Join Jessica Stipanovic and me on her The Sober Living Stories Podcast. I share on my growth in business, alcoholism, and eventually into recovery. I share on how addressing my own drinking problem has positively resulted in helping other entrepreneurs succeed. A two year break sailing the Mediterranean and home schooling our three children, resulted in some amazing experiences that started me awareness of something much bigger than myself. We discuss the importance of finding support and not trying to overcome addiction alone. I also talk about my experience reconnecting with my birth family and the personal growth I went through to build relationships with them. We both emphasize the importance of doing the work and seeking help to find hope and overcome addiction.
Audio
Top Entrepreneurs in Recovery: David J. Greer’s Story of Sobriety and Success
Transcript
Jessica (00:00:06):
Welcome to the Sober Living Stories podcast. This podcast is dedicated to sharing stories of sobriety. We shine a spotlight on individuals who have faced the challenges of alcoholism and addiction in our today, living out their best lives sober. Each guest has experienced incredible transformation and are here to share their story with you. I’m Jessica Stipanovic, your host. Join me each week as guests from all walks of life share their stories to inspire and provide hope to those who need it most.
Jessica (00:00:56):
Welcome to another episode of the Sober Living Stories podcast. I’m excited to introduce our guest, David J. Greer, an entrepreneurial coach and author. With over 40 years of experience, including co-owning a global software startup, he’s now helped individuals turn dreams into reality. David specializes in guiding entrepreneurs who have faced alcoholism or addiction to thrive. Stay tuned for an inspiring conversation. Welcome, David. I’m so glad to have you on the show today.
David (00:01:28):
Thanks, Jessica. I’m really excited to be here.
Jessica (00:01:32):
Could you share your journey as an entrepreneur and explain how addressing your own drinking problem has positively resulted in helping other entrepreneurs succeed?
David (00:01:45):
Sure. So, well, lemme start at the beginning. I was conceived in Calgary, born in Edmonton because my mom was, it was a teenage pregnancy and my mom was sent to home for unwed moms and was immediately relinquished for adoption. And I was adopted into an upper middle class family as the first child. And then my sister was adopted three years later and three years after that my mom got pregnant with our brother. I mentioned that partly because my father took over my grandfather’s business that he started in 1923 in Market Square in downtown Edmonton, and it was a wholesale sanitary supply business. I come from a family of entrepreneurs,
(00:02:43):
It’s very normalized. I also don’t think my parents were alcoholics, but they were daily drinkers. Like dad traditionally came home from work at five o’clock or six o’clock, pour a scotch and soda for him and a gin and tonic for Mom, and they’d sit down and visit her best. And then we’d all sit down as a family for dinner, very kind of traditional, and I became a daily drinker. I think part of that is just, again, I don’t think they were alcoholic, but I had that modeled for me. I’m going to talk more about the entrepreneurial journey to start and then more where alcohol came into play because I think the entrepreneurial part came first. I was an academic jock geek in high school and went to keg parties with the football team and drank after basketball games, but I didn’t drink between those times.
(00:03:46):
And yeah, I would pretty heavy binge drinking on weekends or those parties. But when I was in grade nine, I got taken on a tour of the, so Edmonton is a provincial capital of the province of Alberta and got taken of a tour of a government IT department. And I was completely entrenched by spinning tape drives and computer room. And also that year I was taught octal arithmetic. We have 10 digits, which is why we count to 10, but you can use any base, you can use eight, you can use 16. I don’t want to get too technical. I said I’m a techie geek. And from grade nine I knew I wanted to take computers and business and put them together.
Jessica (00:04:32):
It was just a match. Yeah,
David (00:04:34):
Okay. And I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do it in the wholesale sanitary supply business. So later I had a lot of pressure from my dad to take over the business and that wasn’t on. I also happened to go to one of the few high schools in Edmonton with the data processing teacher. And I went to one term in the University of Alberta, and then I was in love. My girlfriend from high school had moved to Vancouver, and I quit school and I moved out to Vancouver where nine months later my girlfriend broke up with me.
Jessica (00:05:14):
Oh, but you got to Vancouver.
David (00:05:15):
But I got to Vancouver and I worked for 18 months. Then I did go back to school. I went to UBC to get my computer science degree. I asked my spouse out after a chemistry lab in first year, and she said yes. That was 46 years ago last November. Oh, wow. Congratulations. We’ve been married 41 years. Thank you very much. So all of this is precursor. I’m going to university, I’m on the rugby team, I’m drinking weekends. Rugby team is a great place to drink with, but my drinking hasn’t progressed and my travel and alcoholism is very much the nature of the disease.
(00:06:00):
And then a friend of mine introduced me to the IT manager of the local cable company, which is the biggest in North America at the time. And its systems were on a small, very new mini computer, very innovative, but it wasn’t working. And they’d hired a consultant to help rewrite it. And I did that for a couple of years, multiple time this summer and part-time. And that consultant started a software company. And when I first met him, he introduced me to this really cool product that I was totally, I didn’t even know anything about the computing platform. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was completely bamboozled. And it was a fellow and his wife, Robert and Annabelle. And so they named the company Robelle named for the two of them.
Jessica (00:06:56):
Okay. Combination.
David (00:06:57):
And it’s a made up name. So Google’s well. And in fourth year I agreed to join them as their first employee
Jessica (00:07:10):
Getting in right on the bottom
David (00:07:12):
Right on the ground floor. Now Bob knew my work ethic and knew what I could do and what I was capable of because we had worked together for at least 18 months, 20 months on rewriting this really major application. So he was the lead, but I did a lot of the grunt work and stuff.
Jessica (00:07:32):
So had you graduated from college at this point, or is this during your college?
