John Sheldon hosts the Beyond Belief Sobriety podcast. I had the privilege of being a guest on John’s podcast where we had a wide-ranging conversation that touched on these topics:
- My story of recovery: what it was like, what happened, what it is like now.
- How entrepreneurial coach Kevin Lawrence was the first person I admitted I had a drinking problem to and how he coached me to going to 12-step recovery.
- Why I became a business coach.
- How John relates to the coaching in his work as a manager and in motivating people in his recovery work.
- My decision to focus on coaching and facilitating with entrepreneurs who struggle with alcohol or who have struggled with alcohol in the past.
- Why only some people are ready for coaching or recovery.
- Making conscious decisions in your life and how important it is to carve out time and energy to do things that are only for you.
- The power of holding space and listening to another person.
- How I was adopted at birth and my journey in discovering my birth parents.
- How alcohol is normalized in business situations and how difficult it can be for someone in recovery to navigate those drinking situations.
It was fascinating comparing business and recovery topics with John. If you are an entrepreneur strulgging with alcohol or an entrepreneur in recovery trying to figure how to stay sober and run a high performing business, call me if you want immediate help from me. You can call me at +1 (604) 721-5732 or Contact Me to book a time when we can talk about your journey and how I can help.
Audio
Transcript
John Sheldon:
Beyond Belief Sobriety is a podcast for people who are seeking or who have found a secular path to recovery from addictions of all kinds.
John Sheldon:
Well, hello. Today, my guest is David Greer, and I think this will be an interesting conversation. David learned about this podcast after listening to an episode that I had done with Dr. Ray Baker some time ago, and he perused the website and thought it was somewhat interesting, I guess, so he sent me an email, and so he’s here today as my guest. I’m actually looking forward to this conversation. We talked just a tad bit about something that David does, which is really interesting that he has incorporated with his recovery, and hopefully we’ll get to that. But in the meantime, let me say hello to David Greer. David, how are you doing? Welcome to Beyond Belief Sobriety.
David Greer:
Thanks so much, John, and it’s great to be here. I’m really excited to have this conversation.
John Sheldon:
It’s one of my favorite things to do. Absolutely, so thank you for being here and giving me the opportunity. Doing this over the course of five years, I guess, over four or five years now and speaking to so many people, I learn more from doing this podcast than probably anything in my recovery. So, speaking with you is a bonus for me. I’m going to get something out of it. If somebody is listening to the podcast, gets something out of it, that’s even better, so thank you. What I’d like to do Dave, is generally, I like to start, you don’t have to go on a lot of deep nitty gritty detail or go as much as you want, but if you could just share a little bit of your recovery journey, and then we’ll just kind of let a conversation flow from that. Does that sound all right?
David Greer:
It sounds great.
John Sheldon:
All right.
David Greer:
When I take my AA Cake, which here in Vancouver, Canada is the tradition of most AA groups, I’ll just start at the beginning what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now. I was born in Edmonton, Canada, and I was relinquished for adoption and adopted into upper middle class, very nice family. My parents both drank and generally were daily drinkers, like come home from work, have one scotch, and that’s it. But definitely saw a model that alcohol was part of our lives, and they certainly would have binges when they had parties and stuff. My father had taken over the family business from my grandfather, so he was high powered, really well-known guy in Edmonton.
David Greer:
Just fast forward, in middle school, I remember wanting to be so much a part of the crowd that I bought a beer, a couple of beers for a buck each in 1970, so I got a 10 bucks each today. But I wasn’t getting drunk in high school. I was an academic jock, so high performing athlete, high performing academic student. Certainly, part of the football team cake parties got very drunk. But I get drunk at the cake party, and that’s Friday night, and Saturday night wouldn’t drink and wouldn’t drink during the week. My story is really the progressive nature of the disease, and I ended up moving out to Vancouver and I met my wife at the university.
David Greer:
Alcohol was part of our lives. I don’t know the exact moment where I went from a cucumber to a pickle. But what I share is that when my wife got pregnant with our first child, I promised her that I would not drink because she was committed to not drinking with our first child, and that lasted 24 hours. I don’t actually know how I justified or made it okay for me to continue drinking, but somehow I did. I know that, at that point, I was a pickle. I don’t even remember back then how much I was drinking or whether I was a daily drinker, because it’s just really just the progressive nature of the disease.
