Sober Living Stories
Welcome to the "Sober Living Stories" podcast, a platform built on the power of personal stories. Each Tuesday, Jessica Stipanovic, your host, shines a spotlight on individuals who have undergone remarkable life transformations to inspire hope in listeners worldwide.
Each guest shares their story giving examples of bold beginnings disguised as endings and life lessons that teach how the darkest moments often hold the key to unlocking the brightest light.
This podcast inspires positive life changes. Whether you're sober curious, living an alcohol-free lifestyle, have overcome a challenge and lived to tell about it, or support someone who wants to shed a habit in light of a new one, our episodes promise to leave you feeling understood, hopeful, and motivated to create meaningful transformations in your life.
Join us for powerful new episodes every Tuesday where the most difficult life experiences serve to uplift and inspire. Regardless of your background or belief system, the "Sober Living Stories" podcast is your ultimate destination for uplifting narratives where hope shines from the most unexpected places.
In addition to featuring our weekly guests, each month on the "Sober Living Stories" podcast, we have the privilege of sitting down with a new author, delving into their story and the wisdom they've shared in their book.
Here's the exciting part: their book becomes the giveaway for that month.
Tune in every Tuesday for brand-new episodes and your chance to win the gift of a transformed life.
Sober Living Stories
Top Entrepreneurs in Recovery: David J. Greer's Story of Sobriety and Success
Meet David J. Greer, a sober entrepreneurial coach who was adopted into an entrepreneurial family and developed a passion for technology early in life. At 22, he joined a young software startup, and stayed for 20 years, becoming co-owner, while building the company into a global powerhouse.
After selling out of that business, he and his wife took a break, commissioning a sailboat in the South of France and home-schooling their three children for two years while sailing 5,000 miles in the Mediterranean. Winds of change can alter a person's course, and for David, it was this particular sabbatical that provided a new compass for his life.
Upon returning to shore, David reaches a turning point in his life, leading him to an unexpected meeting that redefined his path. His sobriety story is an intimate exploration of the challenges that entrepreneurs may face when their pursuit and gain of big-time success meets the insidious grip of addiction.
Today, David enjoys 14 years of continuous sobriety, which is why he focuses on helping entrepreneurs who struggle with alcoholism and/or addiction. From the cunning strategies he once employed to hide his drinking to the turning point that led him to his first 12-step meeting, David’s insights into overcoming alcoholism are as compelling as his success as a business professional.
Moreover, his transformation has had a ripple effect, extending beyond personal growth to include the reconciliation with his biological family and the legacy he's building through coaching. Join us for an episode that affirms the strength of the human spirit and the power of connection in steering a path to fulfillment and success.
David J. Greer is an entrepreneurial coach, author, and facilitator. Grab his free book here: Book | Wind In You Sails | Coach David J. Greer (coachdjgreer.com). David specializes in coaching entrepreneurs challenged with alcoholism or addiction. Click here for details on 1:1 coaching: Facilitated Strategic Planning | Growing Your Business (coachdjgreer.com) He and his wife Karalee are committed to each other and their three children and reside in Vancouver, Canada.
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Your story matters.
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 and are 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 Stapanovic, 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. 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 helping 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.
Speaker 2:Thanks, jessica, I'm really excited to be here.
Speaker 1:Could you share your journey as an entrepreneur and explain how addressing your own drinking problem has positively resulted in helping other entrepreneurs succeed?
Speaker 2:Sure, let me start at the beginning. I was conceived in Calgary, born in Edmonton. Because my mom was a teenage pregnancy and my mom was sent to home for unwed mums and was immediately relinquished for adoption. I was adopted into an upper middle class family as the first child. Then my sister was adopted three years later, and three years after that my mom got pregnant with our brother.
Speaker 2:I mentioned that partly because my father took over my grandfather's business that he started in 1923 in Market Square in downtown Edmonton. It was a wholesale sanitary supply business. I come from a family of entrepreneurs so it's very normalized. I also don't think my parents were alcoholics, but they were daily drinkers like dad. Traditional come home from work at five o'clock or six o'clock, pore, scotch and soda for him and a gin and tonic for mom. They sit down and visit for best and then we'd all sit down as a family for dinner Very traditional. I became a daily drinker. I think part of that is just again, I don't think they were alcoholics, 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. Okay, okay, because I think the entrepreneurial part came first.
