drinking. And then 10 years into building this business, Annabelle decided to retire and she offered for me to buy out her shares and I had to take all the money that I had made and put aside in the previous five years as a down payment. And then I borrowed the money from her and I had three years to pay it back in quarterly payments. And if I missed a single payment, she could claim the shares back. It was kind of a high, it’s very entrepreneurial deal. But I remember leaving, I’m early mid thirties. I’ve got a four-year old and a two-year old. And I left an accountant’s meeting downtown where we’re working on how the structure would be. And I had tears coming down my face. It was that stressful. I’m sure I went home and drank. I don’t remember going home and drank, but I guarantee you I did.
Daniel (08:14):
Maybe that’s why you don’t remember. You went home and drank.
David (08:17):
Yeah, probably. And I ended up buying her out and it was a success. But now I’ve arrived because now I can do more of what I want. My ego, my head gets bigger. I’m a big shot. I already was a big shot, but now I’m a big, big shot and I still use alcohol to fuel the highs being higher and the lows being a little not so low. And we roll forward 10 years. And the original founder and I had a major disagreement about the future of the company. We could see that the computing platform we specialized in HP was going to end it at some point. We didn’t know exactly when. And a lot of businesses around strategy, his strategy was let’s milk the market until it’s all gone. And we turn out the lights and close the doors and I’m like, we built this incredibly specialized team. They do a lot of things that no other software vendor can do. Let’s take a little more money, a little more risk and move it in new directions. I actually believe both strategies were viable, but they were not complimentary at all. And I like to say that Bob and I only had one major disagreement in 20 years, but it was a doozy and it ended in divorce and he ended up buying me out.
(09:44):
There I am in early 2001 tech entrepreneur. I haven’t noticed, there’s this thing called the dot com meltdown. I’m busy chasing deals when someone’s smarter than me. I met through networking and trying to find my next opportunity, and she sat me down in her office after we’d had lunch together and she said, David, your kids will never be 11, nine, and five again. Do you need to work right away? And I’m like, no, I just got a really big check on my jeans. I’m not done for life, but I don’t have to work right away. And when she told me that when she’d had a career break, she’d flown to Australia and bought a VW van and toured around for a year. And so my wife and I …
Daniel (10:28):
Look at, I saw Donna’s face light up, and I’m like, that sounds, because we were just talking just before we should get a camper maybe. And she’s like, oh, what if it breaks down? And I’m like, ah, you’re probably right.
David (10:40):
So we had to plan. We commissioned a sailboat in the south of France and we home schooled our three kids for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles, about 10,000 kilometers, in the Mediterranean.
Donna (10:54):
Holy moly. That’s awesome.
Daniel (10:59):
And challenging. That’s that’s
David (11:02):
Not the faint of heart.
Daniel (11:03):
And I’m not a sailor. I really know nothing of it, but I would, the
Donna (11:06):
Homeschooling part is,
Daniel (11:08):
Yeah, got Didn’t you ever want to tap into the ocean and swim away? I’m swimming for it. Yep.
David (11:14):
Yep. In fact, we talked about doing a third year, but we could not face another year of homeschooling. Truth be told,
Daniel (11:23):
Sharks be damned.
David (11:28):
I will say the Mediterranean was a fantastic place to drink. Beer costs less than half what it costs in Canada. Wine costs about a third. It’s much better. Every single port you pull into has a restaurant, which is really a restaurant in a bar right next to where you’re moored. It’s great. But a couple things happened there that I didn’t know it at the time, but when I finally got sober, I think they were little taps from the universe. So one was, we did a lot of overnight passages like where you go for 24 hours, 48 hours or 72 hours nonstop on passage, including through the night. And on our second overnight passage, we were in the Western Mediterranean Sea, like south of France, but out in the middle of the Med. And my son, who was 10 at the time, came on watch with me.
(12:24):
He did watches with me. Our daughter did watch us with my wife. And I said, you take the port side of the left side of the boat and look out for boats and I’ll take the starboard side. And that night we just kept getting spooked because all above us was the Milky way as far as we could see. And we kept mistaking stars on the horizon for lights of other boats. And I think it was really a time that the universe was trying to touch me and certainly as I’ve come to get to know a power greater than myself that night. And that experience has formed as being an important part of it. The other thing is after being daily drinker now for So Jocelyn’s what? 12. So for at least 12 years of being a daily drinker, probably more. Every time we were on passage, I put down the drink and I didn’t even think about putting down the drink. I just did not drink because the lives of my family were at stake.