David Greer:
Two years later, Karalee get pregnant with our second child. I don’t even think I even tried to agree. I certainly didn’t stop drinking. By now, I’m probably a daily drinker, four years later or third are kind of the same. Now, at that point, I joined a young software company while I was still in university as a 22-year-old, as the first employee after the founders. I was busy building this business. About the time our second child was born, I actually bought out one of the founders, which took a lot of money, a lot of stress.
David Greer:
I remember coming out of accounting meeting, and tears were literally streaming down my eyes just kind of at the stress and what seemed like the risk. But I did get the business. Then I’m kind of arrived, if you’d like, so now I’m drinking because I’m a high powered entrepreneur. I’m drinking to power up to do more stuff, and I’m, certainly some of the time, a workaholic, although I was decent about taking time off. It’s a good thing I love sailing because I made sure that I did enough time sailing with our kids, and we sailed from the time they were very, very little, and ended up sailing out of that business in 2001.
David Greer:
My wife and I did something completely different. We went to the Mediterranean and we commissioned a sailboat and we homeschooled our kids for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles in the Mediterranean.
John Sheldon:
Oh, that’s interesting.
David Greer:
It’d be an interesting story if I had stopped drinking with this great shift, but the Med’s a great place to be an alcoholic. So, it continued, but what I like to share is that on our, I guess our second overnight passage, so some … The Med’s a lot bigger place than it looks on a map, because in a sailboat, you only travel about six miles an hour. To get very far, you’ve got to do some long passages. That includes sometimes going for 24, 36, 48 hours. Our first or second overnight passage, we were in the Western Mediterranean.
David Greer:
We were in the middle of the sea 50 or a hundred miles from any land and came on watch at 2:00 AM with my son, Kevin, who at the time was 10. We stood watches together, and I said, “You look after the left side of the boat, I’ll look after the right, and just keep a lookout.” His eyesight was better than mine anyways, but over above us was the Milky way. We kept getting startled because the stars on the horizon were so bright, we thought they were the lights of shifts.
John Sheldon:
Yeah, wow.
David Greer:
I, in hindsight, really think that that was a moment that something bigger than me touched me. I really remember that three hour watch. I remember sharing it with my son. I remember some of the other experiences of that trip. While I was still drinking, I think there was something potentially happening. It’s certainly one of my earliest memories of something much bigger, and it was spectacular. It was just such a spectacular night. I came back from the Med, turned … I was very unfulfilled career-wise, tried to do a bunch of things. The drinking just continued, was daily drinker. Most of your listeners probably know the story and it just kept progressing.
David Greer:
At no point, I was still completely in denial, I tried to quit in 2004. My wife didn’t think I was an alcoholic. She wasn’t all that supportive. And I white knuckled it for eight weeks or 10 weeks, and then started again, I was, I don’t know, two, three days, so I was right back to where it was. And then, when I turned 50 in 2007, I hired an amazing coach, Kevin Lawrence. I think the universe put Kevin in my path so that I could heal. We worked together for 18 months and we cleared away all of the other clutter and all the other things until the only thing left was the big elephant in the room, which was my drink.
John Sheldon:
How about that?
David Greer:
Amazing. On January 26th, 2009, I sent an email to Kevin, the night before our coaching meeting, about 10:30 at night, just after having my last beer. I’m a very organized guy, so I organized my last drink, and I said, “We have to talk about my drinking.” The next day, he was the first person I ever admitted I had a drinking problem to. He coached me to go to AA, and he got me to commit, that was a Tuesday, so he got me to commit to go to a meeting by Friday. Because I’m an all in or all out high-performing like, I’m all in when I’m in.
David Greer:
I had an event downtown that lasted til eight, and I looked up online, and there, lo and behold, there was a meeting at 8:30 that would literally be quarter of a block off of my drive home. I ended up going to that meeting. It’s actually at a Legion, which is … a Legion, is for, historically, it was for the armed services, so people that are retired from the armed services. It has a bar downstairs, and so I walked into this place, an AA meeting, and the doors are open and there’s like this bar, and there’s beers on some of the tables.
David Greer:
I’m standing there just like a deer in the headlights. Unfortunately, a couple of people that were going to the meeting, people in AA have a pretty good sixth sense. They just looked at me and they said, “Hey, if you’re looking for the meeting, go down the hall and go upstairs.” So, I did, and that was my first meeting. That’s actually been my home group since January … I mean, I didn’t make it that night, but a couple of weeks later I did. That was January 27th, 2009, and that’s been my home group ever since.