David (00:07:35):
I have not. I’m in fourth year. I have a four year degree. And I had to tell my profs that winter that I was going to, so a condition of my employment is I had to submit an abstract to the 1980 Hewlett Packard International User Group convention. And if it was accepted, I had to write the paper and go present it. That was a condition of my employment, and I wrote the abstract, it was accepted. I did write the paper and I had to go to my profs and with no, I was taking a week off to go fly to this user group meeting and present. And I remember standing on the side of the stage and just, I don’t know if I was externally shaking, but internally
Jessica (00:08:21):
I can imagine that’s a big deal. Yeah.
David (00:08:24):
I’m 22, right. I’ve taken one public speaking course, but I’ve done almost no public speaking. And I gave that paper in presentation, which was a strategy that Bob and I pursued for 20 years. We wrote a paper every year, and then we traveled the world giving presentations to managerial and technical audiences to create belief in this small Vancouver based software company you were going to trust your whole business too. And that’s how we created trust and belief in the company. Now at that convention, one of the nights they had a big dinner, free wine, and I tried to match this Hungarian fellow and drinking wine at dinner and got really pissed. And then walking back to the hotel, a car with a couple of girls of the night pulled up and ended up pickpocketing me. And so alcohol is already, it could have happened if I wasn’t drunk. But
Jessica (00:09:30):
If we could just pause there for a minute, because as you’re saying this, I’m just thinking of a big time in my life where I waited a long time to go to something in Washington DC and a similar situation happened where you’re there for something very important that you’ve waited for and alcohol comes in and kind of deters the mission and you would never imagine, but it does. So go ahead and continue.
David (00:10:00):
And a couple years later, Bob and I hosted, it was in Washington where, so this Hewlett Packard user group had a conference every year, and in I think around ‘85, it was in Washington, DC and we hosted a really big party for a couple, a hundred, 250 people, all clients of ours. And I had already figured out we had two, we had one or two other staff members who came. We weren’t very big at that point, but I remember asking them to just keep replenishing me with water. I had noticed that at these kind of events, I just drank continuously.
Jessica (00:10:40):
So you were realizing and recognizing that there was a little bit of abnormal, abnormal normality in your drinking? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
David (00:10:52):
It turns out, not that I was going to do anything about it, but I did have where for all to recognize that I had this pattern. And we continued building the business. Karalee and I continued building our life. At what point did I become a pickle? I don’t know exactly when I became a pickle, but I can tell you that in 1989, Karalee got pregnant with our first child, Jocelyn, and she committed to quitting drinking for the pregnancy. And I committed to stopping drinking to support her. And that lasted 24 hours.
Jessica (00:11:37):
24 hours. So can you explain to listeners that don’t know what your pickle reference is.
David (00:11:43):
In recovery, we talk about the point where, so once a cucumber becomes a pickle, and my wife actually loves to pickle cucumbers and make pickles as it happens, but once you become a pickle, you can’t go back to being a cucumber. And so what we say in recovery is that there comes a point where you are so beholden to the alcohol, you can never go back to drinking normally.
Jessica (00:12:12):
Right. And physically, brain chemistry, physically. And so
David (00:12:15):
Yeah,
Jessica (00:12:17):
Exactly. You cross over that line. You
David (00:12:19):
Cross over
Jessica (00:12:19):
That line to talk about. Right.
David (00:12:21):
And for me, there’s two attributes that makes me identify as an alcoholic. he The first is if I pick up the first drink, I don’t know what the N drink will be, will it be three? Will it be 10? Will it be 15?
Jessica (00:12:40):
I don’t know.
David (00:12:40):
Once I put alcohol in my body, my body just keeps wanting to put more into it. And then I have a mental problem in that the next time I think about picking up a drink, I completely forget about the last time, which was usually for 20 years, I was a daily drinker. It was the previous day thinking that somehow it’ll be different today. Oh, I’ll only have three.
Jessica (00:13:06):
It’s like that. We forget. And that initiation of craving that happens and obsession of the mind, and then it goes into craving. And then what do they say? One is …
David (00:13:23):
One is too many, a hundred not enough,
Jessica (00:13:25):
Right? Correct.
David (00:13:27):
That’s the way I’ve heard it said, I don’t know about a hundred, but 20, right towards the end, I was probably close to that on a daily basis.
(00:13:44):
And then two years later we got pregnant with our second child. And I don’t even think I pretended to quit for Kevin. And then a couple of years after that. So back to being an entrepreneur. Bob and Annabelle were the founders of Robelle. We built it up, was actually only they hired one other person the same month they hired me. And the four of us actually built the business for five years without anyone else. And we grew revenue about 25% a year, which is quite a remarkable feat I now know. But in 1991, Annabelle wanted to retire and I was offered the chance to buy her shares, which was going to take all of the capital that we’d saved over the last previous five or eight years as a down payment. And then I had to pay her quarterly payments and if I missed one, she could claim all the shares back, which is a fairly standard deal, but it’s very high stress. And I came out of an accountants meeting working on the planning for that with tears stringing down my face. I’m like 34, I’ve got kids four and two and I’m going to take this on. But I went ahead with it. And then I’m now a co-owner of this company, and now I’ve arrived. Now I’m a big shot. And by the way, I’ve been drinking all this time, but now I have even more excuses to drink.
(00:15:25):
And It continues on. I use alcohol to power up the highest higher to make the lows not quite so low.
Jessica (00:15:34):
Manage the stress. A lot of success. Maybe a lot of stress too. Yeah.
David (00:15:40):
A lot of it’s since learned since I got sober and done a lot of personal work. I have a perfectionist, but I’m also a high performing alcoholic. Everyone around me was completely surprised I was an alcoholic.
Jessica (00:15:54):
Yes. Okay. Yes. I can relate to that as well. I remember that saying, are you sure?
David (00:16:00):
Didn’t Stumble. Didn’t slur words. I was like a man, I could drink a lot and hold it.
Jessica (00:16:08):
Right. But you knew at that point you knew internally that you did have a drinking problem that needed to be addressed.
David (00:16:19):
I think in my heart of hearts I did, but there was no way I was in denial for the longest time.