Daniel (13:26):
Let’s take a quick break here. I’m going to shout out some sponsors and then we’ll continue on. If you are struggling with the substance use of a loved one or have tragically lost a loved one to drug related harms, reach out to stronger Together Canada peer led support groups by Moms Stop The Harm. If you are in search of private inpatient addictions treatment checkout Prairie Sky Recovery Center, located in Wilkie, Saskatchewan. If you are looking for help with criminal record suspensions, the Elizabeth Fry Society of Saskatchewan covers all associated costs for women or gender diverse individuals. To apply for criminal record suspensions, reach out to Chelsea at 3 0 6 6 6 8 0 6 3 5. If you are a professional wishing to deepen your understanding of substance use disorder, check out the AIMS SK program through the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan, designed to help you improve health outcomes for individuals with substance use disorder. To make contact or learn more about all of today’s sponsors to check out our new merch or if you want to show us some love and buy us a coffee. All of those links are in the show notes below. So David, was it on this boat that you made the decision to put the bottle down?
David (14:38):
Nope. And I’m going to just kind of fast forward the story and go through the next few years. So we came back, now I’m unemployed and I spent three years as an angel investor looking at startups, technology startups. I’d look at about a hundred a year, invest in one work on the board of directors, work for options. I did that for three years and I didn’t realize how awfully unfulfilling that was for me, most of those entrepreneurs were, it’s because when I was 22, 24, 25 years old, I just grew this business by the seat of my pants. And I’m trying to work with entrepreneurs that have 25 rungs down the ladder and it takes me a year to get ’em off one rung. I’m just not working with people that are at my level. And then I took one of my young CEOs to a training event with a guy by the name of Vern Harnish who has a template that a lot of my entrepreneurial technology friends in Vancouver really, really believed in called the one page strategic plan.
(15:50):
And I took her there to go learn about this. It turns out I learned a whole bunch about it and it really changed how I think about strategic planning and planning for business. But more importantly, at the back of the room were two coaches and two business coaches, and I talked to both of them and one of them coach Kevin Lawrence made me more uncomfortable than I had been in a few years. In fact, I had tears in the corner of my eyes and I was telling him what I was doing and how I couldn’t find anyone more at my level to help. And Kevin just said he looked around and he said, look, David, there’s probably a hundred people in this room and probably every one of them needs your help. And I hadn’t found a way to break in or be part of that.
(16:37):
And I took Kevin’s card and Kevin’s card sat next to my phone at my home office for about three weeks, and about once a week I’d think about calling him and the phone would weigh about 10,000 pounds. Thankfully, after about three weeks, Kevin called me and he said, “Hey, this is coach Kevin. We met at the Verne Harnish event. Do you remember me?” Which I replied, yes. Well, my brain is going, yeah, Kevin, I haven’t really thought about much else for three weeks. And I ended up hiring him. And we had our first coaching day together on my 50th birthday, August 9th, 2007. And at that time when Kevin, Kevin is like me, he’s all in or all out? No, in-between. When you started working with Kevin at that time as a one-on-one coach, you did two eight hour days back to back. That was our opening coaching session, 16 hours together.
(17:38):
So pretty intense. And I worked with Kevin for nine years. But after we started working together, we worked together for 18 months and we cleared out all the clutter on the table, all the things that were kind of impeding me till the elephant in the room was the only thing that was left. And I believe that the universe put Kevin in my path I could get sober. And on January 26th, 2009, I drank my last beer. I’m an OCD organized person, I figured out how many beers I was going to buy. I was making sure there was no extras in the house, had my last beer probably at 10 30 at night. And I sent an email to Kevin because we had a coaching call the next day. And the way we structured it as I, we sent the topic the day, the night before, and I said, the topic for our coaching call is my drinking.
Daniel (18:31):
So hang on now. What influence did he have? Did he notice that you were drinking and sort of was poking away or digging away at it a little bit? Or is this something that you believe that just through his coaching you came to this realization on your own?