Speaker 2:I was an academic jock geek in high school and went to keg parties with the football team and drank after basketball games. I didn't drink between those times 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 I haven't as a provincial capital of the province of Alberta and got taken on a tour of like a government IT department and I was completely entrenched by spinning tape drives and like computer room. And also that year I was taught octol arithmetic. Like 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. So I don't want to get too technical. I said I'm a techie geek but like from grade nine I knew I want to take computers and business and put them together.
Speaker 1:It was just a match, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do it in the wholesale sanitary supply business. So later.
Speaker 2:I had a lot of pressure from my dad to take over the business and that wasn't on. So I also happened to go to one of the few high schools, in Empson, with the data processing department teacher Right, and so 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 so I went to school and I moved out to Vancouver, where nine months later my girlfriend broke up with me.
Speaker 1:But you got to Vancouver.
Speaker 2:But I got to Vancouver and I worked for 18 months and 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.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, Congratulations.
Speaker 2:We've been married 41 years. Thank you very much. So all of this is precursor. So 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 you know, my drinking hasn't progressed and my like, my travel and alcoholism is very much the progressive nature of the disease.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And then a friend of mine introduced me to the IT manager of the local capo 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, like multiple time this summer and part time, and that consultant started the software company and when I first met him he introduced me this really cool product that I was totally I didn't know anything about the computing platform. I had no idea what he was talking about. I was completely bamboozled. But and it was. It was a fellow and his wife, Robert and Annabelle, and so they named the company Robel, named for the two of them.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And it's a made up name, so Google's well, and in fourth year I agreed to join them as their first employee.
Speaker 1:Okay, getting in right on the bottom.
Speaker 2:Right on the ground floor, right and, and now you know, 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, unlike rewriting this really major application, right. So I was, he was the lead, but I did a lot of the grub working stuff.
Speaker 1:So had you graduated from college? At this point? No I have not.
Speaker 2:I'm in fourth year of 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 and if it was accepted I had to write the paper and go present it. So that was a condition of my employment and I wrote the abstract. That was accepted, I did write the paper and I had to go to my props and let them know I was taking a week off to go fly to this user group meeting and present and present, and I remember, like standing on the side of the stage and just I don't know if I was externally shaking, but internally I can imagine that's a big deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm 22. Right, right.
Speaker 2:I had I've taken one public speaking course but I've done almost no public speaking and I gave that, gave that paper and presentation, which was a strategy that Bob and I pursued for 20 years. Like 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're going to trust your whole business to Right Got it and that's how we created trust and belief in the company. Now that convention one of the nights they had like a big dinner, free wine, and I tried to match this Hungarian fellow and drinking wine at dinner.
Speaker 1:And yeah got really pissed, you know, and then, like walking back to the hotel, you know a car with a couple of girls of the night pulled up and in a pickpocketing me, you know, and then I, and so you know, alcohol is kind of already, you know it could have happened if I wasn't drunk, but you know, I, 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, in a similar situation happened where you're there for something very important that you've waited for and alcohol comes in and and kind of deter, deters the mission, you know and you would never imagine, but it does.
Speaker 2:You know so go ahead and continue. Yeah, and a couple years later, like Bob and I hosted it was in Washington, where so this he'll, a pack or 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 like for a couple hundred, 250 people, all clients of ours. And I had already figured out like I got we had to. We had one or two other staff members who came. We weren't very big at that point, but I remember asking them to like just keep replenishing me with water, because I had noticed that at these kind of events I just like drank continuously.
Speaker 1:So you were, you were realizing and recognizing that there was, like you know, a little bit of abnormal normality. And your drinking, yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:Not that I was going to, it turns out. Not that I was going to do anything about it, but I did have the where for all to like recognize that I had this pattern.
Speaker 2:And so you know, we continue building the business, Carol and I continue building our life. You know 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, Carol 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 Right, and that lasted 24 hours 24 hours, so can you explain to listeners that don't know what your pickle reference is.
Speaker 2:So 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 pickle pickles, as it happens but once you become a pickle you can't go back to being a cucumber, like that's, and so what we say in recovery is that there comes a point where you are so beholden to the alcohol like you can never go back to drinking normally.
Speaker 1:Right and physically. Brain chemist physically and yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:You cross over that line.
