Summary
Rob Anspach of Anspach Media invited me back to his E-Hereos podcast on Episode 352. This time we talked about my journey with alcoholism and recovery covering these topics:
- Why I am publicly open about my recovery for the past five years as an entrepreneur and coach.
- How I believe that I’m still an alcoholic even after 16 years of sobriety and why I maintain that identity.
- My daily practices including attending three 12-step meetings per week and having exit strategies for social events with alcohol.
- How sailing helps me practice letting go of control, which supports my recovery journey.
- I share how you as an entrepreneur who struggles with addiction can maintaining professional boundaries.
- Use gratitude practices to help with fear management in business.
- The stigma around addiction and the fact that roughly 10% of the population has alcohol use disorder.
- I stressed that recovery requires community support and that there’s always hope for those struggling.
Transcript
David Greer (00:00): Thanks again for having me.
Rob Anspach (00:02): Hey, this is Rob Anspach and welcome back to another episode of E-Heroes for those keeping count. This is episode 352 and I’m bringing back a guest who hasn’t been on here for about five years, and his biggest, I guess, philosophy right now is going public with recovery. And I know that’s maybe a sore subject for some people, especially those who love drinking, but I stopped drinking a long time ago. It wasn’t the social thing. I just didn’t care for drinking it anymore. But I want to bring back David Greer and for the last five years you’ve been on this crusade of just telling people about your recovery and how it’s made this impact on not only your life, but on the people that you help as an entrepreneur.
David Greer (01:04): You’re right, Rob, and thanks everyone. I’m Coach David J. Greer, and yeah, I’m a 40 plus year entrepreneur and I’m an alcoholic. That’s my truth.
Rob Anspach (01:19): Now you say that as I’m an alcoholic, but you’ve been clean and sober for years. I mean, do you consider that you’re still an alcoholic?
David Greer (01:30): I do, because I still have drinking nightmares and I believe there’s fundamentally a part of my brain that is still alcoholic and still wants me to go back out there and start drinking again. And I need to guard every day that I don’t pick up a drink because I think if I went back drinking now, I would be dead in three months, maybe six max. To me it’s a really life and death choice at this point, and my brain wants me to forget. That’s why I have these drinking nightmares. And I work in 12 step recovery. That’s been my method of getting sober. It’s not the only method, but it’s what’s really worked for me. And that program, we live one day at a time, and I remember getting sober is the single biggest achievement I have done in my life. And every morning when I get up, I have to be prepared to achieve my single biggest achievement all over again. And I have a lot of practices that dovetail into that. And I still go to three meetings a week because I go to those meetings for a whole variety of reasons. But one of the reasons is to not forget that I’m an alcoholic
(02:53): Because what I’ve seen is people who drift away from the program they eventually forget,
(02:57): And then picking up a drink suddenly seems like a good idea. Number of times I’ve heard someone my age or a decade or younger get sober and really practice the program really well and then drift away and they get divorced through the first process of getting sober. They find another spouse, that spouse, they’d been married for eight or 10 years, never seen them drink, and then they pick up a drink and it destroys their life all over again. I’ve heard that story just a very surprising number of times. This is why I, and I’m public about it because I want other people to know this is the truth about myself. It’s just a part of me. I’m six foot two and I’ve [size] 12 feet. They’re just facts about me.
Rob Anspach (03:55): Well, it’s not just about you, it’s not just a singular journey. You have to have an accountability team. You have to have people on your side that will root for you, that will not put you in a situation where you’re going to touch a drink.
David Greer (04:11): Yes. Yeah.
(04:15): Part of what I’ve been sharing is for entrepreneurs and business people because a lot of alcohol kind of greases transactions, sales. If you’re a business owner and you go to networking events just for CEOs, there’s usually someone who sponsors a free bar because they want access to the CEOs. One of the things I help coach people, I mean it comes from 12 step recovery, but what I really try and make sure for entrepreneurs in those situations is if you go to a social event, there’s going to be alcohol. What’s your exit plan? If you go with your spouse and you get triggered, you need to have a discussion with your spouse because my recommendation is you just leave when you get triggered and you need to come in agreement with your spouse ahead of time as to whether you’re going to take the car home, she or he is going to find their own way home or whether you’re going to take an Uber home and they can take the car home. But I think you need to be explicit with someone like your spouse that if I get triggered, this is what I’m going to do because I need to stay safe.