David (18:45):
Literally, I think I just conceded defeat. And again, Kevin was as surprised as everyone else was. I had super high performing alcoholic, so no one knew that I was an alcoholic. Everyone was, didn’t even know, was shocked, had no idea, had no idea whatsoever. All our calls and most of the time we’re on the phone and it’s almost always during the day and I don’t start drinking until late in the afternoon,
(19:15):
I’m not inebriated at any time on our calls. And so Kevin, that was Tuesday, January 27th, 2009, and Kevin got me, so he coached me to go to the best known 12 step program, which I had a tremendous aversion to. And I don’t even know today why I had an aversion to it. I think it’s probably just the stigmatism of alcoholism. Anyways, he coached me through that and I agreed with Kevin that I would go to a meeting by that Friday and that meeting at that time was in a Legion. And I walk in and I go through the outer door and the inner door to the bar is open and there’s three tables that have beers on them.
Daniel (20:03):
This is amazing.
David (20:06):
I’m standing there like a deer in the headlights and a couple 12 step people come by me and they have that six sense that we have. And they look at me and they go, oh, are you looking for a meeting? You should go down the hall and up the stairs. And I turned right, and I went down the hall and I went up the stairs, which I later learned those actually were exactly 12 steps. Coincidentally, I went in, I didn’t sit in the back row, but there was a central corridor. And at that point in that meeting, they asked for newcomers about three quarters of the way through the meeting. And then he said, “is there anyone new to the program which we would like to stand and introduce themselves by their first name only?” And I sat on my hands and I sat on my hands. And fortunately the chairperson waited quite a while, probably 20, 30 seconds, like an eternity. It did. That absolutely felt like an eternity. But I did jump up at the end and say, I’m David, I’m an alcoholic.
Daniel (21:07):
How’d that feel?
David (21:07):
That scary, uncertain. I didn’t know what it meant. I celebrated 15 years a week ago yesterday from this when we’re recording this, thank you. Amazing. And that particular meeting, a couple of weeks later, I made my home group. I’ve been involved with it for a very long time. And the chairperson’s notes even today say, ask if there’s anyone new pause for 20 or 30 seconds because they’re scared.
Daniel (21:42):
Nice, because we like to watch the newcomers twist out. They haven’t twisted it enough yet in their life.
David (21:50):
So anyways, that was the start of my journey in the program. And I got a temporary sponsor that night who is actually still a member of that home group. I still see ’em on a regular basis. That group is what I credit with the universe eventually got me to understand a god of my understandings of power greater than myself. But it was listening to those men over and over share their kind of vision or how they came to an understanding and me listening to their lived experience that let me figure it out for myself. Also, let’s go ahead, Daniel,
Daniel (22:29):
Did you have an aversion? Yeah. Sometimes I give out social cues and I don’t even realize it did. Did you have an affinity or a resistance to spirituality before this came along?
David (22:44):
Spirituality absolutely not. But the God word was the sticking point, man, eventually. So here’s why it was a sticking point for me was I kept associating it with the Western version of Christian God. So going to the Sistine Chapel and sitting there and looking up, and God, Michelangelo painted God with gray hair and kind of pointing the finger of Jesus. And then at the end wall is the day of judgment. And it’s like God sitting there judging whether people go to heaven or hell. And my GOD, which is just for me, a three letter word that means a power greater than myself, but my higher power doesn’t judge me. It only wants the best for me, it cares for me, it loves me unconditionally. And these things were not my understanding of a Christian western God. There’s where the disconnect happened, but over time, as I say, I just eventually got to a point where now GOD equals a power greater than myself.
(23:53):
That’s really what it means to me. I can say the word very comfortably. I look at the gifts I’ve got from coach Kevin and I decide I want to give those gifts to other entrepreneurs. I make the choice to become a coach. I take my coach training, I write a business book called Wind in Your Sails, Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth and launch all of that in 2015 and start becoming a business coach. And I also am a facilitator around strategic planning and this guy Verne Harnish, remember he was back in the story where I met Coach Kevin. I specialize in his framework, it’s called scaling up in his one page plan. And that’s the framework that I have the most experience and knowledge in. I facilitate strategic planning using that with executive, with entrepreneurs and their senior executive team.