Speaker 2:You cross over that line Right and you know, for me there's two attributes that I it makes me identify as an alcohol, as an alcohol. So the first is, if I pick up the first drink, I don't know what the end strength will be Like. Will it be three, will it be 10?, will it be 15? I don't know. So 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 those. Last time, which was usually for 20 years, I was a daily drinker, so it was the previous day, thinking that somehow it'll be different today, oh, I'll only have three.
Speaker 1:It's like that forgetter, so that you know we forget. And yeah, and that initiation of craving, that happens, an obsession on the mind, and then it goes into craving and then it. You know what do they say? One is, one is one is too many.
Speaker 2:100 is not enough, right, correct? That's the way I've heard it said. I don't know about 100, but yeah, 20. Right, right.
Speaker 2:That's where's the end. I was probably close to that, you know, on a daily basis. Sure so, and then two years later, carol and I go pregnant with our second child and saying, you know, I don't even think I pretended to like it went for Kevin. And then, a couple of years after that, so back to being an entrepreneur. So Bob and Annabelle were the founders of Robel. We built it up. It 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, and.
Speaker 2: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 account and smitting working on the planning for that with tear string down my face. You know, I'm like 34. I've got kids four and two right and I'm going to take this on. But I went ahead with that. And then, you know, I'm now a co-owner of this company and, like now I've arrived, now I'm a big shot and, by the way, I've been drinking all this time right.
Speaker 2:So now I like have even more excuses to drink, and, and, and. So it continues on. But you know, I use alcohol to power up the highs higher, to make the lows not quite so low.
Speaker 1:Manage the stress.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:A lot of success. Maybe a lot of stress too, yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of it self induced. I've since learned, since I got sober and done a lot of personal work. I'm a perfectionist, but I'm also a high performing alcoholic, so, like everyone around me was completely surprised, I was an alcoholic.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, okay, I can. I can relate to that as well. I remember that saying. Are you sure?
Speaker 2:Didn't slur words. Like you know, I was like a man because I could drink a lot and hold it.
Speaker 1:Right, but you knew, like you at that point, you knew internally that you did have a drinking problem that needed to be addressed.
Speaker 2:I think in my heart of hearts I did, but there was no way I wanted I was, I was in denial for the longest time Sure Okay. I think my inner, inner most self knew that, but I wasn't in any way willing to admit it.
Speaker 1:Not yet yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was still going to come. 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 like 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 like, 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. Okay.
Speaker 2: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. So he ended up in 2001. We had a very acrimonious time Like he you know very emotional emails and blaming me for things that I'd never done and you know from afar. So you know he'd moved to the Caribbean island of Anguilla. We were many time zones and miles apart. We just grown apart. I think is really what had happened. But he solved it by we settled the disagreement by him ending in the end buying me out.
Speaker 2:So I went on a street in early 2001 and I haven't noticed this thing called the dot com meltdown. So I'm trying to chase steals but this is not a good time to chase steals and someone I got introduced to who helped 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, 9 and 5 again. And she said do you need to work right away? And then she said you know, 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 ah right.
Speaker 1:So it's like someone gave you permission to jump in and reset in a different way that honored your family. Yes, Wow, and that just recently happened to me. Same words, similar sentence, just a complete light bulb moment. You know 8, 11, 18, you know, so I can relate to that. Very grateful for that person, huh.
Speaker 2:Oh hi, I'm a massively so let me tell you what happened. Yeah, what did that result in? For you.
Speaker 1:I can't wait to hear.
Speaker 2:So I've been a sailor growing up. My parents had a cabin on Pigeon Lake, which is southwest of Edmonton. We had owned boats since well, since the year I graduated from university, We'd owned a couple of different sailboats, you know, over a 20-year period. Other kids had grown up on sailing, like you know, weeks and weeks every summer on the boat, or weeks and weekends.
Speaker 1:So very comfortable in the water.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So 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 country.
Speaker 1:Well, that's incredible.
Speaker 2:It's the most amazing legacy we have as a family.
Speaker 1:That's wonderful, that is wonderful. So, your life went out, so talk a little bit about that, and then yeah, yeah so.