David Greer (05:31): That was very shocking for my spouse early in my sobriety. She didn’t appreciate, she’s not an alcoholic, she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t know what being triggered means in that context. And we’d have these discussions. You’re what if you’re, you’re going to leave me? Well, yes dear, I am going to leave. I’ll ask you whether you want to come with me. You don’t have to.
Rob Anspach (05:57): My ancestry is German. They’re known for drinking large amounts of alcohol. My wife’s ancestry is French and we used to have drinks at the table and it just got to the point where it’s like, I don’t need this anymore. I can just drink water or tea or soda. And for me it was just easy to stop. But I’ll go to events where there are alcohol and there are people that are drunk and I’m thinking, good Lord, or they getting in a car or they calling an Uber and I’m glad I don’t get a newspaper anymore. I don’t want to see the obituary.
David Greer (06:45): Well also that I’m sober. I used to think after you’d had several drinks, the conversations got more interesting. Now that I’m sober and I go to those events, it’s like the heavy drinkers. I don’t want to talk to them after a couple hours because they just repeat themselves and it’s just, it’s not interesting.
Rob Anspach (07:09): How did that change your opinion of people that you worked with or consulted or other entrepreneurs that drink?
David Greer (07:25): I really work hard to rest my judgment. The thing about recovery is that each of our recoveries is unique. It needs to work for us, for me, for you, for each person. And it’s not for me. I can share my experience, strength and hope. I can say, for me, this is what worked.
(07:47): I don’t know if it’s going to work for you. Maybe you’ll relate to something in my story and you’ll want to give it a try. Maybe you won’t. I dunno. I just share my experience, strength and hope with no expectation. I have one young client who has been diagnosed officially as having alcohol use disorder, and he’s worked on one, worked with a therapist and worked with her program targeted specifically for entrepreneurs and senior executives challenged with alcoholism and he kept drinking. And then he shared probably we’re talking over four or five years, but he shared with me and he’s still client and he doesn’t show up drinking my calls. That would be a boundary violation. I’d say, I’m sorry, I’m not going to have this call with you today if that was the case, but again, I’m not going to judge him for it.
(08:48): And he recently shared that he finally went to a 12 step meeting that he really related to and he found a person he related to and he asked for them to be their sponsor. And he is probably coming up to about 60 days sober. And he’s never been able to put, I mean maybe he put 60 days sober once or twice in the last four or five years, but he’s going to more meetings and he’s on a path. His drinking has shown up in the business, like the partners and the senior managers had to have a sit down with him because he was not showing up. He did own his part and he owned that. He wasn’t showing up and doing what needed to be done, and he fixed that. Again, it’s a journey. It’s be there to support. I did regularly check in outside of our coaching calls out, I coach the two entrepreneurs, their partners, I coach them together. When I’m coaching ’em together, I wouldn’t ask a personal question like that, but outside I’ll send him a text message and say, “Hey, how’s it going? Are you going to any meetings? How’s it working?” Maybe every three or four months. I don’t want to, again, it’s his journey and if you need to talk about it, hey, you can just call me. I’m here to talk to you.
Rob Anspach (10:15): Well, you’ve talked about journey and I find it funny because, and those that are watching this on YouTube, you’ll notice that behind David is, looks like he’s in a boat and he is. You’ve been sailing for years.
David Greer (10:37): Since I was 10 or 12.
Rob Anspach (10:39): Yeah, few years.
David Greer (10:41): That’s a few years. I’m an old dude.
Rob Anspach (10:46): For me, it was that every time I drank, I got off balance. And if I would even get on a boat while I was drinking, I would heave everywhere. And it’s ironic that you take that experience, no longer drinking, but you’re focused on sailing, which gives you, I think a direction. It gives you something to gravitate to that’s not alcohol.
David Greer (11:17): It also, another really important aspect of sailing for me and my journey is in sobriety is I’ve had to really learn to let go of control and to really believe in something bigger than me that has my best interest at heart and to turn it over to whatever that is. And one of the ways I do that is through sailing, because the power of the wind and the waves and nature, I can choose the destination and I can change my mind I don’t have to beat myself against the wind, but sometimes I do and I can adjust sails and pull a few lines. But do you know what all the rest, I cannot control how big the waves are, how strong the gusts are. And for me, it’s a deeply visceral experience that I’m not in control. And this is part of why I sail, is because I need this experience to remind me how little I actually can control in my life with my clients.