(24:42):
That’s over half of my work is doing that kind of strategic planning. And then Kevin decided to stop one-on-one coaching. He referred me to his coach Nan O’Connor out of Atlanta. And Nan has been my coach since we celebrated seven years together last month. And Nan was a very different, Kevin is kind of the hard driven entrepreneur and kind of was really what I needed at that time. And then Nan is still a superb coach and keeps me accountable, but is she’s a sexual abuse survivor. She’s written a book about it. We have really deep coaching calls around much deeper issues, relationships around personal growth that then shows up in my coaching work. It’s really funny how this all happens. It’s like when I do a really big period of personal growth work in one of my 12 step programs also an ACA, it starts showing up. And I, for 30 years, we never did any real work on our relationship. And then the last decade, like we did eight years of relationship counseling. So now when I’m working with partners and they’re at loggerheads with each other, I have all these tools that I’ve learned in relationship counseling because it turns out they’re just, they apply to any two people.
Donna (26:10):
Imagine that way.
David (26:12):
Imagine.
(26:15):
But what Nan kind of was on me for a couple of years and just saying, every time you talk about recovery, your energy is so pure. And every time I ask you anything, you always the answer. It’s just there whether it’s life or business. And so with her encouragement about three years ago, I decided to out myself and make the decision to become very public about my recovery and to publicly tell people that I was focusing on helping entrepreneurs with alcohol or addiction problems. It turns out that naturally I had attracted a couple of those. Anyways.
Daniel (26:57):
Interesting.
David (27:00):
Maybe not too surprisingly. And then I’ve come on a lot of podcasts like this to talk about recovery first, but to also talk about entrepreneurs. Only about 10% of the population ever become entrepreneurs. You got to be semi crazy to become an entrepreneur.
Daniel (27:18):
You have to be all the way crazy to become an entrepreneur, sugarcoat it. And I know that from personal experience and Donna knows that from watching my personal experience. I mean, Donna has seen sides of me that the world hasn’t seen. And sometimes when the world’s not looking, I freaking melt down. This is hard, man. It ain’t easy. It’s not for the faint of heart. And I’m not trying to brag myself up because I’ve barely scraped by the skin of my teeth more than once.
David (27:50):
And I really want to acknowledge, we talked before tonight, before tonight’s episode. In three years, you’ve done over 250 episodes. To me, that is an amazing achievement.
Daniel:
Well, thank you.
David:
No, really. I mean, that is truly amazing and shows your dedication and your hard work. And I can tell you couldn’t have done that if you were not super committed to this.
Donna:
He’s super putting in the time and the effort. I was jealous for a little while.
Daniel (28:18):
He was jealous until I saw how crazy it makes him. And now I’m not jealous anymore.
David (28:24):
And whether it’s workaholism, alcoholism, addiction, it’s very easy as an entrepreneur to need or want to have coping mechanisms because of the difficulty of what you take on. And then there’s also just, I work with some very successful entrepreneurs. When you’re really successful, then you often get involved in more charity giving, which means you go to more galas, which means you go to more networking events. And guess what, when you’re an entrepreneur in a community like Vancouver, I don’t know what, and I think in many other communities, a lot of people want access to you like service providers. And so free networking events with a lot of free booze are very common. If you’re an entrepreneur and you are interested, you do want to network because you want to either help people or you want to help build your business. So how do you cope in those networking events when people keep offering you booze?
(29:29):
I mean, in recovery, I just coach them through some of the things that are fairly common in recovery. But I just really have to remind them, do you have an exit plan? Do you always have something your hand, do you have a drink in your hand? Always like a glass of water for me it’s a cranberry and soda or diet Coke or whatever you want, but just never be without something in your hand so that when people offer you a drink, you can say, oh, I’ll have another glass of water. Or you can say, I’m fine.