Speaker 2:So I got to tell you the Mediterranean is a fantastic place to be an alcoholic. Beer costs about half what it costs in Canada, because we're very taxed. Alcohol or wine costs about half, beer about two thirds. Every porch you pull into has a shoreside restaurant or three or four that you know offers 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 man looks small in a world globe, but it's actually quite big when you can only travel at seven miles an hour, right, so it takes a long time to get anywhere.
Speaker 2:So we'd like explore an area, then we'd like do very long, like 24 or 48 or 72 hour passages, like continuous, like day and night and on our second overnight passage, which was a little more than a day and a half, to cast 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, okay, and we kept mistaking stars on the horizon for the lights of boats.
Speaker 2:Like it was that clear and I think it was. Once I got sober I really went back to that experience because I really think it was the universe really trying to touch me and I didn't, but I didn't know it at the time, although I did really appreciate and understand the magic of it in the moment. Sure, and 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 Like I just the lives of my family was at stake.
Speaker 1: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?
Speaker 2:You know how does that transfer over where you're caring for your family.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you still have to be hyper Like.
Speaker 2:you can't believe the number of roles that you live as parents and sailors, because you've got to be navigator, you've got to be like mechanic, you've got to be engineer, you've got to be store supply, like just getting food for five people, including two. Just about One became a teenager and they were big, fast growing kids. So like you need a lot of food, just getting the food on board, cooking it every day, and then the whole home schooling piece, so like it's flat out. And obviously we and I had other cruisers who'd 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 so we started doing more of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's wonderful.
Speaker 2:I love that and just setting an anchor for a week and maybe not having any school and just going to swim in every day and when I'm worried to a very high performing individual like she's 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 kids, with three kids and two businesses, like it really was.
Speaker 1:It's a lot, that's a lot.
Speaker 2:That's a lot. So I had all these passages where I didn't drink and again I didn't know that and I journaled about it, but there wasn't enough to like want to stop. So in the end, as we got back to shore, the first way I'd celebrate, no matter what time it was, was to hold a beer. Was it a drink? Yeah, Of course. How?
Speaker 1:else would you celebrate?
Speaker 2:Right, so came back from that trip in 2003. And then for three years I was an angel investor. So I invested in young startups and was on boards of directors and worked for options and I didn't realize that it was just completely unfulfilling work. Most of the people were just. They were where I was when I was 24, 25, a couple years into the business.
Speaker 2:We grew the business so fast, we learned things so fast that and I'd accumulated so much knowledge over the years, mostly by the seat of our pants, and I found that it took like a year to bring a CEO up one running at the ladder. I didn't have that much patience. So 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 and a lot of my technology entrepreneur friends in Vancouver swore by this One Page Strategic Plan and so 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 you want to do this quarter.
Speaker 2:And we grew a rule bell, the way a lot of entrepreneurs do We'll do what we did last year 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. But I wonder, if we had used the One Page Strategic Plan all the way along, what we might have achieved and done.
Speaker 2:But what was really important was in the back of the room were two business coaches how big. I went and talked to 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 you know, and I didn't realize how unfulfilled I was till I had the conversation with him and I, literally I had tears in the corners of my eyes and.
Speaker 2:I think he just did a simple statement. There's about a hundred people in the room and he just looked right, said, david, there's like a hundred people here and every one of them need your help, and I've been trying to find people I could help for like three years right and Anyways, I took his card and I took it home and it sat next to my phone and about once a week I'd look at it. And then I look at the phone and the phone weighed at least 10,000 pounds right and.
Speaker 2:Then, three weeks later, kevin called me. And he called you okay, called me he said, hey, do you remember me from the Vern Harness event? And I said, yes, you know. Meanwhile, I don't tell him like, oh, I haven't thought about much else for the last three weeks, but I Do remember you Right, and I hired him on my 50th birthday, august 9th 2007, and when you 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.
Speaker 2:Kevin is my kind of guy like or you're all out that's all in immediately there is no in between whatsoever, and and I had to be to pay him for 16 hours and he charged a lot right. So 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 like cleared away pretty well all the clutter right and cleared off the table and like kind of All the things and we got me sort of started in something, although it was still kind of working for upside, not getting any salary and.
Speaker 2:Then, on January 26, 2009, I took and drank my last beer, which I'd kind of care 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 him like the topic for the next like send him the topic for the next Day's coaching session. So 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. Oh, and I saw I wrote the email. I said the topic for tomorrow's coaching session is my drinking.
