How to Get a Girlfriend with Connell Barrett - Sober Dating, Part 1: How I (Finally!) Quit Drinking, and How YOU Can Confidently Date without Booze

Starting point is 00:00:00 I just said, this has to change. I'm not the guy who wakes up in the middle of the night, you know, vomiting up Johnny Walker, Jameson. This podcast episode is not brought to you by Jameson Irish Whiskey. Welcome to the Dating Transformation Podcast. Here's your host, dating coach, Conal Barrett. Welcome back to the Dating Transformation Podcast. I'm your host, dating coach, Conal Barrett. I'm here to help you learn to flirt, gain confidence, and attract an amazing girlfriend.

Starting point is 00:00:37 And do it all with authenticity, being your true, real, best self, not somebody who you aren't. And I'm gonna try to walk the walk today and be extra authentic, honest, real, true, and talk about something that's a personal confession. I have a confession, a revelation, and it's this. The revelation is that earlier this year, I truly realized for the first time that I had a dependency on alcohol. I was a gallon of scotch every month, to being totally booze-free and fitter, thinner, and just feeling incredible right now and being sober now for eight months plus. So today's episode is totally for you. If you're a guy who feels like you need alcohol or a drink or two to relax around a woman on a date, or if you feel like you drink too much and you're a single guy and you don't want to feel like you have to have alcohol to approach a woman,

Starting point is 00:02:00 today's episode is going to help you. Maybe you can only go talk to a girl, go talk to a cute girl if you have liquid courage or if you need a couple of drinks to feel like you're yourself. So if that's you, please keep listening because today I'm going to talk about that topic. But today's episode is also about more than alcohol being something that you might be addicted to. There are a lot of things you can become addicted to as a single man. You can become addicted to, especially if you're a guy who has struggled with dating. If you're struggling with dating, you could also become addicted to pornography. You can become addicted to procrastination. Staying in your comfort zone is something you

Starting point is 00:02:43 can basically become dependent on. So today's episode is not just about drinking. It's about how to notice and fix any other addictions or dependencies you might have that are hurting your dating life. Because all I want for you is confidence in yourself and a great connection with a wonderful woman and that you do it all with authenticity as your best self. So let's get into it. And let me tell you about my rock bottom moment. And here it is. Basically very simple. So I fell into a really bad habit over the last several years because I'm a dating coach, right? So I've probably been on a thousand dates and I've approached hundreds and

Starting point is 00:03:33 hundreds of women, maybe over, maybe thousands at this point. And alcohol is part of that scene. You know, it's so easy to have a drink when you go out or have alcohol, have a cocktail or two on a date. It's so much easier to approach that girl if she's cute and you've never talked to her before and she's very pretty and you're like, oh man, let me do a quick tequila shot and then I'll go talk to her. So I had fallen into some bad habits. But the thing is, most of my drinking was not happening out in the dating world. Most of it was happening at home. I fell into this pattern. At the end of a long day, I would have somewhere between two and four of those little airplane

Starting point is 00:04:17 bottles of whiskey, Irish whiskey usually, but also scotch. And I fell into this pattern of three or four of these little shots. And then I would eat junk food, chocolate. Oh my gosh. Chocolate, good dark chocolate with a scotch. Wow. Proof that there's a higher power. Proof that there's a God. At least that's what it feels like. So I would say five or six days a week, I was doing this. Usually at home alone. So I'm drinking alone, three or four scotches, three or four whiskeys, and then eating a bunch of bad food, pasta, chocolate, basically junk food. And so back last February, I did this one night and I probably had an extra drink that night and ate a big plate of spaghetti and some chocolate for dessert, passed out at about 1 a.m., maybe 1.30. I woke up at about 3.30, 4 in the morning, vomiting in my sleep. The alcohol, the poison,

