Why This Story Matters

Today's episode is a personal one. It's been five years since I decided to stop drinking, and I want to tell you what it's actually cost me and what it's given me. But first, I want to go through some quick housekeeping items. We've got a big fall coming up and a lot of awesome leadership development opportunities coming your way. Welcome to the Restaurant Leadership Podcast, where we coach independent multi-unit restaurant operators to build systems that drive profitability and reclaim time so they can scale with confidence and spend their time and energy where they want to, not where they have to. I'm your host, Kristen Marvin, restaurant coach and author of Multi-unit Mastery. If you are an independent restaurant owner managing multiple locations, you know the chaos that comes with growth. Inconsistent execution across your restaurants, managers who won't take ownership, constantly answering questions your team should already know the answers to. You're stuck in your current role when you want to be playing a bigger strategic role as you scale. You don't have the right leaders in place, or you keep losing them. And you're not sure how to find great people and actually keep them around. We work with passionate independent restaurant owners who found success with their first few locations and are ready to scale strategically. Our clients aren't looking to just survive expansion. They want to thrive through it. They're committed to developing strong leaders and creating exceptional guest experiences. Through the independent restaurant framework that we teach in multi-unit mastery, we coach independent restaurant groups to move from chaos to confidence by focusing on three pillars people, process, and profit. You can grab a gifted copy of the book at irfbook.com. On this show, we bring you real coaching conversations, leadership strategies, and the frameworks that you need to lead like a CEO instead of operating like a worn-out manager. And here's the thing: coaching has changed our clients' businesses and can change yours too. If you've never experienced what it's like to have someone in your corner who actually gets the restaurant world, we'd love to connect. We offer one-on-one and group coaching. Head to kristinmarvin.com slash contact for a complimentary coaching session and let's talk about what's possible for your restaurant group.

Gratitude And The Podcast Mission

Before I kick off this week's episode, I have got to express some gratitude. We had a record amount of downloads on the show last week for the episode around what behavior are you tolerating. Thank you so much for those of you that showed up to listen to that episode and share it. And if you haven't checked it out, I'd love to know what's resonating with you and would love for you to share it with anybody in your network who you feel like could benefit from it. You can always reach me anytime at Kristen at CallumbineHospitality.com. I'd love to know what your takeaway was, and I'm always looking for additional episode topics. So let me know what your biggest challenge is right now, and uh I'll provide some content around that. Why does this matter to me so much? It's not about the vanity of the downloads. You know, I started the podcast 122 episodes ago because I wanted to provide a resource to the industry that would be available to anyone. There was something that was intimate, something that they could listen to in their car on the way to work, if they needed a little nugget of inspiration or something to bring to their teams on the way home to decompress or feel like they're not alone, uh, maybe celebrate a great shift that they've had, or work through a challenging moment that they've had as well and find a topic on the show that really resonated with them. Um, I love podcasts because they're so intimate. I love listening to shows when I'm walking the dogs. If, you know, they've taught me a lot about how to build my business and they've provided a lot of community for me. And so my hope is that they do the same for you. One thing that I love about the show, though, is that it's really brought up a lot of tough conversations and hard topics for people. And I get a little a lot of feedback of the this episode really helped me. Um, I got a message from a girl on LinkedIn last week who said, I just want to let you know that I listened to one of your episodes and I immediately recognized that I had an opportunity to advocate for myself about how unhappy I was and how much I was being micromanaged. And I went into my boss's office and I asked for what I wanted and what I needed, and things have already shifted. And that is exactly why I do the show and and what we're hoping that you all take away. Thank you so much for being open and willing to listen. And congratulations on investing in yourself and taking the time to want to better your leadership and yourself as a human. Okay,