Speaker 1:Wow, and what do you think? In the days following up to that last beer, you know what was going on inside of you that you were addressing.
Speaker 2:I was sick and tired of being sick and tired of being sick and tired like it. Just I, just I, just like, what did that?
Speaker 1:look like for you. Like what it, what it's you being sick and tired? Look like I.
Speaker 2:Just conceding defeat. I'm just like. You know this and you know it's like the. You know I would didn't. My version of alcoholism like is you don't drink in the morning, you know, otherwise you'd be an alcoholic right, so Right. So you know I used to be. I didn't start drinking till 4, 30 or 5, and then, you know, in the previous year working with Kevin, that time kept coming down, so now it was like 3 o'clock.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you talked about it early on.
Speaker 2:The progression years is more about yes, the progression, absolutely, and you know, and just the the sheer amount of work like making sure you know you got to go about I drank. You need to go to liquor store three or four times a week, like 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 you know I go to four different liquor stores in a week because it's the same. People saw me. What would they think?
Speaker 2:sure, like it's it's a lot of it's, but it's crazy like clearly I Must be thinking I'm an alcoholic, but I don't admit it. I'm still in denial.
Speaker 1:Right, it's in. It's an incredibly complex. Right and I mean you're talking about, like going out to the, to the store and going to the different stores, but the mental capacity and and and space that takes to so just imagine when that's gone, you know how much more time. You have to focus on what matters and a bunch of red lights.
Speaker 2:Like you know, 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. You know, and like going down to the beach and having three tall cans to like, Because I've been in an event downtown all day to like preload before I get home because I know I can't go in my office and and like have a bunch and and I was super expert at hiding it right Both in a lot of work. It's exhausting.
Speaker 1:It's the planning and and just the dishonesty, like we don't even Realize the dishonesty that's involved, you know, in to ourselves, like you know, and then yeah it's just it's exhausting and it's exhausting.
Speaker 2:One thing I did know is I built this trust relationship with Kevin and I knew when I sent that, 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 right.
Speaker 2:Like 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 gonna be like to have dinner without wine. Like you know, I was afraid of what my life would be without alcohol. I didn't realize that for many years, but sure. So 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 like communal fire pits and he would sit around and he'd met a person with 20 years in 12-step recovery. But he talked to many times About his journey and 12 step recovery. So Kevin coached me to go to a meeting.
Speaker 1:So he was already in in 12 step recovery Kevin wasn't, but he was friend was but it'd be.
Speaker 2:But a summer friend Right sat around the campfire with him, so so he knew something about, you know, 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.
Speaker 1:I sure you know I.
Speaker 2:Think probably it's just the stigma of alcoholism, and still yes, absolutely a guy with raincoat and paper bag right.
Speaker 2:So 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 may have finished at eight or a little before. So I looked online the lovahold at 830. 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 to go home.
Speaker 1:So the universe once again just line, just lined it right up for you.
Speaker 2:Like I, honestly my heart of hearts. The universe put Kevin in my past so I could get so.
Speaker 1:Like, that's what. I truly believe and so often there's that pivotal person that you know you trust enough, or that's just placed right in front of you at exactly the right time. Yeah you're gonna go ahead and yeah, and he was at where you need to be.
Speaker 2:Kevin was the first person in the world I admitted I had a drinking problem too well and and this particular meeting was in a legion. Legions are like social venues with bars for veterans, so I walked in the front door and.
Speaker 2:The doors to the bar are open and there's beers on two or three tables and I just stand there like, and Then a couple of people going to the meeting, they sense they had that sixth sense of you know, 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. Oh it's, it's, oh, it's dead.
Speaker 2:And there was, like you know, kind of a back social room and then, you know, the meeting in another room. So I kind of hung out in the back and two young ladies came out and welcome 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 kind of sitting at the end of one row, but halfway up and At that time in the meetings recorders, 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 Sit 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.
Speaker 2:I don't really understood what it meant, but I did it.
Speaker 1:It's a real, you know. 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 how well. How could I possibly live without, you know, having wine at dinner? How can I possibly Go here and not drink that? I mean, it just was so ingrained in my life, you know, as such a part of it, to imagine not doing it anymore is just seems almost impossible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how is that gonna be? No booze like sure on and all those first a wedding, you know.