Jessica (00:16:23):
Sure, okay.
David (00:16:25):
I think my inner, inner most self knew that, but I wasn’t in any way willing to admit it.
Jessica (00:16:32):
Not yet. Yeah.
David (00:16:33):
Yeah. It’s still going to be a while actually. So fast forward to the end of 2000. Bob and I have a major disagreement on the future of the company. We can see the end of this computing platform we specialized in. We don’t know exactly when the end is going to come, but it’s coming. And Bob wants to milk the market till the last customer leaves and turn out the light. And I’m like, we’ve built this incredible team. We do things that most software vendors never can do. I want to take a little more risk, a little more money and move it in new directions. And I think each strategy was viable. They were not complimentary. And Bob and I got into a very major, as I like to tell people, Bob and I had one major disagreement in 20 years [and it] ended in divorce.
(00:17:24):
So he [Bob] ended up in 2001, we had a very acrimonious time, very emotional emails and blaming me for things that I’d never done. And from afar. So he moved to the Caribbean island of Anguilla. We were many time zones and miles apart, we’ve just grown apart, I think is really what had happened. But by we settled the disagreement by him ending in the end, buying me out. So on the street in early 2001, and I haven’t noticed this thing called the dot com meltdown, I’m trying to chase deals, but this is not a good time. Chase deals. And someone I got introduced to who helps senior executives find new positions, she took me to lunch. And then we went to her office and she sat me down. She said, David, the kids will never be 11, nine and five again. And she said, do you need to work right away? And then she said, when I had a career break like yours, I went to Australia and I bought a VW van, and I drove around for a year. And if your listeners can imagine the most cartoonish light bulb going off over my head
with the words Aha.
Jessica (00:18:42):
Right. It’s like someone gave you permission to jump in and reset in a different way that honored your family.
David (00:18:50):
Yes.
Jessica (00:18:51):
Wow. And that just recently happened to me. Same words, similar sentence, just a complete light bulb moment, 8, 11, 18. I can relate to that. Very grateful for that person, huh?
David (00:19:09):
Oh, I massively, so lemme tell you. Yeah.
Jessica (00:19:13):
What did that result in for you? I can’t wait to hear.
David (00:19:18):
I’ve been a sailor growing up. My parents had a cabin on Pigeon Lake, which is south and west of Edmonton. We had owned boats since, well, since the year I graduated from university, we’d owned a couple of different sailboats over a 20 year period. Our kids had grown up on sailing like weeks and weeks every summer on the boat or weeks and weekends. Very comfortable on the water.
We commissioned a sailboat in the south of France and we took our three kids and we homeschooled them for two years while sailing more than 5,000 miles in the Med.
Jessica (00:19:56):
That’s incredible.
David (00:19:58):
It’s the most amazing legacy we have as a family.
Jessica (00:20:02):
That’s wonderful. That is wonderful. So your life went that. So talk a little bit about that and then.
David (00:20:12):
Yeah. I got to tell you, the Mediterranean is a fantastic place to be. An alcoholic
(00:20:21):
Beer costs about half what it costs in Canada because we are very taxed. Alcohol or wine costs, about half beer, about two thirds. Every port you pull into has a shore side restaurant or three or four that serves cold beer on tap. So my alcoholism continued on full board, but a couple of things happened. One was we did a lot of … the Med looks small in a world globe, but it’s actually quite big when you can only travel at seven miles an hour. It takes a long time to get anywhere. We’d explore an area, then we’d do very long 24 or 48 or 72 hour passages like continuous day and night.
(00:21:09):
And on our second overnight passage, which was a little more than a day and a half across the Western Mediterranean Sea, so you think kind of the part underneath France and Italy in the Med, my son Kevin, who was 10 at the time, was on watch with me in the middle of the night. And as far as we could see above us was the Milky Way. And we kept mistaking stars on the horizon for the lights of boats. It was that clear. And I think it was once I got sober, I really went back to that experience. I really think it was the universe really trying to touch me, but I didn’t know it at the time, although I did really appreciate and understand the magic of it in the moment. Sure. In that particular moment, I was sober because of the 20-25 overnight passages that we did. I never drank on any of them and I didn’t even think about not drinking the lives of my family was at stake.
Jessica (00:22:20):
Yeah. You had mentioned you were a high performance alcoholic in business, and I was just going to ask, did that travel over to your family when you were on a break? How does that transfer? Over where you’re caring for your family?
David (00:22:40):
Yeah, you still have to be hyper. You can’t believe the number of roles that you live as parents and sailors. You’ve got to be navigator, you’ve got to be mechanic, you’ve got to be engineer, you got to be stores supply. Just getting food for five people, including two, just about, well, one became a teenager and they were big, fast growing kids, so you need a lot of food just getting the food on board, cooking it every day, and then the whole homeschooling piece. It’s flat out, and obviously we, and I had other cruisers would meet us up with times to remind me that the adventure of our travels was schooling and we should just kind of back off a little on the formal schooling sometimes and just have play days. And We started doing more of that.
Jessica (00:23:35):
Yeah, that’s wonderful. I love that.
David (00:23:37):
And just sitting at anchor for a week and maybe not having at any school and just going swimming every day. Well, and I’m very to a very high performing individual. She is a physiotherapist and she started her own physio clinic and had the biggest physio clinic in the west side of Vancouver, which she sold just before this trip. So she could spend time with the kids. We had three kids and two businesses. It really was free.
Jessica (00:24:05):
That’s a lot. That’s a lot.
David (00:24:11):
I had all these passages where I didn’t drink. And again, I did note that and I journaled about it, but it wasn’t enough to want to stop as soon as we got back to shore. The first way I’d celebrate, no matter what time it was, was with a beer with a drink? Of course. How else would you celebrate?
Jessica (00:24:32):
Right.
