What do you look forward too?

What in your life do you look forward to? This is one question that keeps coming up consistently in my 8 month sobriety.

One thing I do know is what it was that I used to look forward to. I used to look forward to the end of my work day, and boy did I look forward to the end of the working week! But not for the reason's I should have! It was so I could drink. I could not wait to get those beers down my throat, to de-stress my day. Friday was just party night. The way I saw it, I had no commitments on Saturday, so it didn't matter how messed up I got myself because I could just sleep it off all day Saturday. At the expense of spending time with my family and kids, and at that stage of my life I did not care.

So I'd trained myself, over the course of 15 years, to look forward to drinking, to look forward to getting messed up to the point where I could not remember a thing. Even when I got to the stage of my life I knew this wasn't healthy and I should not be doing it, but I was still looking forward to it!

That is one of the biggest shifts in lifestyle I've had to deal with since being sober. I don't seem to look forward to anything like I used too, well at least look forward to anything the way I used to look forward to drinking and inevitably getting drunk!

Here in Australia we had a big horse race Tuesday just gone, called the Melbourne Cup, other wise known as The Race that Stops a Nation. This day has always been a day that I have looked forward to and really enjoyed, however this year has been the first year without it including alcohol, and guess what! My enthusiasm towards the build up and the fun I actually had on the day just wasn't there like it used to be. Don't get me wrong, I still had a good day and spent some quality time with my kids, but I ended up heading back to work not long after the race, where every other year going back to work just wouldn't be an option.

I have 3 things I look forward to now since being sober, my Family, my day job & my side projects. This isn't a bad thing by a long shot, it has allowed me to grow immensely as a father, as a partner, as an employee and as a entrepreneur so in overall, it has allowed me to grow as a person. I do feel as if something is missing, I still get that urge to have a good time, and the only way my mind seems to know how is to think about drinking.

Will this change over time? I guess only time will tell and I am going to make sure I give myself the time I need to figure out what it is in life that I can do for fun that does not including drinking!


Success built from failure,
The Alcoholic Entrepreneur

www.thealcoholicentrepreneur.com

Update

Wow another month has past! I can't figure out if I thought time went quicker while I was drinking or quicker now that I don't? I definitely am more aware of where my time goes now.

So like all my sober months prior to September, it was a busy month, I squashed in a week long family holiday down in the beautiful South West of Western Australia, and managed to pick up a virus which I am still not 100% over. But all being said and done I still managed to give this project a bit of time albeit a little less then the past couple of months and something I want to work to rectify.

Last month I spent most of the time on social media, my goal is to establish a small following across multiple channels and populate them with relevant quality information. I am starting to get a small following and hope this increase over time to help with the social media updates I recently started using a bit of software called HootSuit, which allows me to post to multiple social media channels at the same time and schedule when those post's go live, I currently have it set up to post to Facebook, Google+ & Twitter, I have been adding to Instagram (Alcoholic_entrepreneur) and Pinterest (alcoholicentrep) individually and have decided to put more focus on these two channels as I believe social media can be over whelming and you can get lost in the hustle if you do not focus on one or two channels at a time.

A big positive that came out of September is I received my first email opt in, I have had the site up now for a few months with the email opt in on a couple of the pages so to receive an opt in has given me great hope and excitement, I am still unsure and am still learning how to set up regular emails and send out to my huge email list of one person, but with time and determination this will get done.

I'm going to keep this Months update short as it doesn't feel as if I did a great deal this month and what I did do was small behind the scene social media things. But I will be making up for it in the October update.


Success built from failure,
The Alcoholic Entrepreneur

www.thealcoholicentrepreneur.com