My Favourite Failure: One Founder's Journey to Sobriety and Success - Jim Frawley

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1:11I would never, you know, I don't think I've ever in my life pounded a beer, but I was more of a, I can drink all night long kind of guy. That's Jim Frawley, a founder who specializes in executive development. Before he made it, he was a drinker, a big drinker. But it was only after looking at himself in the mirror and confronting his failures that he could truly become successful.

1:41Before he gave up the drink, Jim could really put it away. There were days where I'd drink a bottle or two of whiskey, give me a bottle or two of Jameson. That would be sometimes a case of beer or a couple bottles of wine. I mean, I could really put it back. The time had probably really increased. You know, when you have your own business, you work from home, you need a little hair of the dog in the morning. So you just kind of have a beer at lunchtime and all that stuff. It just kind of, it wasn't limited to the nights and the weekends. And so, you know, you can't go pick up your kid from daycare after a couple of drinks.

2:23So like, oh, well, I can't drink today. I want to drink today, but I got to pick up the kid from daycare and all that other stuff. So like, it just wasn't, nothing was really aligning. But I was drinking, I mean, I was drinking a lot. It was, it was, it was a lot. Tining 40 stopped Jim in his tracks. So what I used to do when I would get frustrated with work, is I'd just go to the bar and I'd drink and I'd write in my notebook about, you know, putting together strategic plans and doing all these things. And this is what I should be doing and all that stuff. And so it was, I remember it was October 28th.

2:52It was my half birthday. and when you hit your half birthday, I just start rounding up. So it was, I was 39 and a half. And I'm like, all right, now I'm 40. And I went out with the idea of writing in the notebook, doing the plan. And all I wrote down was my failures, right? I'm not doing what I want to do. I'm seeing these other people who are successful and I want to be successful and I'm not doing what they're doing. And, um, and I went home that night after drinking at the bar and I woke my wife up and I said, look, I got to tell someone. And, um, I said, I need to quit drinking because it's not, um, I'm not doing what I want to do.

3:27I'm not the person that I actually want to be. And to her credit, she jumped up. She said, what do you need? Uh, I'm with you a hundred percent. Um, do you need AA? Do you need that? I was like, no, I don't need that. I'm gonna do it on my own. And she looked at me. She said, do you need AA? I said, no, I don't need it. Um, and so I, I bartered with her. I said, look, I'm going to try and do this on my own, but I'm telling you, cause you know me the best and you're going to know if I'm cheating on it. And if I can't do it, then yes, I'll commit to doing one of those other things. But telling my wife was something that made it a lot easier for me because she would know if I was kind of cheating on it.

4:00I was able to do it on my own. I didn't go, I didn't join an alcoholics group. I didn't do, I didn't go into recovery. I didn't do any of these things. And I went through almost like a self-coaching process while I was doing it so that I was able to come out the other side. And I, to be honest, within, you know, a very short period of time, I noticed the benefits, my business tripled overnight. Like I started seeing the benefits very, very quickly. And that was a nice kind of trigger point or a stepping stone to get me on the right track. Jim had to hit the bottom before he could turn his life around.

4:29I have cried, I think three times in my life that I can remember. One is when my grandmother died. One was September 11th. And the third time was October 28th, 2018. Because it was the time that I looked in the mirror and I was failing. And I admitted to myself that I was failing. We tell our stories all the time, like, ah, you know what? It happened this weekend, but it'll never happen again. Oh, it'll be whatever I was drinking and pass it and I'll just move forward and do that. But behaviors don't change and results don't change over time. And that was like just this level of sadness, abject sadness, that I wasn't living up to the person that I wanted to be.

5:21That I consider that one of my lowest points. And the only way to get out of that was I needed help and support. And fortunately, my wife was there to be there. Jim discovered something about failure along the way. What I've learned from this is most people aren't afraid of failing. I know that I consider it a failure. I consider myself, I was failing in the moment, but I don't think we're afraid of failure. Everybody just says, oh, people are afraid to fail. What we're afraid of is what people are going to think when you fail. And there's a social component. The reason most people I speak to, because a lot of people come to me now like, oh, I'm thinking about quitting drinking and this and that.

5:58It's always, what are the neighbors going to say? What are the friends going to say? How do I explain to people that I'm not drinking? How do I kind of own this? And when I realized that most people don't care about this stuff, most people don't think about you as much as you think of, nobody thinks about you as much as you think about yourself. And so when I think about failure, and this was a big realization for me that helped me in my business and everything else. When I think about failure, it's not a fear of failure, which allows me to now take more risks and try more things. What we're afraid of is what other people are going to think about us when we make these changes, when we make these decisions, when we do this.

6:31And when it's a very different and nuanced kind of challenge is that you're not actually, if you go to build a model airplane in your basement, you fail. You're like, I don't care. Fine. Whatever. I tried it. It didn't work. But if you try something that's displayed, it's why people don't want to write a book. They're afraid of what people are going to say. It's why people don't make a video. It's what are people going to say? Why I don't want to speak in public. It's what's the audience going to say. If you realize that your fear of failure is really a fear of social rejection, all of a sudden you have a very different challenge that you're focused on.

7:01And it's a lot more fun to focus on the task at hand because you're focusing on you and what you want to do and your creativity and what you can build. Everyone else and what they think is really irrelevant. And that was probably the biggest lesson for me is that I wasn't afraid to quit drinking. I was afraid of what people would say to me when I quit drinking and how do I explain to people? How do I justify this to people? And I don't have to justify myself to anybody. You need to focus on yourself, not what other people think? I feel like a lot of the drinking I did was to escape from whatever kind of thing that I was trying to deal with, whether much of it was insecurity.

7:36You know, we all have different levels of insecurity. We just don't want to admit it. Everybody's got it. And we drink because we're then the smartest person in the room. And so a couple of quotes that have taken me so far, one is Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in a letter to a friend, how can anyone be satisfied in life if they are not satisfied with the one person they can never be separated from. And that helped me shift my focus, right? It's not about failure and what other people will think. I have to focus on me and dealing with any kind of macro situation external. The only way to respond to it is to focus on you as an individual.

8:10So my drinking was a failure of myself because I didn't want to deal with the things that I wanted to deal with or not want to do that. I was trying to not deal with. Um, so satisfied with yourself is number, number one. we're not looking for happiness. We're looking for self-satisfaction. We're not looking for crazy success. We're looking for self-satisfaction. And when we're satisfied with ourselves, that's ultimately the success and the happiness that we're looking to do. So that was one. And then two on the social side, as I was chatting with someone about how do I sell the business? I don't want people to reject me, yada, yada.

8:43And the quote is, you can have the greatest peach tree in Georgia. Some people just don't like peaches and that's fine. So when we talk about insecurity, we talk about the challenges, we talk about running our business, we talk about that. It has nothing to do with you, your work, your product, your business are an objective thing that you're looking to build and you put your heart and soul into it because it's what you want to build. You want to do that and all that. But some people aren't going to buy in. Some people aren't going to pick up what you're putting down and that's okay. It has nothing to do with you.

9:13A lot of the challenges we're facing have nothing to do with us, but our brains kind of put it into this kind of sausage wrapper of, you know, well, social rejection. We have to sell this person. I have to do this and I have to do that. But, you know, we're barking completely up the wrong tree by focusing externally and not focusing on the one thing that we can actually control, which is ourselves. That was Jim Frawley. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Serta.

9:43If you enjoyed this episode and found it useful, please write us a review and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. It makes a real difference. And we genuinely love reading what you think. We read every single review. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter, and we'll be back next week with more lessons for entrepreneurs and leaders. See you next time.

10:13Thank you.