John Sheldon:
Is there still a bar that you have to walk through with …
David Greer:
Yeah, you have to walk by. Fortunately, you don’t have to walk through. Now, in COVID, of course, it’s been closed for the last several months, but we plan to go back. We plan to go back. For some of us, when you hear the music downstairs, if someone’s put the jukebox on and meeting, it’s kind of like, yeah, this seems appropriate that we got an AA meeting above a bar.
John Sheldon:
Yeah, that’s funny. Yeah. The home group that I went to, prior to my going there, but I think it was back in the ’60s and ’70s, they met above a jazz bar here in Kansas City. They always spoke fondly about their meetings about above the bar, like you say hearing the music and all of that, but yeah, it’s kind of interesting. You mentioned the coach, was he a life coach?
David Greer:
He’s a business coach.
John Sheldon:
A business coach. Okay. Now, just for the listeners to know, David already clued me in on the fact that he is interested in business coaching and that he incorporates that as part of the recovery, and now it makes sense because it was your business coach who got you into recovery.
David Greer:
In fact, it’s why I decided to become a business coach, was I wanted to give the gift to other entrepreneurs, and business owners and CEOs that Kevin had given to me. But he gave me a lot of gifts beyond recovery.
John Sheldon:
Oh, sure.
David Greer:
But that was definitely a driving motivation for me to become a business coach, was what Kevin had given to me over a very long relationship that we had together.
John Sheldon:
There is a real connection. I work as a manager and I’m a person in recovery, and I’ve recently gotten a certification as a peer support specialist here in Missouri, and I learned a lot about motivating people to reach goals, their recovery goals. You let the person define what their recovery will be to them, and then you work with them to help them achieve the goals that they want to achieve. When I was taking this course, I thought to myself, well, this applies to my employees at work.
David Greer:
Absolutely.
John Sheldon:
Recovery is, this is very much like what I would do as a manager at work is, if you’re a good manager, is to find out what motivates your people. I can understand how, has a business coach, and especially as a person in recovery, and with your background, that you would want to incorporate the two. Can you tell me a little bit about how that would work, how you would envision that working, or how is it working?
David Greer:
I only made this commitment about six months ago and I’m still feeling my way forward, although a new client I took on last year was drinking for the first three months that we worked together, and then he came out and admitted he had a problem. Here’s how I see it working right now, is people hire me because I’m a business coach and I have a lot of business expertise, but drinking clearly gets in the way. Like for this individual, who’s someone actually I’ve known person for a long time, I said, “If you want me to be like your temporary sponsor and work with you on that, then we need to pause the professional coaching.”
David Greer:
Because I feel like that’s 12 step work and I shouldn’t be charging for it. I said, “Or we continue with our relationship as a professional coach. I’ll share my experience, strength and hope like it does show up in our coaching calls.” It’s just, I try and say after 10 minutes, it’s like, “Do you want to stay on this path? Or have you got some business issues you want to deal with too?” Then I insisted that he go out and find a sponsor to work with in recovery, which he did find one that worked for him, and has worked with that person every week for the last year actually.
David Greer:
I’m feeling my way. If it’s pure recovery, 12 step work, then, again, I don’t see that I can charge for that against the principles of AA, but my goal is always to help someone, is to help someone into recovery, right? For this particular client, this focusing on the business aspect and where he wants to go professionally while still understanding his journey and what’s been going on for him for the last year in early recovery has been very, very powerful.
John Sheldon:
I can imagine. I really liked that connection. I’ve talked to other people who are recovery coaches and there’s no way you can talk about recovery without talking about someone’s entire life. I don’t know if there’s any way that you can really help somebody reach their goals in anything if you don’t kind of deal with who they are as a person and what they’re going through as an individual. It makes sense to me. I think it’s a valuable service to have someone in recovery who is in this role, so that at least you’re attuned to it. You’re attuned to, if you’re with somebody, you say, “Oh, you know what? I’m picking up on that you might have something else you want to talk about as well with me.”
David Greer:
Right. Or not.
John Sheldon:
Or not.
David Greer:
It’s like, with coach Kevin, it took 18 months for us to build a trust relationship until I got to the point where I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. And now I had someone in my corner who I could fully trust and know that he’s going to do the right thing for me. I also knew that when I admitted it to Kevin, because I built a strong enough relationship with him, I knew he’d never, ever, ever let me off the hook. I knew that was a one-way street.