Starting point is 00:05:28 the food was all coming back out. And that woke me up in more ways than one. I've never in my life vomited in my sleep before that I can recall, certainly not because alcohol was involved. And that was really scary. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't want to overstate this. I wasn't choking to death. I don't think there was a choking hazard here. I'm not like, what's that episode of Breaking Bad where Jesse's girlfriend Jane is in a heroin haze and she chokes to death. That wasn't going to happen, I don't think. But it was a wake-up call, quite literally, a wake-up call. And it made me sit on the side of my bed at four in the morning and I said, I think I said this out loud, I said, you're not, I don't know, Jim Morrison or Mama Cass or some rock star who's

Starting point is 00:06:30 going to choke to death in their sleep or who's vomiting in their sleep. That's not you, Connell. What the hell's going on here? And that was a really powerful moment. So fast forward to the next moment, or sorry, the next morning. The next morning, I get on the scale. And I say, you know what? I'm gonna read your mind. Ready? I'll bet that you would love to confidently approach women, get great matches on the dating apps, flirt with charm, and attract your dream girlfriend. Right?

Starting point is 00:07:07 But fear keeps you from approaching. You're not sure how to flirt. You struggle on the apps. And desirable women just don't seem into you. Well, I have great news. Dating coach Conal Barrett can help. He's guided thousands of men like you to more confidence and helped them attract their dream girlfriends.

Starting point is 00:07:28 So book a free strategy call today to see if Connell's coaching is right for you. On your call, Connell or a team member will give you personalized advice to help you have more confidence, more dates, and more fun. Oh, and you'll be dating women as your best self, a charming gentleman. Transcription by CastingWords Book your free call today at datingtransformation.com forward slash contact and grab a time that works for you. Then you'll be on your way to more confidence, better results, and attracting bright, beautiful women.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Oh, so you know, soon Connell will stop taking on new clients. So book a call today while you still can. Go to datingtransformation.com forward slash contact and transform your love life. Bye. I feel like I put on a few pounds in the last couple of years. What am I tagging? What am I weighing?

Starting point is 00:08:33 And I get on the scale and I weighed 172 in high school, or sorry, in college in my early mid twenties, about 172, 175. I get on the scale and it shoots all the way up to 199 point something. I've never in my life been 200 pounds, but I'm pretty much 200 pounds back in February. So I look in the mirror, I take my clothes off, I'm naked in front of the mirror and I just hate what I see. I hate it. I'm chubby, skinny fat, skinny legs, big chubby top, big whiskey gut.

Starting point is 00:09:10 The third thing that happened in this period of time back in February is I was with my very special lady and I couldn't perform. I could not perform when I wanted to. And that really got my attention because there's definitely a link between alcohol being in your system overall and then erectile dysfunction. I hadn't been drinking that evening with her, but I think there was so much alcohol in my system that it was having an effect on my erection. So these three things, this confluence of moments, they were very disturbing. And I said, okay, I've got to make a change. This is disturbing me and I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to feel ugly. I'm sorry. I don't want to feel this way. I don't want to feel this way. I don't

Starting point is 00:10:05 want to feel ugly. I'm sorry. I don't want to feel fat. I don't want to feel bloated. I don't want to struggle to perform in bed. And I just said, this has to change. I'm not the guy who wakes up in the middle of the night vomiting up Johnny Walker, Jameson. This podcast episode is not brought to you by Jameson Irish Whiskey. Yeah. So I said, okay, something's got to change. And then the next day I did a little research. Here's what really helped me. This helped me so much. I went online. I did some research. I found a great book by a guy named Alan Carr. It's called The Easy Way to Control Alcohol. And his book, he's no longer with us. He died years ago. But he wrote a great classic book, a couple of great, amazing books about overcoming addiction to alcohol and overcoming an addiction to nicotine.