(12:27): There’s only a little tiny infant decimal piece that I can control, which is really what my response is to things. How I show up in responding and what’s the next right step, even in the middle of a facilitation, I can’t be focused on the end of the day and what the goals are going to be. I need to be focused on the people in front of me and what I sense their feeling and saying in this moment and sailing helps me to actually do all that. I get this visceral experience from sailing I can then take it into these other aspects of my life.
Rob Anspach (13:06): And it gives you a lot of alone time to think
David Greer (13:11): There’s that and a lot of joy.
Rob Anspach (13:13): Yeah, a lot of joy. You get to see nature in its truest form.
David Greer (13:19): Yes, and gets me away and out of routine. For me, I love routine. I’m a really, really disciplined guy, but it also, I need the breaks from it too and give myself permission to, I’m not exercising at seven o’clock in the morning every day. I mean, I’m still trying to go for walks every day, but I’m not up out and exercise this done this responded emails here. I mean, that’s part of what’s been my success is that level of discipline. But it’s very nice to have a break from it
Rob Anspach (13:58): Off air. We talked about the number of episodes that E-Heroes has, and as I was listening to you now I’m thinking, why did it take 352 episodes for me to talk about a deep dive into recovery? Because alcoholism seems to be, well, it affects a lot of people and they think that they’re in control and they think they can stop anytime that they want. But it does take not only effort, it takes discipline, it takes determination, it takes a team. And it’s not something I’ve talked about here. And yet I think more and more people need to be aware of it. They need to be open to it. And it seems like in the entrepreneurial, they still have events with alcohol. They still let the bottles flow. And I don’t think it’s necessary.
David Greer (15:02): I don’t think it is either. And I think some event planners are getting better, but I’ve also had some of my sober community be put up for awards and go to the awards dinner and they have trouble getting water. They can’t get any other non-alcoholic drink
(15:25): Because it’s a big award ceremony and a gala and wine is served and they literally can’t get a nonalcoholic drink. And it’s like who puts on an award gala event? And the thing about that, but I mean this is recent anyways, I hope things are changing. Roughly. The National Institute of Health in the US and the corresponding organization in Canada, the statistics are pretty clear about roughly 10% of the population has adult population anyways, has alcohol use disorder. My province has five million people. Ignoring children for now or underage, that’s roughly half a million people just in my province. That is a lots lot of people. And part of why I come into podcasts like yours, Rob, and talk about this is I’m really trying to reduce the stigma around it because we still have, there’s still and I had it too when I first, an amazing coach came into my life and I hired him, coach Kevin Lawrence, and we worked together for nine years in total. But after having worked together for 18 months, and I was really frustrated in my career and I wasn’t getting what I want, I hired him for my career
(17:03): And we cleared all the clutter off the table and we cleaned everything up. And the elephant in the room was my drinking. And he was the first person I admitted I had a drinking problem too. And in his personal life, he had met people with many, many decades of sobriety in my 12 step program. And he knew what to do. He coached me to go to a meeting. And I had tremendous aversion about it, and I don’t even know where it came from. I think I’d still had that picture of an alcoholic is someone who’s on the wrong side of the tracks in a trench coat and drinks out of a paper bag. And there are some people that look like that. And they’re less than 1% of the people of alcohol use disorder. The people who have families, people who have jobs, moms who are looking after the kids. These are all people who suffer from alcoholism. They’re more like you and me than this picture.
(18:06): But that’s not the stigma is, and the stigma is you have to have crashed and burned and lost everything. And when I went into recovery, I had a house and I had a spouse and I had three kids and I had a couple cars in the driveway. And 16 years on, I’ve got a house and I’ve got a spouse and I’ve got a couple cars and I’ve got three kids and I have two grandkids. Looking on the outside, David, nothing changed. Well, on the outside, nothing did. But on the inside, I’m a dramatically different person than that person who went to his first meeting 16 years ago.