John Sheldon:
Yeah.
David Greer:
I knew, if I wanted to keep drinking, he wouldn’t like stand in the way, but he’d keep calling me on it, and if I didn’t get towards my goals, I knew that, that’s where he’d go. When I sent him that email, I knew that, that was really it. I didn’t know I was going to get to AA, but I knew the jig was up and probably the first time they ever that I was not in denial.
John Sheldon:
Yeah. That takes a lot.
David Greer:
The fact that Kevin was able to engender that relationship with me and get me to that point is just, I think is a remarkable testament to his coaching abilities, and to his abilities as a human being.
John Sheldon:
Yeah, that really is quite a skill. This recovery coaching thing has just kind of taken off, I guess, over the last five, six years. I don’t know. I’ve seen it around. I kind of scratch my head wondering, what are these people doing? I mean, it’s interesting that you could be a in recovery, I’ve been in recovery for a long time, but I might not necessarily be very good at helping somebody identify and reach their recovery goals. There’s more to it than just being there yourself, you know?
David Greer:
Yes.
John Sheldon:
When you have someone that comes to you for coaching, what do you do? You just kind of sit down and get a feel for what they want?
David Greer:
Yeah, absolutely. So, it’s not about me. Coaching is not … There’s nothing about me in it other than the skills, and I got a big toolkit. I got a really big toolkit. Probably a lot of stuff you’ve never heard of. I bring that to the table, but really, the process is talking, seeing if the person is coachable. I often do a free one hour call. I got to tell you because a lot of my clients are all entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs, or super, super high powered salespeople or uber high performers. A lot of those people are not coachable.
John Sheldon:
Really?
David Greer:
They’re just, they have problems and they want to get them fixed, but they don’t want to look at themselves in the mirror, that’s for sure.
John Sheldon:
That’s funny.
David Greer:
Sometimes I’ll have an hour like introductory call with someone, and I’ll just say, oh, that’s very interesting. Maybe they made a commitment to do something and I’ll say, and I’ll follow up with you to make sure you did ABC. That’s it.
John Sheldon:
That’s the same thing you’re going to have with somebody if you’re a recovery coach and someone comes to you. You’re going to have some people that they’re really not ready. They’re not interested in recovery. They told me that during the training that I went on is, you can’t set the goal for these people. If their goal isn’t abstinence, then that’s not … You have to meet them where they are, and you can only help them get to where they want to go, whether that be in recovery or anything else in life.
David Greer:
Then, assuming that I think our personalities get along and our energy levels, I oftentimes say at the end of that introductory call, “I think we could work well together, what do you say again?” Again, you got to co-create this, this relationship, is my belief. Then the process looks just like what you described. I send them an intake form, so I get some information, their spouse and their kids, so if they start talking about them, I know who they are and roughly how old they are. Because it will come up in conversation. It’s interesting, most business people say, “We’re only going to talk about business, right?” and I say, yup. I say, “We’re only going to talk about the things that you want to talk about.”
David Greer:
Then, of course, sometime within three months, we’ll be talking about some other aspect of their life, but I understand, to begin with, they have trepidation about opening up about that, that’s building trust too. But then I ask them to write down like six, 12 and 18 months goals. If they can, I ask them to consider three areas of their life, so their career slash business, their self. So, what is one goal you want to do for six month that’s just for you? Whatever that looks like. I’ve had people say, well, I’ve always wanted to go to The Masters.
Okay. Well, when is The Masters? Is that in six, 12 or 18 months, and that’s just for you, right? It’s like, I’m not going with your spouse. Just something you really want to do for yourself. Then, what’s a goal for your life? Which I mean by your significant others, your relationships, like the other aspect that’s not business and not just yourself. My experience with high performing people is they … We often, very, very often, squeeze ourselves out of the middle.
David Greer:
We’re super passionate about our business, our career, what it is we work on. We’re super passionate about our families, about the relationships that we have, and we just get so intense on those two sides that we literally don’t put enough time and energy into making sure that we replenish ourselves, and we do those things that really sustain us.