(30:00):
It’s really how do you cope? And I deal with entrepreneurs who deal in high-end sales. And the typical mode is when you’re getting close to the closing the sale, the CEO has to fly down to the prospect, has to meet the boss’s boss, often the boss’s boss’s boss, the chief financial officer of the business, you’ll go out for dinner. One of my clients a couple years ago said I was down in, I forget where it was, and sales team. And we met with their team and we went out for dinner and everybody had a couple drinks before dinner and then we drank a bottle of wine each. And he said, is that normal? And I said, well, in closing sales situations, yeah, that’s very normal. And then you probably have drinks afterwards, but it’s very alcoholic drinking. I can’t speak whether they’re alcoholics, but to have that’s seven drinks in a row without a break because a bottle of wine is five drinks. And again, it’s like I would coach him, he wasn’t an alcoholic, but I coached him. How do I cope in those situations and just kind of help him have some coping ways to deal with those kind of situations. He just didn’t want to drink that much and felt obliged to.
Daniel (31:19):
That sounds like a whole nother world I deal with. I close sponsorship deals and things like that, but I mean, I don’t jump on a plane and fly down and talk to some chief financial officer. And that’s a whole new level of stress, man. And for me as entrepreneur, and I know that you can relate when you close that deal or when you make that sale or whatever, that’s the fix that puts you the year you’re flying when that happens. I mean, I could see that being a pretty dangerous place to be in such a high stakes thing where you’re flying down and the boss’s boss’s boss’s chief financial officer and everyone’s wearing suits and fancy hotels and Bentleys. That’s a high game.
David (32:06):
Absolutely. And is your sponsor’s phone number And if you’re in our program of recovery, is your sponsor’s name at the top of the favorites list on speed dial ready to go? So you can step out of the dinner and just have a call. And if you’ve got five other people in recovery, who are the next five people in your speed dial? If the sponsor’s not available, you just call through the list until you talk to someone who’s a recovering alcoholic and just talk to them for five minutes. Because oftentimes that’s all we need, even if we’re not really close to picking up a drink. But we’re just the smell like everything is off putting, but you’re still expected to be there, right? It’s like, okay, talk to a person in recovery and make sure that you, and maybe you have an exit plan, you need to catch the flight early in the morning. So you warn the sales team and you make sure that the business part of the discussion happens with appetizers and then you leave at dessert, but you set it up ahead of time so that the other side isn’t thinking you’re bailing.
(33:25):
You just set it up that I’m going to need to leave early, but I want to be here and I want to make sure we cover off on this and this or whatever we want to talk about. And I often coach around this when even with new clients or existing clients, is if you’re going to set goals, set goals actually for three areas of your life, so for your business career, how much money you want to make for your life, but then set some very specific goals for yourself. What regenerates your energy, what creates resiliency for you? And oftentimes sometimes it’s going out and doing things with special friends of yours.
(34:14):
For me, it’s like getting out of Gray Vancouver and coming to Puerto Vallarta. Well, I came to the Sobriety Under the Sun conference, which was a great, great hit of AA and Al-Anon. And then I’m living and working here and getting a lot of sunshine every day. I do get, I don’t think I formally have sad seasonal affected disorder, but I do feel it drag on me. And it probably won’t surprise you. Sometimes I just go off for a week on my sailboat with no one else. I mean, I love having other people in the sailboat, but sometimes doing a four hour passage just by myself is a meditative. And for sailing, you have to be a hundred percent present. You can’t be mind wandering because especially in Georgia Straight and BC, there’s a hell of a lot of logs. So you got to always have a lookout for other boats for logs. You got to see how the wind’s changing, whether you have to change your sails. And also sailing for me, and especially very challenging sailing is my connection to the universe because you only control a few tiny things on your boat. And the universe controls how strong is the wind, the universe, how big are the waves, the universe, you can choose your direction and how much sales you got up, but it’s all really reactive to what’s happening around you. And it really puts me in touch with my higher power and reminds me that my higher power is in charge. It’s saying what’s going on.
Daniel (35:49):
I love that. That’s
Donna (35:50):
Super
Daniel (35:50):
Awesome. Love it. I had, so
David (35:53):
In goal setting and everything, always my goals for the year. It’s like I always make sure stuff is carved out. That’s just for me. And as a codependent, doing this at first was very, very hard. Why is that? And my spouse didn’t always, well, because my spouse didn’t agree with my going away by myself without her. We were codependent.
Daniel (36:16):
Okay, so she was mad that you were having experiences without her?
David (36:21):
Yeah.