Speaker 1:And it's funny how, when you walk into that American Legion or whatever it was and and you know you had mentioned seeing the beers you know like fast forward now to today, you could probably walk in there, wouldn't think anything of it, you know, just walk right past them, get to your room, but that initial first couple steps, there's that initial, maybe for six months, first year, it's so like precarious, you know, just walking through life, you know trying not to, you know Violate your newfound sobriety and but then you know the possibility is it's just, it becomes your way of life not drinking and all of those initial fears, they're just gone. So we're existing in a world that's a drinking world and we're completely Navigating it successfully, without even wanting, you know. So that's the real miracle of it all that's just so available to millions of people, you know it can get past that first step of fear.
Speaker 2:And that particular meeting you know I kept going to and a couple weeks later I made it at my home group and I just recently celebrated 15 years sober Congratulations. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much, and it's still my home group.
Speaker 2:And after COVID we couldn't meet there anymore for a meeting. The meeting had been in that Legion for about 40 years, and and just Just changes at the Legion. Did you move it to online? Has it been changed?
Speaker 1:No, we moved it to online during COVID, but we've moved it back to a physical Location.
Speaker 2:But it's just, it's not in the Legion anymore. And of course, as I gained time and sobriety, I was often tickled that you know my home group meeting, because you know it's sometimes a bit music downstairs, sure, and it's like you know, do you sometimes? 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 above a bar right? You know, it reminds me of I don't know if you've ever been to a 12-step meeting, where they're talking about.
Speaker 1: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 I Maybe I felt that a time or two, but that's not true. And I maybe I felt that a time or two, but that's not generally the overall feel of feel of those places, you know.
Speaker 2:So it was more like yeah, it actually helped because it was like I can practice a program so well and Stay sober that I'm okay being you know, I'm okay with the irony of having a meeting over top of a bar, of a bar and I'm not, and I'm not bothered by it, so I wanted to spend more time on kind of what happened after so please yeah, I did throw myself into the program.
Speaker 2: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 Carolee and I were busy when. Where we are, we're currently away in Mexico for a little bit, but it's quite unusual that and Half of the group I meet with weekly were there when I came in 15 years ago.
Speaker 2:And, 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 created 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. Sure.
Speaker 2:So that's been really important. I've worked to steps in in a multiple times and five years ago I started with adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families and I've worked. I've done their three workbooks. I just finished last year the Loving Parent Guidebook and that has been just another massive Like leap forward. Well, 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 Landed a few gigs, usually in senior Sales and marketing roles, but where I'm working directly with entrepreneur friends of mine. So I worked with a friend of mine in the Ottawa Valley who I'd known for 30 years.
Speaker 2:I worked with him for a year and I'd spent three weeks in Vancouver and one week at the headquarters in the Ottawa Valley and I went to a lot of rural meetings in the Ottawa Valley, which are they're a little different but, you know, still good, strong recovery. And then I got a senior position as VP of marketing for this company in in Vancouver in the telematics business so that's where you take that piece of hardware that's bolted to a car or truck and attracts it in real time Okay, fleet managers can use information that comes from there to manage their fleets better to know where their vehicles are was publicly traded like 35 million a year business 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 Like I worked as hard in those three years as maybe I did ever in my working career and I was in my like mid 50s.
Speaker 2:Okay and so, you know, 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 my all my programs and therapy work is trying to be aware of and you know, parent my, my taskmaster spirit like Let him loose when it really helps me, but at times it's like though, I don't need you right now.
Speaker 2:And and so, working with coach Kevin, I made also I made the decision that I wanted to give to the gifts other entrepreneurs that Kevin had given to me, and so I made the decision to become a business coach. I 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. You know, once you kind of roll through a few businesses, you experience kind of multiplies, and every chapter of the book starts with the sailing analogy what.
Speaker 2:I'd call the Wind in your Sales, and a third of the book are case studies of other entrepreneur friends of mine.
Speaker 2:So a third of the content is not my hard one wisdom, but other people's hard one wisdom, and so I started down this coaching path. So 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, also is one of the world's best experts in that template and that framework. So 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 because he wanted to focus more on like 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 introduce me to his coach, nan O'Connor in Atlanta, who I still work. I worked with for seven years now. We just celebrated last month A very different kind of relationship and again each person was perfect in the time I was in and so and then Nan kept kind of prodding me a little bit.