Starting point is 00:11:10 I've never been a smoker, or I haven't been a smoker for a long time. But his book really resonated with me. What Carr writes about in The Easy Way to Control Alcohol is he says, look, alcohol is not a drink. It's not really a beverage. It's poison. It's poison. And there's this really cool moment in the book where he is having a rhetorical conversation with a person. And the person says, hey, Alan, can't you just teach me? Why do I have to give up alcohol completely? Can't you just teach me to drink less,

Starting point is 00:11:49 drink a couple of times a week? He said, sure. Yeah, I can teach you to drink a couple of times a week. I can also teach you to drink arsenic a couple of times a week. Would you like to drink arsenic a couple of times a week? Because that's basically what alcohol is. That really hit me hard. And then I also checked out, there's a guy on YouTube. He's fantastic. He's a genius. His name is Andrew Huberman, Huberman Labs. And Andrew has a YouTube episode or it's a podcast, but he turned it into a YouTube episode where he talks about all the things alcohol does when it enters your system. And I listened to his episode about alcohol five, six times over the course of like a week. And one, the thing that really hit me from Andrew's podcast is that alcohol, when it enters your system, alcohol always, it turns into something called acetyl aldehyde.

Starting point is 00:12:47 I think I'm saying that right. Alcohol turns into acetyl aldehyde. And it's basically poison. So every drink you take is poison. That's not how I used to look at alcohol. That gave me an amazing shift. I thought alcohol was a potion that made me happy. What I realized is that alcohol is a poison that was making me fatter

Starting point is 00:13:16 and hurting my confidence and hurting my sex life. And I realized that it had to change. I had to change. And I found one other really great resource online. There's a YouTube, sorry, a TED Talk done by a woman named, I have her name here, Jo Harvey Weatherford. And Jo Harvey Weatherford had a really powerful line in her TEDx talk about drinking. Paraphrasing her, she said, addiction is anything we use or do compulsively to make ourselves feel better that has a negative effect. That really hit me hard because I was rationalizing my drinking. I said, oh, you know what? I'm just an Irish writer, author, dating coach. I have a few drinks now and then. I'm not addicted.

Starting point is 00:14:11 But I was doing it compulsively. I wanted to stop, but I hadn't. It was making me feel better short term, but it was having negative consequences. By definition, or at least by Weatherford's definition, an addiction. Last but not least, definitely not least, I'm a big fan of Dax Shepard. Dax Shepard is so inspiring to me because he has talked so articulately about his struggles with drinking, his struggles with painkillers. He's so vulnerable and raw and real. He did an appearance on a YouTube channel where I called off camera where he said, I felt demoralized to be so powerless with drinking or sorry, with drugs and addiction. And when Dak said that, I felt the same way. I felt

Starting point is 00:15:05 so demoralized to feel like I had to drink five, six days a week. And again, I did the math on it one day. One day, what really helped me back in February is I did the math and I said, okay, I'm having two, three, four little whiskey bottles a day, five, six days a week. I did the math, realized how many ounces of whiskey I was drinking. Then I translated that to how many ounces are in a gallon. And I basically did the math and I was drinking one gallon of whiskey per month. I was drinking a gallon of poison every month. And it was costing me confidence. It was giving me a big gut. It was hurting me in the bedroom. And then I went into the future. I did something Tony Robbins calls the Charles Dickens process, where you look into the future and you look at the potential cost and consequence

Starting point is 00:16:05 of what your current bad behavior or flawed behavior, not just what it's doing to you now, but what's it going to cost you in the future? And I went into the future and I said to myself, wow, if this continues five years from now, I'll be 20, 30 pounds heavier. I'll have liver cirrhosis. I'll be so unattractive to my woman where she probably won't want to be with me. I'll be alone or settling for less because I'll be less attractive. And I'll probably kick over, keel over, and probably die of some kind of liver cirrhosis in my early mid-60s, or maybe cancer, or maybe one of the other dozen terrible diseases that alcohol causes.