Daniel (36:21):
Or mean, we don’t want to start taking her inventory here, but I mean, is that the feeling that you were left with? That would
David (36:28):
Be
Daniel (36:28):
Now,
David (36:31):
No, she’s not. She’s upstairs at the pool so that she doesn’t make any noise or isn’t in the background for this interview. So part of my personal growth in getting past my codependency was I remember the first time seven or eight years ago, I went up to Whistler for four or five days by myself. And like I said, are we doing anything this week? Is anything on, is there anything I should know about? No. Well, I’m letting you know I’m going to head up to Whistler for five days.
Donna (37:02):
So can I ask, does she do the same?
Daniel (37:06):
Is she like, fine, she I’m going to go too somewhere else.
David (37:10):
She has come to really appreciate the time on her own to do and she can mess up the house, or we just have different ways that we like things to be, and after 41 years we know how to get along and make it work. But sometimes it
Daniel (37:28):
Sounds to me like you know how to not get along too.
David (37:32):
Yes.
Daniel (37:34):
In that eight years of work that you did in your relationship counseling, was there a turning point? I mean, it sounds to me, and you just admitted that you’re both very codependent. Was there a pinnacle moment or something that was said, a realization that made that sort of shifted that in your relationship? Or has it been just a slow going ongoing process?
David (37:55):
So again, a really progressive nature of that work, but I would say on our fourth go round, like fourth therapist, and each therapist was good in their own and I think was appropriate for the time. But the last one is the recovering alcoholic and drug addict who had extremely traumatic childhood, really traumatic, very active in 12 step work and super, super trained relationship counselor. And the other ones were not 12 steppers, they weren’t in recovery. And I think that partly made a difference. So the aha moment was with her when I suddenly realized I didn’t need to defend myself or that if I was defending myself, that’s where the problem was. Didn’t
Daniel (38:47):
Need to defend yourself to your wife.
David (38:50):
Yeah, exactly. I still tend to get in defensive mode. Well, I need to do this because blah, blah, blah, blah. She’ll be mad, or no, she might not be anything, but I’m still defending myself. You think I need to explain everything? Yes, and I need to justify everything. Whereas again, it’s really more, it’s a self-esteem issue as well as a codependent issue. It’s like I’m whole and the whole Sue’s, It’s Sue Diamond Potts is the name of this therapist, and her model is interdependence. So this idea that each of us can stand on our own, we could live perfectly good lives totally on our own, but we choose to lean in and have an interdependent relationship so we can make something that’s even more beautiful than just the parts. But at any time, we can still stand on our own two feet and be adults, make adult decisions and not be dependent on one or the other. And we are not totally dependent on the other person to meet all of our wants. We have other people in our life who can fill in and there might be some things like I can’t go out and have a glass of wine with Karalee. And sometimes she likes to do that and she has other friends she can do it with and I can’t fill that. I mean, we go out to dinner together, but I’m not having wine.
(40:22):
It was really understanding when I’m defending, and this has really helped in my coaching too, if I’m kind of really jumping on my bandwagon and saying, you have to do it this way, which is just kind of another form of defensiveness, then I’m not really coaching because coaching is just, Hey, in my experience, I found this works better, A works better, and you’re suggesting B, but it’s totally up to you whether you want A or B. That’s up to you. Right? All I can do is, one of the things that coach Kevin told me in the first meeting we had in the back of the room at the Vern Harnish training session was, “David, you are going to do whatever you want to do. And I will perhaps sometimes point out major pitfalls and potholes that you’re likely to fall in if you pursue your particular path. But at the end of the day, it’s your path and your choice. And if you go down that path and you fall into some really major holes, I’ll be here to help you pick up the pieces.”
Daniel (41:25):
So your relationship with your wife developed now, in addition to that, I’m sure your relationship with yourself has deepened. Now what I’m thinking is I’m reminded of a guest that I had, he’s a counselor at a treatment center here in Saskatchewan, and he said that he used to go to Al-Anon to better understand the relationship he has with himself as the experiencer and as the observer. Can you give us anything to maybe help us understand what that looked like for you as your relationship grew?
