It may take a few attempts - but so what?

Below I take a chapter from my book "Losing my Addiction" (written about a year into my quit) and learn that all it takes is succeeding just ONE more time than you fail. Here goes:

Back in the 1990’s there was a song in the charts by a band named Chumbawamba that went “I get knocked down, but I get up again”. These lyrics speak of resilience, the ability to recover quickly from a setback, a difficulty, and carry on again. Look at it maybe as triumph in the face of adversity, and we know it’s unlikely that we’ll win first time.

Taking a massive cultural shift from 1990’s clubland to traditional Japan, there’s an ancient saying

“Fall seven, Rise eight”

that encapsulates this perfectly. When we give anything a go, it is not the falling down that matters, it is the getting up and giving it another go until you succeed (rising one more time that you fall) that does. Watch a toddler learning to walk. He is not deterred when he falls, he’ll often giggle at this point, landing back down in his bum. He’ll smile his way through grabbing the sofa to hold himself steady, then stepping into the unknown of the open carpet, faltering and collapsing. He’ll relish the challenge, and never be put off by what we’d term as failure – falling. Pretty soon, he’ll be walking and having even more fun exploring the world that has opened up to him at this new height, two foot above the carpet!

Maybe you have tried to quit drinking before. Did you quit? I mean, if you did, you wouldn’t be drinking now, you wouldn’t be reading this book about quitting, would you (unless it simply interests you, in which case I’m flattered)? So now you are back, thinking about giving it another go. There’s something important here and it’s that, in spite of the adversity you have faced, the fact that you have tried to quit and failed (I guess), you are back and giving it another go. In the words of Don MacNaughton:

Adversity is often for many people a fact of life, but rather than letting difficulties keep them down, people with high resilience find a way to get back up

What it doesn’t mean is that you are immune to setbacks. Stuff happens, even to those with high resilience. The thing is that they will accept this, adapt the way they act, and overcome the difficulty.

The good news here is that you can also learn resilience, how to make yourself better at coming back. And on one of those comebacks, you’ll find your quit. McNaughton suggests the following to help build your resilience, your comeback-ability, but I’ve put them in my own words

• Focus on your current abilities, build your self-confidence through them
• Set small and realistic goals (walk before you can run)
• Try to get your inner voice to talk positively about you (you can try the “fake it to make it” routine – it works!)
• Pause before you react (we’ve seen this a few times now)

Baby steps, that’s what we need. That’s all the toddler needed, and he got to walk. He’d never walked before – so you have the advantage over him of having lived sober before – you, unlike him, know what’s ahead.

But do you?

I’m not sure I did. I’d been a drinker since I was 15, still a boy really, certainly not a man. Could I remember a sober life, one wholly devoid of alcohol? No, and as you’ll recall from the start, booze had always been there at home, a constant in my life. I even remember my Dad’s office in London had a drinks cabinet. I don’t remember learning to walk, but I do remember learning to quit. I don’t remember deciding to walk, but I decided to quit. It may not have looked that way when, very drunk, I may have appeared to had forgotten how to walk! The road from decision to quit is not always the smoothest.

As the saying goes:

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again

And remember, it really doesn’t matter how many times you fall before you get up that very last time because, once you get there, you’ll soon forget all the failed attempts and remember just the one successful one. You’ll remember only the good, none of the bad, and that will add further strength to your already successful quit.