Rob Anspach (18:51): For me, it was never about experimenting with all the thousand different tastes and drinks, and I can’t remember all those names was just, I saw what it was doing with friends and family. I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. And granted, sometimes I even stutter without alcohol. My God. Plus I wasn’t a terrible drunk, but I didn’t like the person I became when I was drunk. And that only happened a few times. But I think social media right now is, I’m not saying it’s intentionally helping people become alcoholic, but people are posting their drinks when they go to the bar and they’re posting all these pictures and it’s like, how do you avoid that? How do you turn that off?
David Greer (19:58): Yeah, I think there’s the whole kind of, moms deserve a glass of wine at the end of the day. They work hard kind of philosophy, which is also very prevalent in social media. And for certain people, not all that one glass turns into two turns into a bottle, turns into a couple bottles every day,
Rob Anspach (20:22): And they’re still moms. I, I’ve made the mistake of posting that I was drinking a beer or I posted it, but it hasn’t been for years and just I don’t want to do it anymore.
David Greer (20:36): And thank you. Thank you for being a model of, I know you’re doing it for personal reasons and it doesn’t work for you. But again, I’m happy for people who model healthy behaviors without substance altering chemicals or alcohol.
Rob Anspach (20:58): I’ve never gone through the 12 steps. I don’t even know what they are. I guess I could Google ’em, but I just don’t put myself into those situations. And if I do go to a party and I happen to drink a beer, that is the limit one. And then I switch to water because if I have to drive somewhere, I do not want getting pulled over and say, you were drinking one beer. One beer affects different people. You don’t indeed, if you didn’t eat anything that whole day and you had that first thing was a beer, you could be drunk.
David Greer (21:38): You could, and especially if you haven’t drank in quite a while, but people who have an occasional drink is not the problem. Again, it’s this 10% of us who become, here’s the deal with alcohol. It’s a socially acceptable drug. And in my belief, and from all the reading I’ve done from the various health institutions and research that’s been done, alcohol is the most powerful drug on the planet. And if you drink enough, you will become an alcoholic. It’s inevitable because of the physiology and what it does to us. And also our brains are really magical. Our brains want to reach homeostasis. We put this alcohol in us, and alcohol doesn’t target any one aspect of our brain. It basically pickles our whole brain. But as soon as alcohol comes in and starts going into the brain, your brain starts issuing other chemicals to counter it.
(22:50): And that’s why for me, my experience was very much the progressive nature of the disease. It came on slowly and over a long period of time, and it’s very hard for me to pinpoint like, this is the day I flipped the switch and I became a pickle. And I couldn’t go back to being a cucumber. But I had to continue to drink more and more over the years to get the same effect because again, my brain got better and better at countering the effects. And in fact, some of the books I’ve read, if you always go to the bar at five o’clock on Friday on the same route, when you are on route to the bar, your brain will start issuing those chemicals to counteract the alcohol because it knows it’s, you’re going to put it in your body. Again, our brains are just this miraculous thing, but we do these things to ourselves.
(23:43): And I want your listeners to know I was the daily drinker for 20 years to come to a point, and I was in denial for pretty well that whole, it’s not like I thought I was an alcoholic and I tried to quit and I used alcohol to fuel up to make the highs higher, to work harder to make the lows not low. And again, it didn’t have this massively catastrophic impact on my life. But eventually I hit this point where I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I was just sick. And
Rob Anspach (24:19): What did you replace alcohol with? Did you drink more coffee? Did you drink tea? Did you drink water?
