Phil Jordan The Clear Thinking Coach

10/10/2026

2723 DAYS ALCOHOL FREE. ☀️

Blustery but gloriously sunny parkrun this morning, and some reflections on a conversation this week about something so many of us carry around.

REGRET. GUILT. SHAME.

You know the drill. The morning after drinking, replaying the conversation, remembering what you said, wondering what you did, wishing you could turn back the clock.

And then playing it all over again. And again.

Here’s something we don’t talk about enough when we stop drinking. You remove the numbing agent, but the old scripts are still playing.

You’re trying to build a new life, perhaps wondering whether you’ll ever have fun again, while your mind is busy reminding you of everything you wish you’d done differently.

You can apologise. You can make amends. You can take responsibility. But you cannot rewrite the past.

And eventually, there’s another amends you need to make.

The one with yourself.

Not by excusing your behaviour or pretending it didn’t happen. By accepting it, learning from it and allowing yourself to be human.

Responsibility without self-punishment.

You can regret something you did without condemning the person you are. You can acknowledge the hurt you’ve caused without spending the rest of your life punishing yourself for it.

And this takes time. True self-forgiveness isn’t just saying the words. It’s reaching a place where the memory no longer carries the same emotional weight. Where you can look back without being dragged back.

And slowly, something beautiful happens.

You wake up feeling calm. You stop conducting a courtroom drama in your head. You reclaim all that mental space previously occupied by guilt, shame and remorse.

And you become free to live.

Free to discover who you really are. Free to explore what you want from life. Free to build relationships and become the person you always wanted to be.

Because here’s something I genuinely believe:

It’s so much easier to be a good person when you feel good about yourself.

Not perfect. Not without mistakes. Just someone who can act from self-respect rather than self-loathing, compassion rather than punishment, and choice rather than fear.

If you’re at the beginning of your alcohol-free journey, please hear this.

Take responsibility. Make amends where you can. Learn the lessons.

But you don’t have to spend the rest of your life punishing yourself for the person you were.

Your past deserves to be acknowledged. It doesn’t deserve to imprison you.

2723 days. Grateful for the sunshine, grateful for this journey, and more grateful than ever for the peace that comes when you finally stop fighting yourself. ❤️

03/10/2026

2716 DAYS ALCOHOL FREE.

And today feels like a really good day to talk about CAUSE.

I’ve been exploring Peter Sage’s four levels of consciousness alongside an NLP concept I’ve used for years:

Cause & Effect.

And I think there’s a really powerful connection.

TO ME — Effect
“Life is happening to me.”

BY ME — Cause
“I can choose my response and influence what happens next.”

THROUGH ME — Flow
“I don’t have to control everything. I can allow and respond.”

AS ME — Being
“I can simply be present, without constantly needing to change the experience.”

For me, that represents a movement from:

Resistance → Responsibility → Flow → Being.

And being at Cause doesn’t mean we caused everything that happens to us.

We don’t choose betrayal, loss, injustice, trauma or difficult circumstances.

But we can choose our response, meaning, decisions and next action.

That shift can be life changing.

Instead of:

“They made me angry.”

Ask:

“What am I going to do with what just happened?”

Instead of:

“My cravings made me drink.”

Ask:

“What choice am I making right now?”

Instead of:

“This is just who I am.”

Ask:

“Who am I choosing to become?”

For me, this is at the heart of CLEAR.

CHOICE is where the shift begins.

And alcohol free living has given me thousands of opportunities to practise it.

Not perfectly.

But consistently.

Which brings me to October.

October is my New Year.

It’s my birthday month, and I love using it as a reset.

So I’m challenging myself to:

🏃‍♂️ RED October — Run Every Day.

🍫 A sugar detox for the month — with fruit very much allowed! 😂

Not because I need to punish myself.

Because I want to choose the challenge.

To practise discipline.

To strengthen the habit of doing what I say I’m going to do.

To remind myself that I am not simply at the mercy of my impulses.

I have a choice.

And every choice is a vote for the person I’m becoming.

That’s what being alcohol free has ultimately given me:

Not control over everything.

Control over my response.

And that is a very different kind of freedom.

2716 days.

Still learning.
Still choosing.
Still doing the work.

And today?

I’m firmly at CAUSE. ❤️

Phil Jordan The Clear Thinking Coach

26/09/2026

Clear thinking 😎

26/09/2026

2709 DAYS ALCOHOL FREE. ☀️

Gloriously sunny this morning.

And one of those mornings where you can’t help but feel grateful.

Grateful for the life I have.

Grateful for the freedom.

Grateful for the clarity.