Starting point is 00:16:58 I want to take a quick moment here and say, I am not hitting a Bible here. I'm not like Bible thumping. Stop drinking. It's bad. You should quit. That's not what this episode's about. In fact, you do you. I am just saying for me, I had to reframe alcohol. This is not a potion for confidence and courage. This is a poison for ill health, low confidence, and it's not helping my dating life either. Okay. So that was the moment basically over the course of a few days where I said, time to take action, time to change things. So what action did I take? What did I do? I just said, restraint. No,

Starting point is 00:17:40 not a single drop for a month. So I took a month off. That was the plan. One 30-day chunk of time, I'm going to quit drinking. Or I'm going to pause. Sorry, I'm going to pause drinking for a month. And that's all I intended to do at the time. And I remember thinking, okay, February. Sorry, at the end of February, let's look at March as a clean and sober month. I called it Parched March. Parched March, I coined that, trademark, Parched March. And I remember I was at a party on St. Patrick's Day, March 17th, surrounded by people drinking. I did not want to drop. And that was the moment I realized, okay, this is great. I'm now able to be around alcohol.

Starting point is 00:18:27 And what was really wonderful was I felt just as clear, just as confident. In fact, I felt more confident at that St. Patrick's evening party than I would have felt if I was drinking. Because I would have needed another glass of that confidence and courage if I had needed alcohol. But because the confidence and the good emotions and the sense of self or the good state was coming from inside, I didn't need it from a glass because it was coming from within me. And fast forward another couple weeks,

Starting point is 00:19:09 it's early April. I'm going to a birthday party. And it's been 30 days since I've had a drink. And I'm about to walk into the birthday party. And I say, I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to, so the plan was, let me go have a drink on this, at this birthday party and basically toast my sobriety. And then I thought, what the hell are you saying to yourself? You're going to take a drink of scotch and whiskey to celebrate the fact that you haven't had any scotch or whiskey in the last month? What the hell are you doing? By the way, in those first 30 days, I dropped about 12 pounds. I'm looking back now about half of that's probably water, liquid, the booze leaving my system. But half of it was also just fat coming off my body.

Starting point is 00:20:10 Because guess what? I wasn't eating all the junk food. Oh, thousands and thousands of empty calories were not entering my system in addition to all the empty calories of alcohol. So 30 days later, I'm sleeping better. I look better. I'm thinner. I feel amazing. I'm still going out with my clients and being their wingman and helping them approach women. And that's incredible. And I don't need a drop of alcohol to do that. And I just walked into that venue that night and I said, I don't need to have a drink tonight to celebrate sobriety. I'm going to celebrate sobriety by staying sober, by staying alcohol-free. And it felt incredible to be able to do that. It reminded me of a night I had many, many years ago when I first got into this world of meeting and approaching women and

Starting point is 00:21:05 working on my dating life. Rejection, ghosting, loneliness, lack of dates and lack of confidence. For many men, dating just sucks, but it doesn't have to. There's a simple yet powerful way to gain instant confidence and attract a great girlfriend. Be radically authentic. It's all laid out in the number one Amazon bestselling book, Dating Sucks But You Don't, your step-by-step guide to attracting wonderful women

Starting point is 00:21:39 and doing it with total authenticity. Author and dating coach Conal Barrett has had and fixed all the dating problems that you struggle with. He's also helped thousands of men gain confidence and find love. He's put his best tips and strategies into dating sucks but you don't, so that you can confidently approach women and get dates. Become magnetic and attractive, even if you're not tall or great-looking. Always know what to say to make sparks fly.

Starting point is 00:22:13 Get lots of great matches and dates on the dating apps. And attract your dream woman. You can find Dating Sucks But You Don't on Amazon or wherever books are sold in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook. Get Dating Sucks But You Don't today to transform your confidence and find your dream girl. There were nights I went out when I had a few drinks and there were nights when I went out and I was sober. This was before my problem took root. And I remember this night in Miami years ago. I said, I'm committing to sober approaching. And it was literally the best night of my life I ever had going out to meet women.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Because what I did was instead of getting drunk on alcohol, I got drunk on action. I got drunk on expressing my authentic personality. I got drunk on cracking jokes. I got drunk on expressing myself. And I remember that night I was with my old wingman, my buddy, and he and I were talking to girls. And I remember this girl said, hey, what are you guys drinking? You guys must be shit-faced. Because we were both sober. And I remember thinking, oh, my God, she thinks I'm drunk. But I was actually just feeling so good and so buzzed on action.