John Sheldon:
This is really interesting because I-
David Greer:
Sometimes people just will give me one goal for six months and one for 12 and one for 18. Again, is no right or wrong. Sometimes we have to have another call where I help them a little bit, oh, I have no idea what my goals are. I just, again, try and be curious, ask a few things, well, what about this for your business? What about that for your life? And just get them to nudge a little bit and then write something down.
John Sheldon:
Recently, I’ve had people like you come around in my life that are kind of putting some ideas in my head. I’ve been going through some stuff where with this podcast, the podcast has gotten really popular. I’ve been having a lot of guests and I let them schedule their time at their convenience, and next thing I know, I have more guests than podcasts I can actually publish. I have more going on, and the stress that comes from that makes me feel overwhelmed. So, I was talking actually to a therapist about this problem, and she suggested the very thing that you do.
She says, “Look at your day, you’ve got 24 hours in a day, you have to work eight hours, you have to sleep eight hours if you want to … That gives you another eight hours left, and then you have to divide that time up. You have to think about your own personal wellness. You need to think about, you need to budget some time for your family, you need a budget some time for exercise, you need to budget your time for … And then what’s left over, you can commit to your passion and your projects.”
She’s told me the same thing that you just mentioned, that people who are really passionate about something, they take that eight hours where they’re not sleeping or working and they act like it’s there to give out to everybody. Like it’s an unlimited resource, and it’s really limited and they kind of leave out a lot of other parts.
David Greer:
Yeah, and because we love helping other people, because I’m sure you love the impact you make with your podcast, and how fantastic. It’s not that they’re bad per se. Again, I don’t judge these things. It’s just, if you are so depleted, you can’t do anything in life, which is where you eventually end up if you do this long enough, so you have to bring conscious choice. I guess the number one thing I ask with clients is that you bring conscious choice. It doesn’t really matter to me what you choose, as long as you thought about it and then you made a choice.
David Greer:
It’s the unconscious, the, oh, I just … Right?
John Sheldon:
Yeah.
David Greer:
Like anyone can schedule my time and there’ll be more podcasts and boom, right?
John Sheldon:
Right.
David Greer:
Which when you started, was probably a conscious choice and it made a lot of sense to you, but you need to make a different conscious choice, what stage, status, where you are now, because you’re in a different place.
John Sheldon:
And the same thing with our recovery, we have to make in step three in AA, which I see as a decision, it’s really a thoughtful … It’s a commitment, is what it is, and it’s one that’s well thought out based upon what we’ve learned from that moment when we said we can’t handle this by ourselves and we have hope for ourselves, then it comes time to make a decision and a commitment. I kind of see that as what you’re talking about, where it’s like, you’re not just reacting like, I got a DWI and that’s it. I’m done. I’ve done that too many times. I’m not really making a conscious decision. There’s a difference, and I don’t know if you can even manufacture that or not for somebody in recovery.
David Greer:
My experience in coaching, in general, is it’s asking someone to slow down. One of my kind of taglines is slow down to speed up, which is, I use in a business context to say, you really need to do strategic planning by getting out of the office, and I have a structure and a suggestion for how often that is, which is usually way more than most entrepreneurs think they should, but I’ve seen it over and over again what a difference it makes, is this, you need to pull back, slow down, look at the bigger picture, then you can accelerate back into what you want.
David Greer:
To me, step three is a slow down, like you need to slow yourself down to really say and make that decision.
John Sheldon:
That’s a good way of looking at it. I’d never really thought about it that way, but it is because you’re kind of … First of all, alcohol itself slaps you in the face and your life is usually kind of a mess. So, yeah, you are kind of slowing down, aren’t you? That’s a time of almost reflection, it’s like, well, something has to give here.
David Greer:
I can just go back to, we talked about what it was like for me, but then what happened was I started going to AA meetings. I talked about what happened and then what it’s like. In that early recovery, just going and sitting in an AA meeting for 60 minutes, that is slowing down.
John Sheldon:
It is, isn’t it?
David Greer:
It’s, you got put your butt on that chair and you just got to pay attention.
John Sheldon:
And you listen.
David Greer:
And you listen. You don’t talk. I do a lot of coaching around that as well. Maybe you want to try listening some more.
John Sheldon:
That’s really helpful. I didn’t realize at the time that … See, there was something good about going to those AA meetings that I found really, really helpful, because I had … Here was my thing, I had all these problems that I created for my drinking and that could have landed me in jail. I didn’t have a place to live and all this kind of stuff. And all I could think about was getting out of these problems and worrying about these problems. The more I worried and thought about these problems, the more I just wanted to drink so I didn’t have to even think about this kind of crap.