David (00:24:34):
So came back from that trip in 2003 and then for three years I was an angel investor, I invested in young startups and was on boards of directors and worked for options. And I didn’t realize it was just completely unfulfilling work. Most of the people were just, they were where I was when I was 24, 25, a couple of years into the business. We grew the business so fast, we learned things so fast and I’d accumulated so much knowledge over the years, mostly by the seat of our pants. And I found that it took a year to bring a CEO up one rung of the ladder. It was just, I didn’t have that much patience. I took one of my young CEOs to an event by a guy by the name of Vern Harnish and he has something called the one page strategic plan.
(00:25:25):
And a lot of my technology entrepreneur friends in Vancouver swore by this one page strategic plan. And I went to educate this young CEO, but also for myself, which I did. And part of Vern’s stuff, what makes it so different is that you start by looking at three or five years and where do you want to be? Where will your markets be in three to five years and coming up with the four or five key capabilities and trust that you need to move into in that timeframe. Then you work backwards to what you want to do next year or this year, and then you work backwards to what do you want to do this quarter? And we grow rule, be the kind of way a lot of entrepreneurs do. We will, we’ll do what we did last and we’ll do a little bit better this year, but not very strategic. I mean, towards the end, Bob and I became much more strategic about the business and hey, we made a lot of money. We were massively successful.
(00:26:27):
But I wonder if we had used the one page strategic plan all the way along what we might’ve achieved and done. But what was really important was in the back of the room, were two business coaches. I went and talked two of them or to both of them, and one of them coach Kevin Lawrence made me more uncomfortable than I had been in a lot of years. And he looked around the, I didn’t realize how unfulfilled I was until I had the conversation with him and I had tears in the corners of my eyes. And I think he just did a simple statement. It was about a hundred people in the room, and he just looked around. He said, “David, there’s like a hundred people here and every one of them needs your help.” And I’d been trying to find people I could help for three years. And anyways, I took his card and I took it home and it sat next to my phone and about once a week I look at it and then I look at the phone and the phone weighed at least 10,000 pounds. And then three weeks later, Kevin called me.
Jessica (00:27:28):
He called you.
David (00:27:28):
Okay. He called me, he said, “Hey, do you remember me from the Vern Harnish event?” And I said, yes. Meanwhile, I don’t tell him, oh, I haven’t thought about much else for the last three weeks. But I do remember you. And I hired him on my 50th birthday, August 9th, 2007. And when he worked with Kevin at that time as a one-on-one client of his, your opening coaching session was 16 hours to eight hour days. Kevin is my kind of guy, you’re all in or you’re all out.
Jessica (00:28:06):
That’s all in immediately.
David (00:28:08):
There is no in-between whatsoever. And I had to agree to pay him for 16 hours and he charged a lot.
(00:28:21):
We started a nine year relationship of working together as his is my coach for me as his client. But 18 months after we started working together, we had cleared away pretty well, all the clutter and cleared off the table and all the things. And we got me sort of started in something, although was still kind of working for upside, not getting any salary. And then on January 26th, 2009, I took and drank my last beer, which I about 10 30 at night. And I carefully kind of planned that and I made sure there was no other beer in the house. And the way I worked with Kevin was I was to send to him the topic for the next, send him the topic for the next day’s coaching session. I had a coaching session in the morning with him the next day, which was the Tuesday, January 27th, and we had a coaching session. I wrote the email, I said, the topic for tomorrow’s coaching session is my drinking.
Jessica (00:29:26):
Wow. What do you think in the days following up to that last beer, what was going on inside of you that you were addressing this? I got sick.
David (00:29:38):
Sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Jessica (00:29:45):
What did that look like for you? What did you being sick and tired look like?
David (00:29:51):
Just conceding defeat. I’m just like this. And it’s like my version of alcoholism is you don’t drink in the morning, otherwise you’d be an alcoholic. Right. It used to be I didn’t start drinking until 4:30 or 5:00. And then in the previous year working with Kevin at that time kept coming down until now it was like 3:00.
Jessica (00:30:23):
Yeah. And you talked about it early on, the progression. Yours is more about the progression.
David (00:30:27):
Yes, absolutely. And just the sheer amount of work, making sure you got to go get booze, I drank, you need to go to the liquor store three or four times a week just to get it in and out of the house. It’s actually harder to get the empties out than it is to get the full ones in. But I go to four different liquor stores in a week because it’s the same. People saw me, what would they think?
Jessica (00:30:54):
Sure. It’s lot of work’s crazy,
David (00:30:56):
But it’s crazy. Clearly I must be thinking I’m an alcoholic, but I don’t admit it. I’m still in denial.
Jessica (00:31:05):
Right. It’s an incredibly complex, and I mean, you’re talking about going out to the store and going to the different stores, but the mental capacity and space that takes too. So just imagine when that’s gone, how much more time you have to focus on what matters.
David (00:31:27):
And a bunch of red lines, I’ll never drink in the car, then I’ll never drink in the car when it’s moving. Then I won’t have more than one beer while the car is moving and going down to the beach and having three tall cans. I’ve been in an event downtown all day to preload before I get home. I know I can’t go in my office and have a bunch. And I was super expert at hiding it both in the house.
Jessica (00:31:54):
That’s a lot of work. It’s exhausting.
David (00:31:56):
It’s exhausting.
Jessica (00:31:57):
It’s the planning and just the dishonesty. We don’t even realize the dishonesty that’s involved to ourselves. And then it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting.
David (00:32:12):
One thing I did know is I built this trust relationship with Kevin, and I knew when I pressed send on that email, I knew that jig was up because I knew that Kevin would never let me off the hook.
(00:32:26):
I knew that was the one way street. I didn’t know what it looked like. I was completely afraid. I couldn’t imagine what it was going to be like to have dinner without wine. I was of what my life would be without alcohol. I didn’t realize that for many years. We get to the coaching session the next day and Kevin asked me a couple things about my drinking. It turns out that at his summer place in Washington State where he went every summer, there was kind of communal fire pits. And he would sit around and he’d met a person with 20 years in 12 step recovery that he talked to many times about his journey and 12 step recovery. So Kevin coached me to go to a meeting.