And perhaps most of all, grateful that I eventually learned that changing my relationship with alcohol wasn’t about finding more willpower.

It was about learning how to work with my own mind.

Over the years, I’ve developed a simple framework that has become a big part of how I think about change.

I call it CLEAR.

C — CHOICE

Reclaim your agency.

An urge can be powerful without being a command.

“I may feel the urge. I still choose my response.”

L — LIES

Challenge the stories that keep the old behaviour alive.

“I deserve it.”
“Just this once.”
“I need it.”
“I’ll start tomorrow.”

Instead:

Is this actually true, or is my mind giving me permission?

E — ENVIRONMENT

Don’t constantly fight yourself.

Look at the people, places, routines, availability and situations that make the old behaviour easier.

Change the setup, not just the intention.

A — ACTION

Insight isn’t enough.

When the trigger arrives, have something you will actually do.

Don’t just ask:

“How do I stop myself?”

Ask:

“What’s my next useful action?”

R — REPEAT

This is where the magic happens.

One different decision is an event.

Repeated different decisions become a pattern.

And patterns, practised often enough, can become your new normal.

Don’t chase perfection. Build repetitions.

Looking back over 2709 days, I can see this principle everywhere.

The peace didn’t arrive overnight.

The confidence didn’t arrive overnight.

The clear thinking didn’t arrive overnight.

They compounded.

Choice after choice.

Action after action.

Day after day.

And that’s why I share CLEAR.

Not as a magic formula.

Not as something you must follow.

Simply because it’s helped me understand my own behaviour and create a life I genuinely love living.

And perhaps one part of it might help you too.

Because ultimately, this isn’t just about alcohol.

It’s about moving from automatic behaviour to intentional behaviour.

From:

“This is just how I am.”

to:

“I can choose what I do next.”

That’s an incredibly powerful shift.

So today, while the sun is shining, I’m feeling deeply grateful for something I once couldn’t imagine:

A peaceful mind.
A clear head.
A life I don’t need to escape from.

And if you’re still struggling, please remember:

You don’t have to change everything today.

Just become curious.

What choice can I make?
What story am I believing?
What can I change around me?
What will I do instead?
And can I repeat that tomorrow?

Sometimes a completely different life begins with one different response.

And then another.

☀️ 2709 days. Grateful beyond words.

19/09/2026

2702 DAYS ALCOHOL FREE.

Another marvellous milestone.

And today I’m feeling energised by something I value more than almost anything:

The freedom of being at peace.

There’s a quote I love:

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

For me, this captures something incredibly important about an alcohol-free life.

Consistency compounds.

One alcohol-free day doesn’t transform your life.

One healthy choice doesn’t transform your life.

One difficult emotion faced instead of escaped doesn’t transform your life.

But stack them together…

Day after day.
Choice after choice.
Promise after promise.

And eventually, they become something much bigger.

Every time you choose not to drink, you strengthen that choice.

Every time you sit with discomfort instead of escaping it, you learn you can handle it.

Every time you keep a promise to yourself, you build self-trust.

Every time you challenge an old thought, you create space for a new one.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly…

the work starts working for you.

What once felt impossible becomes normal.

The habits become your character.

The character shapes your life.

And one day you look back and realise:

You’re not the person who started anymore.

That’s the power of consistency.

It doesn’t have to be perfect.

It doesn’t have to be dramatic.

It just has to be repeated.

The good days count.

The difficult days count.

The days nobody notices count.

The days when all you can manage is “not today” count.

They all compound.

So if you’re waiting to feel inspired before you change your life…

Start working.

Take the next small step.

Then another.

Let the days stack up.

Let the confidence stack up.

Let the self-trust stack up.

Let the peace stack up.

Because your future isn’t built in one massive moment.

It’s built in thousands of small moments you keep choosing.

2702 days.

One day at a time.

And I can tell you from experience:

The work is worth it. ❤️

12/09/2026

2695 days alcohol free. And this week gave me another lesson in clear thinking.

After a few weeks away from posting, I’m back with something significant.

A legal issue that has been hanging over me for a long time finally concluded this week — with a positive outcome. 🙏

But strangely, the outcome isn’t really the point.

The real test was everything that came before it.

How do you stay calm when you feel threatened?
How do you stop fear turning into anger?
How do you prevent your mind from writing 47 different versions of the future before breakfast?

As Michael A. Singer talks about, we can spend enormous amounts of energy bothering ourselves about a situation — replaying it, resisting it, arguing with it in our heads.

And the Stoics understood this beautifully:

We don’t control what happens. We control how we respond.

Then there’s Viktor Frankl:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

That space has become incredibly important to me.