John Sheldon:
But when I was at an AA meeting, I never thought about that stuff. I never thought about those other things. I think that’s why early on, my first 30, 60 days or so I went to a lot of AA meetings because that was my way, I guess, of kind of slowing down, stepping back, listening, letting the garbage not infiltrate … I would have drank if it wasn’t for AA because I just needed to turn my mind off.
David Greer:
Yes, and just to see a different way of living. The other thing that was really massively impactful for me was about my second or third week of sobriety, I heard about a private man step group. I went there and the way that particular group, we read one of the chapters from the 12 steps and 12 traditions, either step or tradition, and we just kind of worked through it in order. Then every single person in the room shares in every meeting. There’s a lot of people, then everybody learns to adjust their share to be shorter. The kind of format is share on something that came up during the reading related to whatever was in the reading, and then share on what’s happening in your life.
David Greer:
Again, to hold space for a group of man and be perfectly silent and just go around the room was a very powerful model for me to experience, and then this particular group of men were really share emotionally, and again, to witness that was really, really impactful to me. I remember the first time that someone shared and cried, and I was so uncomfortable. I so wanted to go over to that person and say, it’s okay, and parent them or whatever it was. It wasn’t their discomfort. It was my discomfort with another person crying.
David Greer:
My discomfort was crying myself, it turns out, but again, I got to watch, I don’t know how many, there was probably 15 people at that meeting, and 14 of them just sat there and didn’t say a word, didn’t just honor the experience that that individual was having. That particular meeting has been such a gift to me, to just see that over and over. In fact, the same group I still meet with. 12 and a half years later, I still meet with them. I mean, some of the men have come and gone, like all, but there’s a core group that … They were there the first night I went in.
John Sheldon:
I always thought that was one of the greatest strengths of AA is that the fact that you’re listened to, that nobody is there to fix you. No one’s going to stop and interrupt you, or usually, it shouldn’t anyway you get, but you get to be listened to. There’s a lot of value of that, because by talking, I see people’s faces in the room and I feel like people care about me. They’re in my corner. I feel safe, and I’m kind of talking through stuff. It was quite helpful. It’s different than going to a group therapy thing where there’s a doctor who’s actually going to guide me through it, and that’s good too.
John Sheldon:
But I think there’s a tremendous value in that listening, and not just for the person, but like you mentioned, for yourself, because you’re uncomfortable the guy’s crying and you think you need to go over there and fix that, you need to go over there and do something for this guy, right?
David Greer:
Yup.
John Sheldon:
But the thing to do is just to be there, just to sit there. I had the same experience. I went to a men’s group for like 25 years, all men’s group … It was an interesting group. We had meetings like what you described, where we would read the Twelve and Twelve. We had a lot of those meetings. We’d read the Twelve and Twelve and go around and discuss them. It was good experience for me in some ways, because I grew up in a military family with a father who was very authoritarian, and I grew up in that era where men behaved in a certain way, and getting into AA at the time of my life, I was just like raw, I guess. Emotionally, I was just kind of just beaten down.
It was important for me, I guess, or helpful for me to be around other men who had some compassion and understanding and could speak about their own pain and not just order me to be something different, or, you shouldn’t be talking like that, you shouldn’t be expressing that emotion or whatever, which is how I grew up.
David Greer:
I’ve eventually learned in recovery and some therapy work and some other 12 step group work, that I had a narcissist father, and one of the things that wasn’t allowed was negative emotions. It’s not surprising that it was modeled. Roughly nine or 10 years into sobriety, after firmly having kept the door locked on my birth family, so I mentioned I was adopted at birth. I had done enough healing in AA and through all of this work that I decided to go find my birth families, which I did. I found my birth mother and my birth father. My birth father or my birth mother doesn’t want to have anything to do with me, but thankfully, both of her daughters, my sisters do, and we have built great friendships with them.
David Greer:
Through them, I learned that my birth mother was an alcoholic and that our brother, so between them, my two sisters was a brother, and he died in 2015 of liver diseases as a direct result of his alcoholism. I’ve now seen a path from potentially, a genetically related, certainly it wasn’t that common in my adoptive family, but in my birth family. My birth father wonders if his father wasn’t maybe … He moved out when he was 18, so he wasn’t around the house, but he thinks, certainly later on, his father might’ve been an alcoholic and his sister is an alcoholic who’s in recovery. So, it looks like I may have got it from both sides, but that’s been another really interesting part of my healing and journey, which there’s no way I could’ve got there without sobriety and without the AA and without all of these experiences of these meetings and of this sharing and hearing. Hearing other people go find their birth families.