David Greer (24:26): I definitely coffee, which I already liked coffee, but I definitely upped my intake on coffee. I more replaced it with activities. Early in my sobriety, I went to a lot of meetings and I find 12 step recovery meetings to be an amazing, amazing human experience. You and I hear on your podcast today, you’re being very respectful when I’m speaking. And there’s a silence there. And that’s what I experienced in 12 step meetings is to have this group of people together and then to have someone sharing about their experience, what happened, what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now. And in almost the vast, vast majority of meetings I’ve gone to, you can hear a pin drop. I just don’t think there’s that many human experiences where we can be in a group setting where the rest of the group can be respectful to the person that’s sharing. You might not agree with what they’re sharing you often, but that’s not the point. Your point is to hold space
(25:41): For them to be able to share. To go into that experience. And I also found very early on a group of men who met every week in a private meeting, and we read from one of the pieces of literature called 12 Steps and 12 Traditions. And the thing is, we do this reading and then everyone, each would go around the room and each person would share what they took out from the reading, but then they’d also share what’s going on in their life. And what I learned, I got to see men cry and for things that were going on in their life. And I remember in that room the first time that happened, I desperately wanted to go up and kind of pat them on the back and say, it’s okay. And I eventually learned, it’s just I was excruciatingly uncomfortable with another man crying. I didn’t really want to go comfort them for them. I wanted them to stop, but it took me a long time to figure that out. But again, I’m in a space where no one’s moving, no one is commenting, no one is trying to comfort the person. They’re just leaving them with their emotions, leaving them to have the time and space to process them, to share them, and to not judge them. Man, what a gift to be able to have those experiences.
Rob Anspach (27:12): And what do you do when people judge you? When you tell ’em, I’m not drinking anymore?
David Greer (27:21): What I’ve learned is as far as I can tell, at least 99 times out of a hundred, they have some issue with alcohol. It may be themselves, maybe their relationship to alcohol. It may be a family member, it may be a parent or the family of origin that they grew up in. But what I found is really negative reactions to my recovery are all about the other person and some experience that they’ve had with alcohol. And depending on the person, I might engage with it a little bit or I might not. It’s like, okay, you’re welcome to your opinion, but I don’t really want to listen to it. If we can’t talk about something else, then I’m going to walk away. I mean, part of my growth is being better around boundaries that I don’t have to stand there and tolerate someone who’s judging me unless I choose to.
(28:20): It’s perfectly [okay] for me to walk away. Whereas before, I didn’t really have that capability. That’s one of the things I’ve learned in sobriety is okay to have boundaries, and it’s okay if people don’t like you. That’s also I’m, one of my issues is I’m a people pleaser. I know where that comes from. I know it’s kind of the family of origin issues that rose that. And it’s still pretty easy for me to be a people pleaser, but I got better at recognizing, oh, I’m just trying to please someone and I don’t need to, you can choose. One of the things I heard early in sobriety is, Hey, this is my first time in this meeting, I don’t know any of you, and I’d like you to get to know me. Then you can decide whether you like me. I thought, wow, that is a pretty powerful statement.
Rob Anspach (29:17): Well, let’s talk about powerful because you’ve come a long way, but what are the powerful things that you do to celebrate your wins now because it’s not with alcohol.
David Greer (29:33): A lot of times it’s just to sit in gratitude. Probably for the first 10 years of sobriety, I probably wrote five things I was grateful for. Every day I just built that practice and then the side of the practice wasn’t serving me and I had too many repeats rather than finding new things. But one of the things I’ve discovered is that it’s very difficult to be in fear if we are in gratitude.
(30:08): And sometimes in coaching calls with entrepreneurs, when I can really see the fear is there, I might just ask them, can we put that aside for a minute? And can you tell me two or three things you’re grateful for today? And it doesn’t have to be in the business. It can be because their little girl brought home a great drawing from school. There’s all these things happening around us that are good. The problem is our brains are wired for negativity. As therapists taught me negative sticks like Velcro and positive skips off like Teflon. You have to be very conscious about it. And what’s interesting is in the middle of this, dealing with a difficult issue with a client around their business, if I can get them to focus on a few things of gratitude, it doesn’t immediately take away the fear. And obviously it doesn’t solve the issue or take it away, but it changes the way they feel about it and it changes the way they can be open to other possibilities.
(31:11): If you’re deep into your fear about what’s going to happen, then it’s very hard to come up with creative solutions. I know you were talking about celebrations and wins, and I got onto gratitude, but just the other thing for entrepreneurs, sometimes the best thing is just go down the path of the worst case. I’ll actually take a client down the path. That happens and this happens and you lose that much money and that and that and that. Where are you? Oh, well, I’m still in business. I have less cash, but I still can keep going. Sometimes exploring that worst case scenario, it’s not quite as bad as you thought it would be,
(31:59): And then it may let you realize you’re going to survive it and now you can be more creative and open about other possible solutions. Yeah, I celebrate with time with my family. I celebrate. I mean, I often write down wins in my journal at the end of the day, not a lot, but a couple. And it’s part of my philosophy. I also coach people every business meeting you have, start with the wins. Just go around the table and spend one minute, two minutes. They can just be little tiny wins from the last 24 hours, personal, professional, whatever. And what I find is that it changes the whole dynamic in the room when you’re dealing with a big ugly challenge when everyone first starts with something that’s working, my belief is if we remind ourselves about what’s working, then it makes us better able to believe we can solve whatever problem is in front of us. It’s like
Rob Anspach (33:04): How do you mourn when someone falls off the wagon?