David (42:00):
I’d say some of the most recent growth in that has come from Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families [ACoA]. And I’ve done all three workbooks in a ACA. So they have the yellow workbook, which is their workbook for doing the steps, which are basically exactly the same as [the alcoholic] 12 steps, except the first one has a minor change. But I’ve worked the steps the [alcoholic] way at least six, eight times. And I’ve done it with workbooks that have questions that come out of treatment centers and other things. But in a ACA, they just asked, it’s just a different perspective and ask questions, looking back at your family of origin and where you come from and where they come from and that whole history. And last year I finished the Loving Parent Guidebook, which is the latest publication. It’s only been out for about two years. And that was really a lot of inner child work, and it’s just peeling the layers and just so my taskmaster spirit is actually visualized internally in me by this octopus I have, which used to wrap itself around my heart to protect me from having any negative feelings. But it’s also, …
Daniel (43:14):
Whoa, hang on one minute. Let’s talk about that. That’s amazing what you just said there. I love that. Unpack that for us please.
David (43:25):
I also did five years of therapy work with a brilliant therapist a couple years. Then we took a year or two break and then another three years. And through center meditation work with her and some work with her, I eventually manifested these visions of internal sea creatures. Not surprising, given my love ocean and sea, that makes sense. Yeah. So octopus is one of my really big ones. All my fears are represented by humpback whale, kind of everything having to do with food, which I sometimes baked goods are one of my weaknesses. Anyways, they’re manifested by my dolphin Mike, and my sexuality is manifested by my dolphin Ed. And I have a beautiful 70 pound chinook salmon that isn’t really an inner child, but is more my loving parent. I call it the Wise One. I have this little menagerie of sea creatures who I pray with every day,
Daniel:
Actually that’s incredible.
(44:33):
I pray with them every morning and acknowledge them and they’re just aspects of myself. And that then led to some of the work with a ACA, which has led me to, oh, okay. I’ve been able to quiet a lot of the critical voice in my head and reparent myself. I’m not perfect. I don’t catch it all the time. And when my task master spirit is really showing up and it’s not necessary, again, I can really reparent and work with it and just show up. And I guess I’d like to end with something that’s nothing to do with business, but very much to do with life. I started with, I was conceived in Calgary and born in Edmonton and adopted. And after nine years of recovery and 60 years of life, I decided I would go looking for my birth families. And I didn’t for a long time because of my codependency with my mom, because I was too afraid of how she would feel or think of my going and doing that.
(45:35):
And she’d given off subtle indications that she didn’t want me to. And eventually, again, she’s an adult. She is welcome to her feelings. And if her feelings are hurt by my going and pursuing this journey that’s right for me, they’re her feelings. It’s still the right journey for me and I don’t need to defend it. It’s back to defense. I don’t need to defend. It’s just the right thing for me. And I found my, I’ve since found both my birth families and I have a constellation of various people, but the first person I called five years ago was my birth mother. And I said, I’m calling because I’m your son. I’d been coached. I had a counselor I worked with who’s helped a lot of reunifications. So anyways, I told her my story and she said, “I don’t [know] what you’re talking about.”
(46:32):
So denial. Then I said, well, “the people at Alberta Adoption Registry Services in the file.” [She said] “those damn people. They shouldn’t have given you anything.” So blame for that thing that she just told me she knew nothing about. And then she said, “I want nothing to do with you.” And it was just outright rejection. And I replied to her that I had identified other members of the Ridley family, Ridley is my maternal family name. And that I’d be reaching out to them because often times first moms will agree to have a relationship once they know that the jig is up and the secrets coming out. She said, “I don’t want you to do that.” And I said,” I can appreciate that, but it’s important to me to connect to the Ridley family. And I will be.” And that was the end of the conversation. And a little bit later, I emailed my sister Wendy, and I told her a three paragraph story and the fact that Terry didn’t want anything to do with me and that I was her brother, and they called Aunt Marvey, who was the four years older sister of my birth mom and said, was there a baby? And Aunt Marvy said, yes, there was plus I look like all of them.
(47:55):
And about 10 days later, my younger sister, Nancy, wrote me a beautiful letter welcoming me to the Ridley family. It came as an email, but really it was a letter. And later when I met her for the first time, she told me she’d taken a whole Sunday to think about and compose that message. And I just shared a WhatsApp message with Wendy a little earlier today. I was in Wales with her husband at the moment. And I just exchanged emails with my birth father last night and this morning. And so you’re in it. This is, I’m totally, totally in it. And by the way, my birth father is bigger than me and my three paternal brothers are all quite a bit bigger than me. And I’m like a really big guy.
