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Coaching requires a particular kind of listening. Not just to what a client says, but to how he says it. The words he chooses. The ones he avoids. The slight change in posture when something resonates. The longer pause before an answer that tells you more than the answer itself. You're watching and listening at the same time and you're doing it continuously, because the most important moments in a coaching conversation rarely announce themselves. We live behind an alcohol mas

Happiness is a full socket set box, 10mm included I lost my toolbox last week. Not misplaced it, not lent it to someone and forgotten who. It fell off the back of my ute while I was driving home, bounced across the road and was gone inside six minutes! Twenty kilos of tools I had been collecting and using for forty years, including specialist tools I had made myself for maintaining my own aircraft. Gone. Just like that. The tailgate was down. I knew it was down. I had been re

Nobody tells you about the blue wrens. They tell you about the liver. They tell you about blood pressure and sleep cycles and the number of calories you are no longer consuming. How the mind will become clearer. All of that is true and all of it matters. But the thing that actually stopped me one afternoon, about three months after I stopped drinking, was a pair of tiny blue wrens flitting about in our garden. I stood there watching them, genuinely watching them, as they mo

Men come to this work from very different places. Different ages, different amounts, different circumstances. Some are drinking daily, some are bingeing on weekends, some are barely over the guidelines but something still feels off. Some have tried to stop before. Some are considering it for the first time. From the outside they look nothing alike. But in my experience there is always a moment. It doesn't announce itself. It's rarely dramatic. It's just the point where the co

Trying to keep your resolutions while carrying old habits is like climbing a hill with a rucksack full of rocks. Stats don’t lie: by mid-January or Quitter’s Day, 75% of resolutions have already failed! By mid-February, only 12–15% survive. This year, lighten the load. Try the 7-day alcohol reset and see what happens when the weight is removed.

Let’s Be Real for a Second Most blokes know there’s more in the tank. You’ve got experience, wisdom, and a gut feeling there’s another level waiting but somewhere along the line, life’s routine, work stress, or a few too many nights at the pub got in the way. That spark you used to have? It’s still there, buried under years of “I’ll sort it later.” That’s where coaching comes in. Not fluffy “positive vibes” talk, but real, practical guidance to help you clear your head, reset

Are you like a moth to a flame with alcohol? Back in 2007 when I first stopped drinking, I used willpower. Conditioned my mindset, stopped the behaviour, and then spent the next eight years arguing with myself about staying stopped. Whenever I hit a bump in the road, I countered any desire for a drink with the internal rhetoric of a crazed temperance advocate. That internal rhetoric was on and off for the eight plus years I was not drinking. At times it was barely a whisper,

Fair question. Most men assume that if they're going to change their drinking, all they need is enough determination. Build the mindset, change the behaviour, hold the line. Job done. It always starts well. The decision feels clean. The reasons are clear. The pain of continuing outweighs the pain of stopping and that's usually enough to get through the first few days. Then the internal battle begins. Not drinking makes you miserable. But the thought of drinking also makes you

For the last 9 years I have been flying an aircraft I built myself. I think I'm pretty reasonable at flying it, I have learned what to do and when, what flight control and throttle settings to use, what speeds to maintain for the various phases of flight. How the engine sounds, how the aircraft behaves and so on. What's this got to do with being alcohol free? Bear with me there is some relevance. You could say I have formed a lot of neural networks that make it easy for my b

We purchased some sad looking belladonna lily bulbs on special at the local nursery several years ago. We planted them in sunny spot looking forward to late summer blooms taking over that area in six months. Over winter the bulbs store energy from the foliage, but the leaves in the first year were small and lacklustre. No flowers that summer! Next winter a bit more foliage but the local rabbits started to dig them up. As they are poisonous no leaves were eaten but they caused

There seems to be a common belief that you have to hit a rock bottom before you can even consider making a change to your drinking when alcohol begins to have negative impacts in your life. The notion you have to be at that point of losing or having lost everything before you can try to claw your way back to sobriety. The truth is, waiting for that moment can be dangerous and even counterproductive for some people. Kind of like "I'll give up xxx when.. (insert condition)" typ

The theatre dimmed, the audience quietened we had come to see our granddaughter perform in the combined schools concert. The kids began the first performance to cheers and clapping, their little faces lit up with delight at being on stage for a real audience. As the performances went on, I began to notice a pattern in the performers, and it was with compassion and warmth that I realised there was a cross section of kids all doing their absolute best on stage with smiles on t

I'm a do-it-yourself kind of bloke, give me a task and like many, I'll opt for a do-it-yourself approach. As William Ernest Henley said, I want to be master of my fate, captain of my soul. Forget calling in the tradesman or reading instructions. If you're doing a job that doesn't require a licence, all you need is a can-do attitude, and the right tools and materials for the job. Hey, you might even need YouTube if you really get stuck! When we go to work, we reach for a screw