Gerald, with a sobriety date of November 16, 2015, shares his story. Registration for the RE Asia Adventure is now open!  You can register and get more information about this event here On a recent Café’ RE webinar, our host Odette, who is a sobriety warrior, brought a fantastic topic to the webinar.  The Cherokee parable titled Two Wolves.  It is about an old Cherokee teaching his grandson about life.  He tells the grandson that he has a fight going on inside him between two wolves.  One is evil, the other is good.  The grandson thought for a moment and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”  The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.”  This same fight is going on inside all of us.  But we should refrain from labeling our wolves ‘evil’ and ‘good’, because they are both equally important.  We tend to feed our ‘evil’ wolf more, because it’s source of energy doesn’t require much action.  When this wolf gets thirsty, we feed it alcohol.  The ‘good’ wolf takes more effort and energy to feed, it craves sobriety.  Because both wolves are equally important, we cannot ignore the ‘evil’ one, we must acknowledge it and that will keep it happy.  When we ignore one, we become unbalanced.        SHOW NOTES [13:00] Paul introduces Gerald.  Gerald is 50 years old and lives in Boulder, CO with his family.  He was born and raised in Connecticut, where he went to a private school and private college.  Skiing and biking are Gerald’s passions.     [15:50] Give us a little background about your drinking.  Gerald started drinking when he was in high school.  Through high school and college his drinking was only an occasional/weekend thing.  After moving to Boulder, he cut back on his drinking because he was staying active biking and training for triathlons.  At the age of 30 he decided he wanted to go to culinary school and stopped exercising and started eating, and his drinking picked up.  He gained 40 pounds.  In 2011 he decided he wanted to lose the weight, so he got back on his bike, cut back on his drinking, and in 8 months lost the 40 he had gained.  When he was 43 Gerald lost his job and the decrease in income forced him and his family to move in with his in-laws.  While he appreciated what his in-laws were doing for him and his family, he says it really started to take its toll on him and the way he felt as a man.  This is when his drinking really started to progress.  [19:11] What happened after that? In April of 2015 he lost another job.  The pattern was starting to solidify.  This was also when he really started to get into personal development.  [20:20] Did you start to see the role that alcohol was playing in your life?  Gerald said only looking backwards.  He didn’t see it at the time.  He thought he drank the same as all his friends, and that nobody ever pulled him aside or suggested he had a drinking problem.  He did stop drinking for 3 weeks and nobody seemed to notice, so he went back to his normal and kept on drinking.  [21:55] What happened on November 16, 2015?          Gerald was on his way home from his job at a brewery and was invited to a going away party for someone from work.  After grabbing alcohol from work, and drinking even more from the party, he got behind the wheel, took a turn and hit the curb hard enough to employ his side airbag…right in front of a cop.  He got a DUI.  [23:00] Was this your rock bottom moment?        Gerald says it was the moment that he knew he had to change something.  He got kicked out of his in-law’s house that night and lost his job a few days later.  He found himself starting at ground zero again.  [28:45] What was day 1 like?  On day 1 Gerald kept an appointment with his blog coach, which he had made prior to his DUI.  He says that appointment was transformational.  It helped him begin to understand that he had a different purpose.  Instead of doing what he just wanted to do he was trying to create something of value.  Providing more value to people made the biggest differen