Daniel (48:43):
How big tall are you?
David (48:45):
I’m 6’ 2”, 240 pounds, 46 inch chest.
Daniel (48:51):
Big dude.
David (48:52):
I stand next to my brothers and I look smaller, and it’s been very fascinating to really be in the presence of my DNA and really see where it comes from. But last April, my sister called me and my birth mother and my sisters had let me know that my birth mother was an alcoholic. And I also had a brother, Gary, who I never met because he died in 2015 of cirrhosis, as will ever, as a direct result of his alcoholism. And in April, my sister called me and said, Terry’s just being admitted to the hospital with a brain tumor and she doesn’t have very long to live. That was like a Saturday. I talked to them Sunday, I flew out Monday, Tuesday morning, all of the Ridley clan, my aunt, my uncle, my sisters, they all invited me to the hospital room. And at that point, my birth mother was unconscious, so she couldn’t object to my presence. And that was the first time I’d been in her presence since I’d been relinquished at birth. And she probably never held me at birth because that wouldn’t have been the thing you do in 1957.
(50:02):
And it was just incredibly moving to have the Ridley family invite me there. And for me, the personal growth is that I can sit and be with them and I can be their brother and I can just be with my feelings. And a couple hours later, Terry passed away and took her last breath in that hospital bed and we all cried. And I don’t know if I was crying for Terry or whether I was crying for what never could be, or I was just crying because my Ridley family was crying and they lost their mom and their sister. And after we’d all kind of settled back down, my uncle Jim turned to me and he said, I was standing pretty close to the bed at that point just because he said, “do you want a picture with Terry?” And I tell you, my brain was no f’ing way …
Daniel (51:03):
Because of the circumstance that Terry had passed being objective of resentment.
David (51:09):
Resentment,
Daniel (51:10):
Right.
David (51:12):
But I was able to catch it in the moment. I never said anything. It’s a big chunk of personal growth. I also realized I had no picture of me and my birth mother and I never would if I didn’t take it right then. And I said, yes, and I handed Uncle Jim my phone and turned the camera on and I kneeled down next to my birth mom and took the picture. And then I stood up and paused for a second, and then I kissed her on the cheek and I wished her well, she never got this program. She carried the toxic shame of my birth for her entire life for 65 years. She was shamed for it by her mother, as far as I can tell. And the next day, my brother and sisters went to her place and there was an open bottle of Canadian rye whiskey and the kitchen cupboard, and there was a case of 12 in the closet.
(52:03):
I was curious whether she was practicing alcoholic up to the end. And I’m going to say that that was affirmative and, and probably no small part caused for brain tumor. I mean, who knows the unknowable. But the gift of all of this work is my presence with all of my families because family is one of my most important values, my family relationships. And I’m still, my mom is 96 years old, lives independently in Edmonton. I had a great half an hour conversation with her this afternoon as it happens, really. I called her from Mexico and gave her the latest news on her grandkids and great grandkids. And I caught up on her news and I had a really nice visit and I go see her every six months. I go to Edmonton just I can be with her, because it means a lot to me. It means a lot to her. And I see my brother and sister and then I’ve really worked hard at developing this whole circle of relationships with my maternal and paternal families.
Daniel (53:08):
You know what, I think we’re going to leave it right there. Usually I ask if there’s anything you’d like to leave us with. But I think you nailed it down pretty good, man.
David (53:15):
I dunno how to make it much better than that.
Daniel (53:16):
Yeah. Alright, well David, it was a pleasure having you. Thanks so much for joining us tonight. And I guess that’s it, man. Take of yourself
David (53:25):
And thank you so much for having me and for all the work that you do.
Daniel (53:28):
Take care, David. Thank you so much, David. Take
David (53:30):
Care. Bye now.
Daniel (53:32):
Alright, if you got something out of that tonight and you are watching on YouTube, please click that subscribe button. If you are not already subscribed, turn on notifications. Give us a like we go live every Friday morning, every Sunday evening, right here on the channel. We’re also on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts. That’s all I got for you tonight. Take care. My friends say this is Hard Knox Talks.