Jessica (00:33:13):
So he was already in 12 step recovery,
David (00:33:17):
Kevin wasn’t, but his friend was. A summer friend who sat around the campfire with him. So he knew something about 12 step recovery and he coached me to go and I had a really huge aversion. I don’t know where that aversion came from.
Jessica (00:33:42):
Yes, sure. Some people do. I think probably it’s just the stigma of alcoholism and still that vision.
David (00:33:42):
Absolutely. A guy with a raincoat and a paper bag. I committed to him to go to a meeting by that Friday and being the overachiever that I am that afternoon, I went online and I had a technical networking event and presentation that I was attending downtown that I knew finished at eight or a little before. I looked online and lo and behold, at 8:30 there was going to be a meeting, there was going to be a quarter of a block off the main road I would be driving down
Jessica (00:34:21):
So the universe once again, Just lined it right up for you.
David (00:34:24):
Honestly, my heart of hearts, the universe put Kevin in my path I could get sober. That’s what I truly believe.
Jessica (00:34:34):
So often there’s that pivotal person that you trust enough or that’s just placed right in front of you at exactly the right time that you’re going to go ahead and
David (00:34:44):
Yeah. And he was it where you need to be. Kevin was the first person in the world. I admitted I had a drinking problem to. And this particular meeting was in a Legion. Legions are like social venues with bars for veterans. I walk in the front door and the doors to the bar are open and there’s beers on two or three tables and I just stand there.
(00:35:03):
And then a couple of people going to the meeting, they had that sixth sense of this deer caught in the headlights. And they said, oh, are you looking for a meeting? 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 actually happened to have exactly 12 steps coincidentally. And there was kind of a back social room and then the meeting in another room. I kind of hung out in the back and two young ladies came out and welcomed me and were just so, so nice to me. In fact, they probably had the service position greeter, but rather waiting for me to come to them, they came to me and I did end up sitting at the end of one row, but halfway out. And at that time in the meetings, three quarters of the way through, they asked, is there anyone new who would like to stand and introduce themselves? And I sat on my hands and I sat on my hands. And then after 15 or 20 seconds, which seemed like about five minutes, I stood up and I said, I’m David. I’m an alcoholic. And I think for the first time I admitted my truth and I didn’t really know what it meant. I don’t think I really understood what it meant, but I did it.
Jessica (00:36:34):
Sure. You spoke to the fear. And I think that to listeners, I would imagine whoever’s not there yet. That is one of the biggest fears I remember. Well, how could I possibly live without having wine at dinner? How can I possibly go here and not drink that? I mean, it just was Ingrained in my life as such a part of it. To imagine not doing it anymore is just seems almost impossible
Jessica (00:37:04):
You have a birthday party, how is that going
David (00:37:04):
To be party with no booze on and all.
Jessica (00:37:07):
Those first a wedding. And it’s funny how when you walk into that American Legion or whatever it was, and you had mentioned seeing the beers fast forward now to today, you could probably walk in there, wouldn’t think anything of it, just walk right past ’em, get to your room. But that initial first couple steps, that initial maybe first six months, first year, it’s so precarious just walking through life, trying not to violate your newfound sobriety, but then the possibility, it’s just, it becomes your way of life, not drinking. And all of those initial fears, they’re just gone. We’re existing in a world that’s a drinking world and we’re completely navigating it successfully without even wanting. So that’s the real miracle of it all. That’s just so available to millions of people. It is. We can get past that first step of fear.
David (00:38:12):
And that particular meeting, I kept going to it and a couple of weeks later I made up my home group and I just recently celebrated 15 years sober.
Jessica (00:38:21):
Well, congratulations. That’s amazing.
David (00:38:23):
Thank you very much. And it’s still my home group. After COVID, we couldn’t meet there anymore for a meeting. The meeting had been in that legion for about 40 years. Oh, okay. And just changes at the Legion.
Jessica (00:38:40):
Did you move it to online? Has it been changed?
David (00:38:42):
No. We moved it to online during COVID, but we’ve moved it back to a physical location, but it’s not in the Legion anymore. And of course, as I gained time in sobriety, I was often tickled at my home group meeting because sometimes there’d be music downstairs and it’s like you suddenly hear the music come through the floor and a whole bunch of us would giggle because it’s like what are the odds that you’re having a 12 step meeting? What above a bar?
Jessica (00:39:12):
Right, right. It reminds me of, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a 12 step meeting where they’re talking about, some people are talking about drinking and someone gets says, well, I can’t come here. It just reminds me of drinking. And I’ve heard that too. And maybe I felt that a time or two, but that’s not generally the overall feel of those places. If that’s a feeling for anybody. Yeah, it actually helped because it was like I can practice a program Well and stay sober that I’m okay being I will. Okay.
David (00:39:12):
With the irony of having a meeting over top of a bar of a bar and I’m not bothered by it. I wanted to spend more time on what happened after. Please. Yeah. I did throw myself into the program within a few weeks. I found a private men’s step group that meets weekly and I meet with that. I missed the meeting last night because Karalee and I were busy where we are. We’re currently away in Mexico for a little bit, but it’s quite unusual and quite of the group I meet with weekly we’re there when I came in 15 years ago.
(00:40:31):
And those men showed me how to cry. They showed me how to express emotions. They shared with me their vision and how they came to a power, an understanding of a power greater than themselves. So that was very important in my recovery to have all of that modeling and to have that experience in a men’s only group.
Jessica (00:40:54):
Sure.