John Sheldon:
Yeah. I have a friend who I’ve had on this podcast. David Bohl, David B. Bohl, and he has written a book called Parallel Universes, which is all about his experience as an adoptee. The first time I ever heard the term being relinquished was from him. He referred to it as that. I’ve had a couple of conversations with him about what he’s learned about adoptees, and the high rate of addiction problems in adoptees. It was really, really interesting to learn from him, and he did the same thing as you is he did go out and seek his seek out his birth family as well. The thing I remember about him the most is he had a great experience with his adopted family.
John Sheldon:
They were very loving, he had a good home and everything, and they went out of their way to let him know how special he was for having been adopted, that we chose you, you’re special. Well, when he was like five years old, he was walking home with his friends from school, and he told them that he was adopted, and they looked at him as if there was something wrong with him. He didn’t understand because he was always told it was a good thing. Then from that point forward, he couldn’t ever trust what his parents were telling him.
Yeah, I found that really, really interesting that, that one event from … That changed the way he thought about his adoption and just about his whole world. It was like, if I could be, and at a young age, if I could be diluted about this thing, what else is there?
David Greer:
Yeah. My experience, I mean, mum and dad are mom and dad. I mean, my father’s passed away. My mom’s 93, got COVID last year and survived it.
John Sheldon:
Oh wow.
David Greer:
I know. Amazing. But what really came up for me was really the codependency. I was too nervous about my mother being disappointed in me or whatever her story was around my going and finding my birth parents. At times, she’s supportive, and at times, she doesn’t really want to hear about it. My mom’s someone who I’ve basically been able to share almost anything with. That’s sometimes hard, but that’s also … My growth is that’s her issue and she’s not comfortable with it. I don’t need to push it on her. I have so many other people in my corner now that can support me.
John Sheldon:
Yeah.
David Greer:
That I can get lots of support. In fact, I participate in a once a month, it’s called the Forget Me Not society. It’s just a group support of birth moms and adoptees. I shouldn’t say birth moms, any birth dads, we equally welcome. They just don’t come. Adoptive parents would be equally welcome. Again, they just generally don’t come. Again, it’s just, it’s kind of like AA. It’s just, we share every month and we share about what’s going on for us, where we are in our journey, what has happened, whether we’ve been disappointed or connected. For me, also hearing the experiences of the birth moms from their point of view has very powerful.
John Sheldon:
It’s easier now for an adoptee to find their birth parents than it was in the past, isn’t it?
David Greer:
Yes. Generally, it is. Yes.
John Sheldon:
It used to be that they just wouldn’t ever show. They would never disclose to a person, but now they do through a lot of DNA testing and whatever, but yeah.
David Greer:
Yeah. I got it because the adoption records were opened by Alberta, where I was born in 2004, so when I applied in 2016 or 17, I was given my file, but my birth mother had put a veto on sharing any of her personal information, so it was all redacted.
John Sheldon:
Okay.
David Greer:
But there were enough clues and I’m very tenacious. I was able to, and with some help, I actually hired a person in Edmonton who’s helped 3,500 birth parents and adoptees over the last 40 years. He just looks at my birth record and says, oh, that’s Dr. So-and-So, and he worked with this. You think there’s no information there, but it turns out, for someone who really knows, there’s clues and we, together, we were able to sluice it. Then I hired researchers at the Calgary Public Library, and they found the record. Looking for my grandfather, because he was anesthetist in Calgary, and there weren’t that many anesthetists in 1957, and so they were able to find out who my birth father was. Imagine that me asking for help, that’s a pretty radical thought and even more radical action.
John Sheldon:
Still to this day can be difficult for me, but when you do, boy, it sure does make a difference. Well, I think it’s really … I really find this interesting. I’ve been thinking about this whole thing about coaching, business, and recovery, and how the two go together for a while now. It’s fortuitous that I’ve had this opportunity to talk to you about this very topic about how the two are intertwined. Even when they wrote the big book, they came up with that chapter to the employers. It was written by Hank Parkhurst.