David Greer (33:14): I spend more time with people who haven’t. And again, trying not to judge it. I do know what that person’s, and I oftentimes hold out my hand if I’m talking to that person. It’s always welcome back in a meeting. Anytime
Rob Anspach (33:36): You don’t
David Greer (33:37): Have to be
Rob Anspach (33:37): Sold. You see these TV programs where they’re always carrying around coin or whatever’s that they’re talking about, and then you see ’em in the next scene. They can’t take life anymore and they’re drinking and not everybody gets welcomed back. And it’s nice to hear that there are people like you that no judgment come back. We’re going to start over and we’ll see if this sticks this time.
David Greer (34:12): I have friends in the program. It took 7, 8, 10 tries. And the main thing is don’t die while you’re out there. Then you don’t have a chance to come back. And I do carry, there’s my, where are we? Nice. For those on YouTube, we will be able to see, that’s my 16 year chip. And yes, I do carry it with me or until I lose it, but I just carry it as a reminder. And sometimes I carry around a 24 hour coin, some meetings give away a 24 hour chip. It’s actually a little plastic thing. And sometimes I just carry it around just for a good day, for a bad day. And also sometimes just when I meet someone who’s suffering, I just give them a chip and bless it and say, I hope this helps you.
Rob Anspach (35:06): Was there a point, and I know that you’ve been sober for a long time, but was there a point where you thought, this is really working, I’m going to stick with this, this is going to really help me. Was it right away or did you have to wait?
David Greer (35:24): I think it was fairly soon because it took me long and much denial to get to the point of admitting I had a problem. Also, Coach Kevin and I had built an extraordinary trust relationship. One of the things I knew in my heart of hearts was when I told Kevin I had a drinking problem, I knew he’d never let me off the hook. I knew he would just badger me and chase me. I didn’t know what that would look like, but I just knew once I let the secret out on the table with him, I was never going to be able to take the secret back. And what a gift that the universe put Kevin in my life. Both that he could be prepared to direct me in the right direction, but also I could have such a trust relationship. And I was fricking scared. I couldn’t imagine what eating a meal without wine was going to look like. Literally. I had no idea how I was going to operate in life without alcohol. I had no idea what the future would look like. It was all just a big unknown. And one of the advantages of going to 12 step meetings is you hear people who’ve gone through this and what their life looks like now, and you start building a vision for what your life might look like
(36:55): By hearing other people’s successes.
Rob Anspach (36:59): And I’m sure that you’ve been in meetings where there are people that were down a road even worse than yours.
David Greer (37:08): Oh, a hundred times, a thousand times
Rob Anspach (37:12): Broke. And just having that appreciation that you didn’t go down that road as far
David Greer (37:18): As we oftentimes say in meetings like you’re on the elevator crashing down towards the bottom, but it turns out if you press the button, you can get off at the first floor before it rockets into the basement and smashes everything into a thousand pieces. And I’m very, very thankful that I seem to have been able to get off at the first floor. But I remember if I pick up a drink, what I’ve observed from other people is I’ll be right back in the elevator and I’ll most likely ride it to the basement and into a thousand pieces. That’s just the most likely scenario. And here’s the deal for me, I know I have another drunk, I have no idea if I have another recovery and I don’t want to test it. It’s not worth it to me.
Rob Anspach (38:17): It took you this long to deal with it.
David Greer (38:19): Exactly.
Rob Anspach (38:20): It may take twice as long to do it again,
David Greer (38:23): Or as I say, I really think drugs were not part of my story. But now I’ve heard many stories about drugs that I think my alcoholic brain would like, oh, we should go dabble more in that. And I isolate when I drink and I’d probably get some tainted drugs and stop breathing and I’d be on my own. And that game over, I think it’s a pretty likely scenario.