David (00:40:55):
That’s been really important. I worked the steps in AA multiple times and five years ago I started with adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families. And I’ve done their three workbooks. I just finished last year, the Loving Parent Guidebook. And that has been just another massive leap forward. But if we go back to entrepreneurism and kind of my career journey, so now I’m sober, I keep working with Coach Kevin. And over a period of years, I land a few gigs. I’m usually in senior sales and marketing roles, but where I’m working directly with entrepreneur friends of mine. I worked with a friend of mine in the Ottawa Valley who I’d known for 30 years. I worked with him for a year. And I’d spent three weeks in Vancouver in one week at the headquarters in the Ottawa Valley. And I went to a lot of rural meetings in the Ottawa Valley, which they’re a little different, but still good, strong recovery. And then I got a senior position as VP of marketing for this company in Vancouver in the telematics business. So that’s where you take a piece of hardware that’s bolted to a car or a truck and it tracks it in real time. And then fleet managers can use information that comes from there to manage their fleets better to know where their vehicles are. It was publicly traded like 35 million a year business.
(00:42:30):
And I came out of that in 2014 and I realized that I never wanted to prove to anyone again that I could work hard. I worked as hard in those three years as maybe I did ever in my working career. And I was in my mid-fifties. And It turns out that I have a taskmaster spirit that lets me get a lot done, but it also makes me work very hard. And so part of the personal growth through working steps in all my programs and therapy work is trying to be aware of and parent my task master spirit ’em loose when it really helps me. But at other times it’s like, I don’t need you right now.
(00:43:17):
And so working with Coach Kevin also, I made the decision that I wanted to give to the gifts other entrepreneurs that Kevin had given to me. And I made the decision to become a business coach, and I took my coach training with the coach training institute, which I still think is one of the best coach training organizations in the world. I wrote my book, Wind In Your Sales Vital Strategies that Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth, which is a book targeted to entrepreneurs, especially owner founders who only ever had one business kind of targeted to them. Once you kind of roll through a few businesses, your experience kind of multiplies. And every chapter of the book starts with the sailing analogy, why it’s called Wind in Your Sails. And a third of the book are case studies of other entrepreneur friends of mine. A third of the content that’s interesting is not my hard won wisdom, but other people’s hard won wisdom.
(00:44:22):
And I started down this coaching path. I’m a business coach and I also facilitate strategic planning using that one page strategic plan that I mentioned early in our, it turns out I’ve specialized into that. And my former coach Kevin is also one of the world’s best experts in that template and that framework. I learned a lot from him and I’ve been facilitating with that framework for nine years now. Kevin stopped doing one-on-one coaching. He wanted to focus more on when I facilitate and he facilitates. It’s always the entrepreneur and their senior management team. And so Kevin stopped doing one-on-one coaching, so he could focus more on that and introduced me to his coach Nan O’Connor in Atlanta, who I worked with for seven years now. We just celebrated last month a very different kind of relationship.
(00:45:21):
And again, each person was perfect in the time I was in. And then Nan kept kind of broadening me a little bit because she just, we’d get on some, I’m coming say I’m talking about my upcoming cake or something right with her. And she just kept telling me how pure my energy was around when I talked about it and how no matter what question she asked me, and especially from a business perspective, but it didn’t matter, whatever she asked, I always had a ready answer, which mostly come out of my 12 step program and my experience. And I guess about three years ago, maybe slightly longer, I decided to break my anonymity and recorded a whole bunch of videos and got much more public, started doing podcasts like this and became more active about trying to find entrepreneurs who were challenged with alcoholism or addiction who’d like to have some coaching. And it turns out naturally, even before I did that, I attracted a couple people. It turned out that had problems. And then some people have approached me because I’ve been on podcasts like this and said, “I listened to you on such and such a podcast and I’ve got four years of recovery and clean and sober and I have the business I’m running and I’d like some help.”
Jessica (00:47:02):
Well, I really commend you for that because I know one that it is hard if you have been privately working, your program of recovery to break your anonymity is a large feat. It’s a process and it’s not always easy to do, but it speaks volumes about you. And I love that what she had said, you had pure energy about it because oftentimes that’s really what we’re giving. And I believe that about you just having met you for a short time, your humility about all of the successes that you’ve had in business paired with your recovery really comes through. And I think one of the benefits, I mean we are in such a digital world right now, and there are so many people who are interested in becoming an entrepreneur, but they don’t know how or what the steps are. And I think by, I love that strategic planning that you talked about because some people can go on for years and not get ahead. And what you’re essentially saying is, wow, in this one page strategic planning, we can facilitate that and get that started so much quicker. And I think when you pair that with active or recovered alcoholics and addicts, we already have this high performance get it done. And it’s just a good combination. So many people are so highly successful that have recovered. And to pair that with one of the biggest growing platforms out there, it’s a really great combination.
David (00:48:47):
And one of the reasons, the one page plan is that it also, the financial metrics are mashed up with the actual what you’re going to do, your goals. And the level of financial literacy is still a real challenge. I am working with a couple young guys. They’re in their late twenties. They started a business when they were 18. They’re one of Canada’s largest T-shirt, custom T-shirt producers. But I’ve had to do a lot of work around financial literacy and them understanding, as I tell them, it’s not about the numbers and the financial statement, it’s about what the numbers mean to your business. And that’s a big huge step. And alI worked with entrepreneurs who don’t really understand how much money they’re making or not making, and
Jessica (00:49:39):
I’m like, correct,
David (00:49:40):
Yes, revenue is ego, profit is about what it’s all about. You’d be better off having lower revenue if you can make more money.
Jessica (00:49:50):
Yeah. Yeah.
David (00:49:51):
Because the making money, the whole point and then, and
Jessica (00:49:57):
Just to have such a good background in that.
David (00:50:00):
So that’s just pure business coaching. But then the alcoholism piece is how do you go to networking events? I mean, some of it’s just pure 12 step recovery stuff, but it’s just, I can help from an entrepreneurial point of view. When you go to networking events, always have a drink in your hand, even if it’s a glass of water, because people will come up and offer to get you a drink and they’ll ask you less questions. If you a drink in your hand, do you have an exit strategy? Even today, I still occasionally get triggered.