Speaker 2:She just we get on some 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 no matter what question she asked me, and especially from a business perspective.
Speaker 2:But it didn't matter. Like, whatever she asked, I always had that ready answer, mostly come out of my 12-step program, but my am I experience, and so 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 and more active about trying to find entrepreneurs who are 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 of 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.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I really commend you for that, because I know one that it is hard. If you have been privately working in 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 the successes that you've had in business, paired with your recovery, really comes through.
Speaker 1: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, I mean we already have this high performance get it done and it's just a good combination.
Speaker 1: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 just a really great combination.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one of the reasons like the one page plan is that it also the financial metrics are matched up with the actual what you're going to do, like your goals, and the level of financial literacy is still a real challenge. I'm working with a couple young guys. They're like in their late 20s. They started business when they were 18. They're one of Canada's largest custom T-shirt producers. Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:But I've had to do a lot of work around financial literacy and, like them understanding, as I tell them, it's not about the numbers in the financial statement, it's about what the numbers mean to your business, and that's a big, huge step. Sure, and also, I worked with entrepreneurs who don't really understand how much money they're making or not making.
Speaker 1:Right, yes.
Speaker 2:Revenue is ego. Profit is about what it's all about. It'd be better off having lower revenue if you can make more money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Because it's the making money at the whole point.
Speaker 1:Right, right.
Speaker 2:And then yeah.
Speaker 1:And just to have such a good background in that.
Speaker 2:So that's just pure business coaching. But then the alcoholism piece is like how do you go to networking events? I mean, some of it is just pure 12-step recovery stuff, but it's just I can help from an entrepreneurial point of view. Like when you go to networking events, like 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, Right.
Speaker 1:And they'll ask you all those questions.
Speaker 2:if you have a drink in your hand, do you have an exit strategy? Even today, I still occasionally get triggered. I'm currently living and working in Puerto Varta, mexico, and I would be lying if I didn't say, occasionally, walking down the Malicon and looking at all of those drinks on all of those tables, my brain doesn't go. I think we should sit down and order a drink. So what if you're in a networking event and that happens Like what is your, especially if you're there with your spouse, like have you talked to your spouse?
Speaker 2:Have you formulated what the exit strategy is going to be? And I work with entrepreneurs who are in super high-end sales. So if you're doing a half a million or a million-dollar deal, like typically, the CEO, when he's 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 because that's the kind of business he's in.
Speaker 2:And he said, david, like, is it normal to have, like everyone to 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. Sure.
Speaker 2:Right. I can't tell you whether any of them are alcoholics. I can tell you it's alcoholic drinking and so I coach people with like. So how do you 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?
Speaker 1:Right right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you know too. With you know, 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. So 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, pre-planned, bring your own vehicle, like have a way to leave, have something in your hand, like it's so smart, so simple, but it just kind of takes that whole thing off of you. You know and you can just walk in that whole.
Speaker 1:Hey, what are you gonna have to drink? You know that is that my drink. Keep it in your hand. Just these simple little strategies. You don't wanna take a sip of something that's not yours, you know, and violate everything, but yeah so.
Speaker 2:I think it's a great combination for success. I do have to be careful of as a business coach and someone in recovery is like. 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.
Speaker 1:Sure sure, I could see that.
Speaker 2:Right yeah absolutely, absolutely, so it's your choice like, which is basically everything I do in coaching. I try and make the clients choice, but you know 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 Sure okay.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So you give them a choice, but I give them a choice, then yeah, and then I send a given call. Like we spent half of this call on recovery and let's move it on to another topic.
Speaker 1:Right right, right Great. You had a question. Yeah, I think it's an excellent combination. Yeah, sure, so 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? Because 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?
Speaker 2:So I mean I'm much more present with my kids. I now have two grandkids. I'm very thankful I can be 100% with them and I'm not. I mean 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 100% right and it was always in the way and I did things like drunk driving with my children in the vehicle, right. That was some of the early amends that I owned. But, if we can, 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.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So when I started like about how I grew up, I was conceived in Calgary and then I was relinquished for adoption in Amateur yes, after nine years of sobriety and after six 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 like co-dependent with my mother and to worry about what her opinion or thought would be and like 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. Okay, so there was quite a bit of personal growth to get to that spot, sure, and I found them, and I 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.