Rob Anspach (38:48): They say that when you try to get rid of one, you replace it with something equally worse and let’s not do that.
David Greer (39:00): I just don’t want to test it. And I just really, I treat alcohol like it’s poison. I really do. And it’s like what? I voluntarily drink a poison. No, I wouldn’t. And I react away from it literally like it’s a poison for me. There’s 90% of the population can drink without consequences and everything is fine. It’s I’m not one of them. And I have to do what’s necessary for me. And I hope your listeners listening to this, there’s a couple of things that I really want people to take away. One is no matter what your situation is in business or in alcoholism or substance use, there is hope. I want you to know there is always hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel, especially when you don’t think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. And the other thing I want people to know is my belief is we can’t do this alone. You can’t get sober with the brain that got you there. You need the help of someone else. And there are people who are ready, able and willing to help you. And it’s the same in business when it’s really dark and it’s really awful. There are people willing to help you.
David Greer (40:30): You just have to ask, just know there is hope and just ask. There’s people like you, like me, will always put some time in helping someone. Not a ton of time. This is our work. We expect to get paid for it. And I won’t speak for you, but I’ll always put some time in with an entrepreneur to help them out of a really nice situation.
Rob Anspach (40:54): For me. I’ve had this curmudgeon attitude on social and everybody’s like, well, Rob, you’re Mr. Sarcasm, but once you’re my client, I have your back, but you got to get through my defenses first. And if you like sarcasm, if you like me being a little pain in the ass to push you, that’s what I’m going to do. But you got to understand that I’m not one of these pushover coaches that will say, yes, yes, yes. I’m going to look at you like you’re already broken and it’s my job to fix you. That’s how it’s, yeah,
David Greer (41:38): Insane. I’m going to push back. I’m going to challenge you. And if you don’t want to be challenged, then you shouldn’t hire me as your coach. I’m not a good fit.
Rob Anspach (41:47): How do people get ahold of you? Where do they go?
David Greer (41:51): coachdjgreer.com. Coach, D as in David and J as in james greer.com and top left hand side of every webpage on my website has my phone number and my email address. And if that’s too hard, I have a contact form too. You can just fill that.
Rob Anspach (42:13): I have no people, people don’t like to fill out forms and I’m always telling people, fill out the form. Well, Rob, I can just get ahold of you on Facebook, whatever, Facebook, me, LinkedIn, me, and the only calls I get are spammers. Yeah, they send whatever works, one spam calls teach me.
David Greer (42:37): That’s too bad.
Rob Anspach (42:40): And that’s what happens when you spend some time answering spam calls and then write Rob versus books. They keep calling. I guess they just want themselves in the book. But I know
David Greer (42:53): The thing is it seems to give you infinite materials for your books. And you shared in our, just before we started that you’re about to or have published your 60th book.
Rob Anspach (43:02): Well, I’ve produced 60 books. Not all of ’em are mine, the majority of them are. But yeah, since 2013, it’s now 60 books. And the last couple of weeks I’ve produced a couple ebook guides for people just that they have something that they give away on their website. But my newest series of books is called Can Go To Hell. And people are like, well, Rob, that’s kind of a provocative, not a very good title of a book, but it’s debt collectors can go to hell, HOA boards can go to hell, slum Lords can go to hell, and the IRS can go to hell.
(43:49): Basically helps you fight back against the tyranny that these people are having over you. Plus at the back of the book, there’s about 20 some templates in each book that you can use to defend your case. And they’re more consumer advocacy books. And I’m kind of leaning towards that going into the future where it’s stuff that’s evergreen that people can just pick up whenever they want, realize it. And the Rob versus books are great. I had a great time making them. They’re all sarcastic adventurers. Dealing with scammers or morons allows customer service. But I’ve realized that after COVID, nobody has a sense of humor anymore. Everybody got serious.
David Greer (44:42): Well, you do. I do. I mean, it’s a sarcastic, a sense of humor.
Rob Anspach (44:49): I still have enough material to write two more Rob versus books, but I stopped it at eight. We’ll see if I thought about writing two more, I almost have ’em ready to go. But these other books have taken, I
David Greer (45:08): Love the series I love, I like titles that get people’s attention go to hell. It gets my attention.