(00:50:36):
I’m currently living and working in Puerto Valdo, Mexico, and I would be lying if I didn’t say occasionally walking down the Malecon and looking at all of those drinks on all of those tables. My brain goes, I think we should sit down and order a drink. What if you’re in a networking event and that happens? What is your, and especially if you’re there with your spouse, if you talk to your spouse, have you formulated what the exit strategy is going to be? And I work with entrepreneurs who are in super high end sales. If you’re doing a half a million or a million dollar deal, typically the CEO, when you’re getting close to closing, is going to fly down to wherever the customer is. And there’s going to be meetings and then probably a big dinner with the higher ups and the bosses of the boss, maybe the chief financial officer, maybe even the CEO. And one of my clients a few years ago who isn’t an alcoholic, but he went down for one of these things, the kind of business he’s in, and he said, “David, is it normal to everyone have two drinks before dinner and a bottle of wine each?” And I said, “well, in that situation, that is normal. And I would call that alcoholic drinking. That’s seven drinks per person nonstop.”
Jessica (00:51:55):
Sure.
David (00:51:57):
I can’t tell you whether any of them are alcoholics. I can’t tell you it’s alcoholic drinking. And I coach people with, so get, if you need to be in those situations, how do you handle the booze if you don’t want to, including this particular individual because he wanted to drink less and he didn’t want to feel forced into having to drink with everyone. Right.
Jessica (00:52:22):
Yeah. And I think too, with you have a strong 12 step recovery program, however, a lot of people are not going that don’t go that route but have problem drinking or they talk about gray area drinking or are sober curious, and they have all these different names on it now in the digital realm. If they’re coming in and they’re wanting to navigate that, but don’t have the backing of the support of the community, the 12 step you coming in and being an entrepreneur coach and having that as your background is so helpful because they’re getting both of that and they’re able to navigate situations and those exit strategies and just so small, but such a good preplanned, bring your own vehicle, have a way to leave, have something in your hand. It’s so smart, so simple, but it just kind of takes that whole thing off of you and you can just walk in that whole, Hey, what are you going to have to drink that? Is that my drink? To keep it in your hand? Just these simple strategies. You don’t want to take a sip of something that’s not yours and violate everything. But yeah, I think it’s a great combination for success.
David (00:53:33):
I do have to be careful of as a business coach and someone in recovery is sometimes the subject has kind of got borderline where I’ve had to say to clients, look, if you want me to be your sponsor, I’ll be your sponsor, but in which case, I cannot be your business coach.
Jessica (00:53:49):
Sure, sure. I could see that,
David (00:53:51):
Right?
Jessica (00:53:52):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
David (00:53:54):
It’s your choice, which is basically everything I do in coaching. I try and make the client’s choice, but I’ve had to say that now in every case, the person’s decided, no, I need your business expertise more. I can find someone else to do the recovery piece. Sure.
Jessica (00:54:11):
Okay. So you give them a choice.
David (00:54:14):
But I give ’em a choice then. Yeah. And then I say, I give him call. We spent half of this call on recovery and let’s move it on to another topic.
Jessica (00:54:22):
Great. Right. Great. You had a question. It’s an excellent combination. Yeah, sure. We talked a lot about business. I think it’s such an incredible strategy you have for coaching future entrepreneurs. How has you being alcohol free, enhanced your family? You had made that choice to do homeschooling on the Mediterranean with your wife and your kids. So as a dad, a wife, how has that enhanced your family life?
David (00:54:55):
I mean, I’m much more present with my kids. I now have two grandkids. I’m very thankful I can be a hundred percent with them. And I think I was there and present 80% of the time, my wife and kids, because family is really, really important to me. But I wasn’t a hundred percent, and it was always in the way. And I did things like drunk driving with my children in the vehicle. That was some of the early amends that I owned. But we’re kind of getting close to the end of time, and I’d like to wrap up with a bigger story about family if I could.
Jessica (00:55:34):
Absolutely.
David (00:55:35):
When I started about how I grew up, I was conceived in Calgary, and then I was relinquished for adoption in Edmonton after nine years of sobriety. And after 60 years of life, I decided that I would look into my birth families, and I had to do a lot of personal growth work because I was still codependent with my mother and too worried about what her opinion or thought would be and hurting her. And I had to get to a point of my Mom is an adult and I need to do what’s right for me, and if it doesn’t work for her, that’s her issue, not my issue. So there was quite a bit of personal growth to get to that spot,
(00:56:20):
And I found them. You did. I found both my maternal and paternal. It was a teenage pregnancy. And then afterwards they went their separate ways and they had separate families. I have two half sisters and three half brothers, and my birth father and my three half brothers are all bigger than me. And I’m like six foot two, 240 pounds with a 46 inch chest. If you stand next to me, you’re going to go, you’re a big dude. And then if you see my brother stand next to me, you’re going to be like, oh, you come from Giants. But I want to talk about the first person I reached out to five years ago this month was my birth mother. And I explained why I was calling, and her name is Terry Ridley. Ridley is my maternal family name. And she said, I dunno what you’re talking about. So denial.
Jessica (00:57:23):
Okay.
David (00:57:24):
Then I said, well, I looked through the papers that Alberta Adoption Registry Services gave me, and she just interrupted me, “those damn people, they never should have given you any information.” She’s now blaming this organization for the topic that 30 seconds ago she said she knew nothing about. Right. And then she said, “I want nothing to do with you.”
Jessica (00:57:50):
Oh, wow.
