6 Life Areas Where Alcohol Has Stunted Your Growth

I have witnessed firsthand—in my own life and the lives of thousands of clients and students—an unimaginable transformation that occurs in individuals who make the conscious choice to remove alcohol from their lifestyles. I’m not exaggerating when I say that every area of my life changed for the better once alcohol was out of the picture. As an alcohol-free woman, I have an increased appetite for success, a higher threshold for what success looks like, and a greater capacity to go after my vision of success. I believe that going alcohol-free has allowed myself and countless others to step into their truest potential.

However, there’s a huge misconception that realizing your potential has to do with achieving some sort of professional or intellectual goal. While your career and intellectual pursuits are aspects of your potential, metrics and accolades are not the only ways we realize our potential.

I see potential as an inherent ability to become the most authentic, self-expressed, embodied version of yourself. I look at potential on a holistic scale and believe that it can be expressed through your personal fulfillment, emotional capacity, relationship quality, professional success, and spiritual connection. As you’ll learn through reading this article, I believe alcohol significantly hinders your ability to perform in these vital life areas, thus keeping you from feeling fulfilled.

No matter what potential means to you, it is your divine responsibility to share your potential with the world. You, my friend, weren’t meant for ordinary.

As you begin to unpack your potential, it’s important that you have some frames for understanding where you still have space to grow. There are many ways to look at this, but for ease of consumption, I’ve separated potential into major categories for you to reflect on:

Personal potential: Your passions, hobbies, and recreational goals and dreams. Often, we put our personal goals on hold as we shift from adolescence into adulthood because they’re not considered productive. However, I contend that passions and hobbies are some of our most important pursuits. Your dreams and desires are waiting for you; choosing not to make time for them is a direct violation of your potential.

Emotional potential: Your ability to name, feel, communicate about, and self-soothe through your most basic and intense emotions. Most of us were not taught to safely experience and share our emotions, so we struggle with this as adults. The capacity to sit with both positive and negative emotions is essential to your ability to express your potential.

Social potential: Fulfilling your need for vulnerable, reciprocal human connection on the platonic level. Connection and belonging are essential to the human experience. Although alcohol is touted as a social lubricant, drinking dilutes social connection by preventing you from having the energy to be vulnerable.

Romantic potential: The depth of your romantic and sexual relationships. We often use alcohol to cultivate closeness, vulnerability, and sexual turn-on in our romantic lives. As in social relationships, alcohol dilutes your ability to connect romantically and sexually and frequently leads to unproductive (or forgotten) conversations and arguments.

Professional potential: Your ability to share your most genius gifts and get paid abundantly to do so. Even high achievers who have found tremendous professional success as drinkers find that sobriety helps them step into new expressions of their professional potential.

Spiritual potential: Your capacity to cultivate a connection with a higher power of your own understanding. It is your ability to tap into your intuition and choose faith over fear. Getting to know your spiritual nature in a way that feels good to you is the ultimate expression of your potential.

If you’re wondering how drinking alcohol is keeping you from reaching your potential, set aside some time to write out your response to the following questions:

What does potential mean to you? Describe what it would look like for you to be living in a full expression of your potential. Consider what life for your future successful self might look like in one to three years. I recommend writing this out as a present-tense story as if you are waking up and going through your day one to three years in the future. Describe this day vividly and write about how you feel living life in this way. As you put your pen to paper, don’t edit what falls onto the page. Remember, if you are creative enough to dream it, you are capable of bringing it to fruition. Often, I find that even the wildest dreams you put on paper in this early stage are only a fraction of what you are capable of. So dream big and know that even your biggest dreams pale in comparison to what the Universe has in store for you.

Do you have a bigger why? Many of my clients are inspired to share bigger whys behind their decision to pursue an alcohol-free lifestyle. Some people have a self-focused why, while others have an other-focused why. Your why could be as broad as feeding your desire to fulfill a bigger dream that you are still uncovering or as specific as showing up as a more present parent for your children.

What is your vision of success in each broad area of potential? Refer to my broad definitions above and spend some time creating a list of some of your goals, dreams, and desires for each of these categories of potential:

• Personal

• Emotional

• Social

• Romantic

• Professional

• Spiritual

Want more exercises like this? The above is an excerpt from my bestselling book, Unbottled Potential - order your copy here.