Speaker 2:So 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, like I'm. If you stand next to me, you're gonna go. You're a big dude. And then if you see my brother stand next to me. You're gonna 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 don't know what she's talking about, so denial.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2: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. So she's now blaming this organization for the topic that, like 30 seconds ago, she said she knew nothing about, right?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And then she said I want nothing to do with you. Oh, wow. And that hurt. Sure. And others eventually reminded me that my birth mother, disney, know who I am, so she can't be rejecting me. She's rejecting the experience of howting me.
Speaker 2:Oh, 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, carol Lee 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 Silvia Hotel. I didn't even meet me in half an hour there and like I was ready then to share it with her, okay, but the beautiful thing there, you know, the walk was put me back in nature, which is one of the ways I connect with my power, and I had just had so many tools to process it so I could take on the emotional burden. But then, you know, by bedtime that night I had a good night's sleep. Like I wouldn't say I was full about it, but yeah. Well, thank you for sharing that.
Speaker 2:And then I just got two more pieces. I'll go pretty quick because I know we're almost out of time. So 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 Came as an email, but it was actually a letter, and you know I've subsequently built relationships with both of them.
Speaker 2: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. So 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 and all of my Ridley family wanted me there. And at that point my birth mother was unconscious so she couldn't object to my presence. And so there I was in the presence of my birth mother for the first time since I was born.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's an incredible story.
Speaker 2:And you know, we just all sat those, both my sisters and my nephew, and my uncle, jim's daughter and his granddaughter was, who was only at that point about a month old. We're all there and Aunt Marty, and two hours later Terry took her last breath and passed away and we had shed a lot of tears I don't know if I was shedding tears for Terry or what was never to be, or just for the Ridley family, who were all hurting. And after we all kind of settled down, my uncle Jim came to me and said, david, do you want to picture with Terry? And my brain went no F and way, like there's still resentment there.
Speaker 2:I thought we're to do. 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 so I said, yes, Jim, I'd like you to take the picture, and I needed 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 told me that she was an alcoholic. But I didn't know if she was like a practicing alcoholic right to the end, but there was open bottle of rye in the kitchen and there was a case of 12 in the closet. So I think it was drinking a bottle of rye a day right up to the very end.
Speaker 1:I'll never know, but From the very beginning, when you said you were adopted, I was thinking of that genetic piece, that genetic predisposition, if that was going to play a part for you, and so it sounds like it did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and on my paternal side, my aunts were recovering an alcoholic.
Speaker 1:So you were connected to her in more of a way than you thought, perhaps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, exactly Well, and my maternal brother, gary, died in 2015 of cirrhosis of delivery and the direct result of his alcoholism, and I didn't connect to 2018. So I never had an opportunity to meet him.
Speaker 1: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 a incredible.
Speaker 2:An amazing, amazing experience 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. So I have my family of origin and my mom is still alive, 96. I try and get out of Amateur and see her every six months. I talked to her every couple of weeks, I talked to her on the weekend and my brother and sister, you know, still live in Amateur. So I have this very large constellation of family. Yeah, it sounds like yeah, so that's wonderful.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to end on that story. You know that's not the business piece, but it is the recovery piece. Like 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.
Speaker 1:Sure, so would you just leave us with listeners, with? If they're struggling right now with building a business, with with being in that whole work world and thinking they may have a problem with alcohol, what would you say to them?
Speaker 2:There's hope. Exactly, there's hope is what I tell people. And the other piece is you can't do it alone, I just the brain that gets addicted, that is in alcohol is the Well. Look at me, look at my story. Like I needed coach Kevin, because the brain that got me to be an alcoholic was never going to get me out of there. Sure, and the fact that I can walk down the Malacca and Port of Ireland still be triggered. I mean that alcoholic part of my brain is still there.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right. So you need that Absolutely, and that's why I still attend meetings and you know I stay close to the program because I know the alcoholic part of me wants to kill me.
Speaker 1:So, but if you're, suffering.
Speaker 2:You don't have to like there is hope there and whether it's 12 step, whether it's there's lots of other programs Like 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.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for being here today. If you want to further.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, and if you want to further connect with David J Greer or obtain a copy of his book Wind in your Sales, visit wwwcoachdjgreer. That is coachdjgreercom. 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. If you are a featured author of the month or to become a guest yourself, visit wwwjessicastapanavikcom.