David (00:57:54):
And that hurt. Sure. And others eventually reminded me that my birth mother doesn’t even know who I am, so she can’t be rejecting me. She’s rejected the experience of having me. Well, it didn’t feel like that, right? But I went for a long walk. It was a beautiful February day, and I called my coach, I called my sponsor, and then an hour later, Karalee called me and said, “do you want to still be alone? Are you ready for the company?” And I said, oh, I said,” another half hour walking, I’ll be at the Sylvia Hotel. Why don’t you meet me in half an hour there?” I was ready then to share it with her. But the beautiful thing there, the walk put me back in nature, which is one of the ways I connect with my higher power. And I had just had so many tools to process it I could take on the emotional burden. But then by bed time that night, I had a good night’s sleep. I wouldn’t say I was whole about it, but
Jessica (00:58:54):
Well, thank you for sharing that.
David (00:58:56):
And then I just got two more pieces. I’ll go pretty quick. I know we’re almost out of time. Okay.
(00:59:03):
A few days later, I emailed my sister and I’d warned my birth mother, I was going to do this and she didn’t want me to, but I was still told her I was going to do it. And then about a week after that, my younger sister wrote me a beautiful letter welcoming me to the Ridley family. Wow. It came as an email, but it was actually a letter. And I’ve subsequently built relationships with both of them. I’ve built relationships with my uncle who was only seven when I was born. He didn’t even know that Terry was pregnant. And with Terry’s older sister, who’s my Aunt Marty. I built relationships with all these people. And last April, my elder sister called me and said, Terry’s just been admitted to hospital with a brain tumor, and she doesn’t have very long to live. It was like Saturday, Sunday, I talked to my sisters. Monday I flew out Calgary, and Tuesday morning my uncle called me and invited me to the hospital. All of my Ridley family wanted me there. At that point, my birth mother was unconscious, so she couldn’t object to my presence there. I was in the presence of my birth mother for the first time since I was born.
Jessica (01:00:22):
Oh, that’s an incredible story.
David (01:00:25):
And we just all sat those, both my sisters and my nephew and my uncle, Jim’s daughter and his granddaughter, who was only at that point about a month old, we’re all there and Aunt Marvey. And two hours later, Terry took her last breath and passed away. And we had shed a lot of tears. I dunno if I was shedding tears for Terry or what was never to be, or just for the Ridley family, we’re all hurting. And after we all settled down, my Uncle Jim came to me and said, David, do you want a picture with Terry? And my brain went, no a way. There’s still resentment there. I felt work to do.
(01:01:18):
But my loving parent from ACA said, “David, if you don’t take this picture, you’ll never have a picture of you and your mom.” And I said, “yes, Jim, I’d like you to take the picture.” And I kneeled down on one knee next to her in the hospital bed, and Jim took the picture. And a minute or so later, I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek and wished her well. And the day after my uncle and my two sisters went to where she was living, she was living on her own, but in an assisted living facility. And they had told me that she was an alcoholic, but I didn’t know if she was a practicing alcoholic right to the end. But there was open bottle of Rye [Whiskey] in the kitchen and there was a case of 12 in the closet. I think that she probably was drinking a bottle of Rye [Whiskey] day right up to the very end. I’ll never know.
Jessica (01:02:13):
From the very beginning when you said you were adopted, I was thinking of that genetic piece, that genetic predisposition that was going to play a part for you. And It sounds like it did.
David (01:02:23):
Yeah. And on my paternal side, my aunt’s recovering an alcoholic and my birth.
Jessica (01:02:28):
So you were connected to her in more of a way than you thought, perhaps? Yeah.
David (01:02:32):
Yes, exactly. Well, and my maternal brother, Gary, died in 2015 of Cirrhosis of the Liver, the direct result of his alcoholism. And I didn’t connect until 2018, I never had an opportunity to meet him.
Jessica (01:02:51):
And just a testament to all the reconciliation and the restoration that happens in recovery, to have your entire family in that room after reconnecting with them is really quite incredible.
David (01:03:03):
An amazing, amazing experience.
(01:03:07):
And I’ve also really built strong relationships with my birth father and with my paternal brothers as well. I mean, I put a lot of time and energy into doing that. I have my family of origin and my mom’s still alive, 96. I try and get out to Edmonton and see her every six months. I talk to her every couple of weeks. I talk to her on the weekend. And my brother and sister still live in Edmonton, I have this very large constellation of family. Yeah, it sounds like. Yeah. That’s wonderful. I wanted to end on that story. That’s not the business piece, but it is the recovery piece. It is that work, doing the work that is suggested to us and that personal growth. Because if I hadn’t done the personal growth, I couldn’t have got to that point where I think I was ready to do it.
Jessica (01:03:56):
Sure. Could you leave us with listeners with, if they’re struggling right now with building a business with being in that whole work world and thinking they may have a problem with alcohol, what would you say to them?
David (01:04:12):
There’s hope. Exactly. There’s hope is what I tell people. And the other piece is you can’t do it alone. The brain that gets addicted, that is in alcoholism. Well, look at me, look at my story. I needed coach Kevin, because the brain that got me to be an alcoholic was never going to get me out of there. And the fact that I can walk down the Malecon in Puerto Vallarta and still be triggered, I mean that alcoholic part of my brain is still there.
Jessica (01:04:44):
Right. So you need that. Absolutely. Excellent.
David (01:04:48):
That’s why I still attend meetings and I stay close to the program because I know the alcoholic part of me who wants to kill me. Absolutely. But if you’re suffering, you don’t have to. There is hope there. And whether it’s 12 Step, whether it’s, there’s lots of other programs, this is the one that really worked for me. Find your solution. But again, don’t do it alone. Find someone who can help you.
Jessica (01:05:16):
Thank you so much being here today. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And if you want to further connect with David J. Greer or obtain a copy of his book, wind In Your Sails, visit www Coach D J Greer. That is coachdjgreer.com. Thank you for tuning into the Sober Living Stories podcast. If you have been inspired, consider subscribing and sharing with anyone who could use hope in their lives. Remember to stay tuned for more inspiring stories in the episodes. To come to view our featured author of the month or to become a guest yourself, visit www.jessicastipanovic.com.