Starting point is 00:23:41 I'd gotten into a flow state. And I thought back to that night during my first 30 days of sobriety. And I just was reminded that, you know what? I don't need drinks to feel amazing, to feel confident, to be able to talk to women, to be able to coach my clients, or just to feel good socially. So essentially, after those 30 days were over, I just realized, you know what? I had my last drink. I have had my last drink. I'm good to go. I'm not saying that with hubris. I do believe in the idea of taking it one day at a time. By the way, I did I do believe in the idea of taking it one, one day at a time. I did, by the way, I did not do Alcoholics Anonymous. I don't know how to, if I qualify for that or if I would have, but I do believe in that daily decision to, to not drink if that's important to you or the daily

Starting point is 00:24:41 decision to do whatever is important to you, whether it's the daily decision to approach women or to go to the gym or to eat healthy. I do believe in looking at every day like it's January 1st. Every day is, boom, let's commit to walking that narrow road, being healthy, being really fit. So how does this affect you? What can you take away from this podcast? Well, if you're a guy who feels like he needs to drink to relax or to approach women, you can keep doing that if you want to. I'm not here to say you have to do that, you have to quit drinking, but just know that you don't need alcohol to be courageous. In his book, The Easy Way to Control Alcohol, Alan Carr says, and I'm paraphrasing, he says,

Starting point is 00:25:37 alcohol doesn't give you courage. It does quiet the fear, but it doesn't give you courage. And if one of the most empowering, powerful tools I give my clients is the ability to use courage whenever they want to do almost anything. And you don't need alcohol to make that first move on a date or to say that honest, vulnerable, flirtatious thing to a woman on a date or to, when the moment's right, go for that first kiss. You don't need alcohol to do that. It does at first quiet the fear, but you can always use courage. Courage combined with authenticity, with authentic expression of your true, real, best personality, that's a powerful cocktail. You don't need alcohol as a cocktail. You need

Starting point is 00:26:33 courage combined with authenticity. That'll give women a buzz for sure. So if you do want to reduce or stop drinking, look, I'm not an expert on recovery. All I have is my story. And I do coach a lot of men now. I guess the one big change I've made in my coaching in the last few months is I've begun to work with men in recovery, guys who want to go out and approach but not need alcohol to do it. So that is now a niche of mine, and that feels great to help men who want to reduce or eliminate or not drink at all be able to go out into a bar, be able to go on a date and be 100% stone cold sober. If you want to quit drinking, then what you want to do, actually, let me make this

Starting point is 00:27:26 more broad. If you want to get over any kind of dependency, whether it's an addiction to alcohol, or maybe you're addicted to porn. A lot of men get addicted or dependent on you porn or Pornhub. If you are addicted to other things that are hurting your dating life, like procrastination, like staying in your comfort zone. Maybe you're addicted to planning, but you're not addicted to action. Maybe you keep planning on fixing your dating life, but you're not actually getting in the game. These are all variations of dependencies. Again, to quote Miss Weatherford from her TED Talk, anything that we do that feels good, that makes us feel better, but that hurts us in some way, that is an addiction. So if you are addicted to alcohol or a drug or porn or procrastination or blaming women or blaming

Starting point is 00:28:37 yourself for your dating trouble, here's how you fix that. First thing you got to do is get disturbed. You have to say, I don't like feeling this way. This is disturbing. Just like I had to have my vomiting in bed at 4 a.m. wake up call. You got to get disturbed. Then what you've got to do is say, what are the future? What are the currents and future consequences and costs in my life if I continue behaving this way. Okay?