Rob Anspach (45:16): I helped a buddy with his book and it was called Boaz on Business, and it takes the old Testament and combines it with modern day advice. And he’s having a blast with that book. He’s taking conventions. He is selling 50, 60 of ’em at a time, and people seem to really like that theming. Then my one book, it’s called Marketing the Magic, and it’s behind the scenes Business Strategies from Walt Disney World. I go to Disney all the time, why not write a book about it? And again, people seem to really like that because those that are in tune with Walt Disney, they want to know what am I going to learn? What marketing or business strategies can I take from what they do?
David Greer (46:07): Well? And I think it’s one of the best marketing companies in the world.
Rob Anspach (46:12): Oh yeah. And granted that people don’t maybe like their films or their woke culture, but I’m talking specifically the parks and it’s like a masterclass in consumer buying habits, their philosophies, they’re everything.
David Greer (46:33): I assume the customer experience,
Rob Anspach (46:36): How
David Greer (46:36): They create the customer experience, how they enhance it.
Rob Anspach (46:39): Well, and then I go through and talk about FOMO because Disney is great at creating fomo, the fear of missing out. And I gave examples of how I do Disney and it’s called jomo, the Joy of Missing Out. And I think that same philosophy can be put towards what we’ve been talking about recovery is that if you can focus on the joy of missing out on alcohol and substitute water or tea or coffee and still feel that
David Greer (47:20): And substitute events and things, a lot of us had a drinking culture. We went out with people who the only thing we really had in common with was our drinking. And you find joy in hanging out with different groups of people now who are either in sobriety or maybe they’re not like sobriety people, but they’re people who don’t drink very much and they don’t need to drink to have a good time. And you can go out and do things together and be part of a group. And the joy of missing out of the drinking culture,
Rob Anspach (47:52): One of my old neighbors, and we’re going back 20 years, he started a band called Forbidden Sobriety. And at first I thought it was a stupid name as I got older. It’s like sobriety sometimes is a forbidden element when it comes to friends, because your friends expect you to be there as their drinking buddy, as their wingman. And it’s like, why aren’t they supporting you through your sobriety?
David Greer (48:23): Indeed. And a great question. And it’s interesting when you get, if you stopped eating bananas, no one says to you, “Hey, David, why did you stop eating bananas?” But if you stop drinking, people are like, huh, “why did you stop drinking?” And I have some stock answers. Well, because of my health, it really was for my health, and I made a decision that I wanted a healthier life, and I decided to stop drinking certain people. I don’t talk about being an alcoholic. I don’t talk about 12 step and all of that stuff. I have some other standard answers, especially people I don’t know very well, or social situations where you’re social networking. It’s just, well, it’s a choice that I made. It turns out to be an incredibly difficult choice, one of, as I said, the biggest achievement of my life. I don’t have to share at that level if I don’t want to.
Rob Anspach (49:20): But also, look at all the money you’re saving, not drinking all the time. Maybe you put it towards investments now. Maybe you put it towards your boat. Maybe you put it towards, I was going to say, Sarah goes into my boat, but I’ve seen some of your pictures and you’re selling around. You’re enjoying life.
David Greer (49:45): I’m, and I make a lot of conscious choice about how I want to live it. And that brings me a lot of joy because I make those choices and the people that I want to be with, and the people that are really important.
Rob Anspach (49:58): And I’m not saying drinking is a selfish reason, but not drinking you to be more available to your family, your grandkids. And now you’re staying alive for everybody else.
David Greer (50:19): I am.
Rob Anspach (50:20): And I’m glad you’re here.
David Greer (50:23): Thanks, Rob. I really appreciate catching up with you.
Rob Anspach (50:25): Glad this, and I hope that the listeners get something out of it, because honestly, I think alcohol consumption is, maybe it’s a personal choice, but not drinking. You’re going to live longer, you’re going to live healthier. You may not have any friends, but that’s, go
David Greer (50:55): Find different friends.
Rob Anspach (50:56): Yeah, you’re going to have different friends. Ones that value your life as much as you do.
David Greer (51:03): Exactly.
Rob Anspach (51:05): With that, I’m going to bid everybody at Adios and we’ll see you guys on the next episode. Adios.