John Sheldon:
Even then, it was kind of talking about how our work life is another part of our lives. In that particular chapter there, he was just trying to tell employers, don’t fire these guys because they’re drunks. Give them a chance. They might just be really great workers later on.
David Greer:
Yes, and don’t judge them too harshly. That’s not changed. I’ve done probably 30 or 40 interviews and it’s still amazing how much it’s a moral issue, rather a mental health issue.
John Sheldon:
Yeah. We still have a ways to go to break down that stigma.
David Greer:
We do.
John Sheldon:
We really do. It exists more with alcohol than it does with anything else. I guess it’s because alcohol is so much a part of our culture where you … People drink it in movies. It’s just like people seem to be okay drinking it without a problem, when in fact, it’s a very addictive substance sentence and it’s not really good for human beings to ingest anyway.
David Greer:
And in high powered business situations, alcohol is what often greases the wheels. That’s how you close really big deals.
John Sheldon:
It is.
David Greer:
[Alcohol] is so normalized. I pointed out some entrepreneurs that I coach, they say, is this like heavy drinking? And I’m like, well, you had two drinks before dinner and you had a bottle of wine each. Yep, that’s more than five drinks. That’s heavy drinking.
John Sheldon:
Yeah. I’ve actually seen that where I work. There was one instance, and I’ve been sober for a long time, there was one instance when I was really uncomfortable being around in a work situation with people drinking. What it was, I was out of town. I was in the Chicago Area, and I was at this like a cocktail party where people are mingling and doing small talk, which is quite difficult for me anyway. They had a bar and they give you little tickets for drinks. Of course, I’m not going to drink anything, but maybe a coke or whatever.
John Sheldon:
This one guy who knew I didn’t drink was just pestering me for my ticket, so I gave him my tickets, and he was kind of making fun of me for not being a drinker and all that kind of stuff. I was just so uncomfortable. I left that little thing and I went down into the lobby and I called my sponsor, and we just chatted about something, but when I went back up there, I realized that I left my coat at a table, and I ended up sitting down right next to the CFO of the company, and I had the best time I’ve ever had because she was so laid back.
John Sheldon:
Because she was so nice, and everybody on the table, they were sober and they were cool. They were great to talk to. I just ended up having a really good time, but I really needed to remove myself from that uncomfortable situation where you were mingling and doing a small talk and drinking and all that kind of crap. But that was the one time I was really uncomfortable, and I just had to remove myself from the situation. But for the most part, in my position, I don’t really have to be … I don’t, not being an entrepreneur or anything and working for a company that really tries to save their money, we don’t do a lot of that anyway.
Yeah. But thank you for coming on. This was really interesting. I enjoyed the conversation. I think this turned out to be a great episode. It’s super. It’d be interesting to hear from you later on to see how this thing moves for you, if you’re going to find … It’d be interesting to see if you actually market yourself in that way. Do you think you would, where you ….
David Greer:
Yeah, that’s my plan. I’m currently building my platform. I want to up with a one hour talk and figuring out what I want to change on my website. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m … I’ve done a few videos, which I have put out there and got feedback from people and broken anonymity, which is still quite uncomfortable for me.
John Sheldon:
I started doing that now.
David Greer:
But I think it’s the right thing to do.
John Sheldon:
It is for me.
David Greer:
I really think it’s the right thing to do to be able to help more people.
John Sheldon:
I think so, too. What’s your website?
David Greer:
coachdjgreer.com. So, it’s my initials, David James.
John Sheldon:
Okay. Well, we’ll put that up in the show notes when we post this. Again, thank you. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. With that, I will say, that’s another episode of Beyond Belief Sobriety. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to help out our podcast, there’s a couple of different ways you can do that. You can do it money-wise by going over to our website, beyondbeliefsobriety.com and clicking on the donate button or the little yellow coffee cup at the bottom to buy a cup of coffee.
John Sheldon:
You can also become a Patreon at patreon.com/beyondbeliefsobriety, or you can become a member of our YouTube channel. We’ve got a lot of stuff posted on YouTube that we don’t post on the podcast. So, going over there, you might find something there that’s interesting. Then later on down the road, there might be other ways to help, just volunteering to help out with the podcast. We’ll see what will come of that in the future. David, thanks again. I really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to hearing how your business develops going forward.
David Greer:
Super, thanks so much, John.
John Sheldon:
Thank you