Starting point is 00:29:09 You got to understand the consequences and the costs. And then you got to remind yourself, and what are the benefits? What are the changes? What ROI am I going to get by fixing this? So using myself as an example, I got disturbed because that's not my identity. I'm vomiting in the middle of the night. Who am I? The consequences being 25 pounds overweight, poor sleep, poor sexual performance, the future consequences is really powerful. I said to myself, oh man, if this continues, I could end up with liver cirrhosis, losing love, and essentially dying for just feeling, either dying young or just feeling unfit, unhealthy. So those are the

Starting point is 00:30:03 future consequences. So what costs and consequences are you paying right now for whatever you might be addicted to? Whether it's booze, whether it's food, maybe it's food, maybe it's again, porn, food, these are common ones, or just procrastination and not taking action to fit your dating, to fix your dating life. Get clear on what is not working and what it's costing you. The next thing you want to do is say, okay, well, what do I want instead? What are the upsides? What do I get out of fixing this? What wonderful thing is going to happen if you start eating better, if you stop using U-porn, if you drink less or not at all, or if you just stop procrastinating and start taking right action in your dating life.

Starting point is 00:30:52 What benefits are you going to get? Love, sex, confidence, connection, meeting your future wife, growing into a better man. You want to get clear on consequences, but also clear on benefits and ROI. And then what you want to do, the third thing you want to do is come up with a plan and make a decision and say, this is what I'm going to start doing starting today, come hell or high water. I'm going to remove X, Y, and Z, whatever the bad behavior is, and replace it with something that meets your needs, but at a better level. So for example, one of the reasons I drank was because after a long day, I needed to replace my, I needed to change my emotional state from stressed and focused on work to, hey, relaxed, buzzed, feeling good.

Starting point is 00:31:50 I used scotch and whiskey to do that. I don't need scotch and whiskey to feel buzzed and happy. What I do now instead is I'll go play tennis or I'll go swimming or I'll hit the gym or I'll watch a really good, fun, stupid rom-com that makes me laugh. And I'll eat something healthy while watching it, as opposed to drinking poison and eating chocolate and too much pasta. So again, if you want to fix anything you might be addicted to that's hurting you, get disturbed. Focus on the consequences,

Starting point is 00:32:33 what it's doing to you. Focus on what value and worth and change and ROI you're going to get by changing your behavior. Then put a plan in place to take new right action. And along the way, add some new things to your life to help you replace the bad behavior or the flawed behavior. Anyway, that's my story. That's how I went from a gallon of whiskey per month to feeling looking a lot better. I've dropped 25 pounds. I'm down to 175 pounds. I've never felt better. I am now addicted. Instead of being addicted to alcohol, I'm addicted to wellness, fitness, swimming. And most importantly, I'm addicted to my clients, helping them have those big dating breakthroughs and do it with authenticity, with good health, with fitness. And I love, love, love coaching men who don't drink or who are sober or want to become sober or who are in recovery. So, hey, let me just put this out

Starting point is 00:33:42 there to you. If you're a guy who has had any kind of struggles with drinking, with drugs, and you want a dating coach to help you, I am absolutely your man if we're a good fit. But I love doing this. I love helping men. And I even coach a lot of these men for free. It's a small way I like to give back. So if you're a guy in recovery or just you want to date sober, go to datingtransformation.com and book a call with me and let's talk. Because I would love to help you get drunk, not on booze, but on becoming authentic and showing women that real amazing you. Because your dream girlfriend, that incredible woman, she's already out there.

Starting point is 00:34:31 She just needs to meet the real authentic you. All right. See you on the next episode. Bye. Thank you for listening to the Dating Transformation Podcast. For lots of free tips, videos, and other goodies, go to datingtransformation.com. See you next time.

How to Get a Girlfriend with Connell Barrett - Sober Dating, Part 1: How I (Finally!) Quit Drinking, and How YOU Can Confidently Date without Booze

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