Because when pressure arrives, the instinct can be fear — followed by a whole cascade of thoughts, stories and reactions.

But I’ve learned to pause.

Breathe.

Notice what’s happening.

Find perspective.

And choose my response rather than surrendering it to the circumstances.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear and love too. Strip everything back and perhaps these are the two fundamental emotional directions we move from.

Fear contracts us.

Love opens us.

And the alcohol-free journey has taught me that I don’t have to live from fear anymore.

I can return to love.

Love of life.
Love of myself.
Love of the people around me.
Love of the present moment.

That’s what Clear Thinking means to me.

Not having a mind that’s permanently calm.

Having the awareness to recognise when it isn’t — and creating enough space to choose what happens next.

Alcohol once removed that space.

Sobriety gave it back.

And that, ultimately, is the freedom.

The victory isn’t getting the outcome you wanted.
The victory is becoming the person who can handle whatever outcome arrives.

2695 days — and still learning. Still growing. Still inc

12/09/2026

2695 days alcohol free. And this week gave me another lesson in clear thinking.

After a few weeks away from posting, I’m back with something significant.

A legal issue that has been hanging over me for a long time finally concluded this week — with a positive outcome. 🙏

But strangely, the outcome isn’t really the point.

The real test was everything that came before it.

How do you stay calm when you feel threatened?
How do you stop fear turning into anger?
How do you prevent your mind from writing 47 different versions of the future before breakfast?

As Michael A. Singer talks about, we can spend enormous amounts of energy bothering ourselves about a situation — replaying it, resisting it, arguing with it in our heads.

And the Stoics understood this beautifully:

We don’t control what happens. We control how we respond.

Then there’s Viktor Frankl:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

That space has become incredibly important to me.

Because when pressure arrives, the instinct can be fear — followed by a whole cascade of thoughts, stories and reactions.

But I’ve learned to pause.

Breathe.

Notice what’s happening.

Find perspective.

And choose my response rather than surrendering it to the circumstances.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fear and love too. Strip everything back and perhaps these are the two fundamental emotional directions we move from.

Fear contracts us.

Love opens us.

And the alcohol-free journey has taught me that I don’t have to live from fear anymore.

I can return to love.

Love of life.
Love of myself.
Love of the people around me.
Love of the present moment.

That’s what Clear Thinking means to me.

Not having a mind that’s permanently calm.

Having the awareness to recognise when it isn’t — and creating enough space to choose what happens next.

Alcohol once removed that space.

Sobriety gave it back.

And that, ultimately, is the freedom.

The victory isn’t getting the outcome you wanted.
The victory is becoming the person who can handle whatever outcome arrives.

2695 days — and still learning. Still growing. Still incredibly grateful. ❤️👊

02/09/2026

22/08/2026

22/08/2026

2674 days alcohol free. And today, I want to sing sobriety a little louder.

This morning I heard the devastating news that someone has lost their life to alcohol.

A person deeply loved by family and children.

Someone who desperately wanted to stop.

Someone who, despite all that love and all that desire, simply couldn’t escape it.

And that is the brutal reality of alcohol.

Nobody sets out to develop a drinking problem.

I don’t care whether people drink or don’t drink. If alcohol genuinely works for you, that’s your business.

But what I wish more people understood is that hidden among those who confidently say “I can take it or leave it” are silent strugglers.

People desperately trying to become what they believe is a normal drinker.

People who know something isn’t right.

People hiding the bottles.

Hiding the truth.

Hiding the shame.

And sometimes hiding from themselves.

There is nothing wrong with the person who has a problem with alcohol.

We can be in denial.
We can feel broken.
We can isolate ourselves.
We can lie and deceive.

But underneath all of that is still a human being who deserves compassion and a way out.

I remember the fear I had when I finally came out.

Ridicule.

Rejection.

Judgement.

What would people think?

But once I stepped into the light and released the shame, something extraordinary happened.

I became free.

And I discovered a life I didn’t know was waiting for me.

Brené Brown describes shame as:

“The intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.”

And that’s exactly what I had to learn.

I wasn’t flawed. I was struggling.

Today I think about all the people who don’t make it.

The devastated families.

The sons and daughters who never got to experience their parent fully present.

And that’s why, if ever there was a time to sing my sobriety loudly, it’s now.

Not to preach.

Not to judge.

But because somewhere out there, someone is frightened, ashamed and wondering if they’re the only one.

You’re not.

And you are not broken.

There is a life beyond the shame.

There is a life beyond the secrecy.

There is a life beyond alcohol.

And if this reaches just one person who needs to hear it today, then perhaps this difficult morning has served a purpose.

If you’re struggling, please reach out.

Your story isn’t over. ❤️