Fall Leadership Events And Offers

let's talk some talk about some exciting fall updates that are coming up. Uh, first off, if you are a Colorado Restaurant Association member, on Tuesday, September 29th, they are hosting the Women in Hospitality Summit. And um I'm doing a group coaching session there on how to lead with confidence at all levels. So um, as far as I know, that they they are sold out. However, I just talked to the organizer this morning and they are opening up a few more seats, which is really, really exciting. This is the first time they're doing this event, and clearly there's a lot of demand for it. They've also brought in a keynote to talk about burnout, which you all know is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. There's also gonna be a leadership topic on resiliency. So everything is intertwined beautifully. It's gonna be a really great day. Uh, it runs from nine to five. We're gonna kick off with a breakfast, have some really awesome speakers there, and then end with a happy hour. So great opportunity to come network with like-minded leaders in your industry. Second of all, uh, really excited about this one for Eat Denver members. Uh, we have put together an exclusive leadership intensive that's gonna run for six weeks in person, and it starts Tuesday, October 13th. Uh, it's gonna be every Tuesday from 9 to 10:30. We are gonna have action items, accountability, homework, and really move the needle on a lot of great areas in your business. Uh, if you want more information on that, there's only nine seats available for this first series. We're gonna offer one scholarship, and you can find more information about the event in addition to how to apply for the scholarship at ColumbineHospitality.com slash leadership dash intensive. Okay. Um, also, this is the time of year where we start talking to a lot of restaurant groups about leadership workshops as we kick off the holiday season, retreats for two and three days uh in January, and the calendars are filling up fast. So if leadership development is on your plan for 2026 and you haven't made it happen, let's talk. Uh, if it's something that you want to invest in in 2027, let's make sure we get some dates on the calendar because our calendars are filling up fast for that. Okay, that's the housekeeping stuff. Um,

The Question That Broke Me Open

now I want to get to the real reason I wanted just to um record this episode today. I was on a podcast last week as a guest and it was a midlife podcast uh for female entrepreneurs. And the and I didn't expect it, but I started crying in the middle of the show because the host asked me what the hardest part was about making the decision to stop drinking. And I don't think that's anybody's asked me that before. Um, you know, it's been five years since I since I decided to stop drinking, like I said. And the question landed really, really hard for me that day. And I realized that the the toughest thing for me was giving up a life that I thought I wanted to live and and a life that I had started to build for myself. So I want to take you back a little bit for those of you that don't know my full story uh or that are newer listeners to the show. I've been

How Alcohol Became My Identity

in the industry for 20, in the restaurant industry for 20 years, right? Started as a line cook at 15. In my mid-20s, when I started to enter in management, I started to weave in alcohol into everything that I was doing from a personal and professional standpoint. I was studying to become a small year. I was traveling to wine country every single year to meet the people behind the wines, behind the labels, behind the marketing, to do wine tastings. I mean, it it was I think I my first one, my first trip to wine country, I visited 25 wineries in five days. I mean, it was it was excessive. Um, but I was excited about it. I wanted to continue my studies. I wanted to be able to come back and tell those stories to the guests. I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could about wine. I also studied with master mixologists out of New York when I lived in Colorado Springs and worked for the Broadmoor, and they had brought us this beautifully curated cocktail program that was all about classic cocktails and fresh ingredients, and it was something that Colorado Springs had never seen before. Uh Colorado was just starting to get on the map, and it was so exciting and delicious. And I remember sitting in one of my first classes preparing, you know, doing it, doing a cocktail tasting, uh tasting clear spirits with, you know, salt and lemon and um rosemary and juniper and brown spirits with you know, smelling different types of wood and honey and spices. It was it was exciting. It was my way of developing myself from a leadership perspective. So alcohol for me very much was a way that I was developing my skill set and my tools for the craft and an industry that I knew that I wanted to be in for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, we know how accessible alcohol is in the industry, and I was married to someone who was also in the uh in the industry as a distributor for spirits and wine, and so alcohol was incredibly accessible to me. My lifestyle was built around happy hours, going out to dinner four to five nights a week, and then coming home to cases and cases and bottles and bottles of open liquor. It was around me all the time, and it was something that I had incorporated into every single aspect of my lifestyle. So the life that I was building was one where I was hungry for development, hungry for promotion, working over and over and over again with restaurant groups that were scaling, whether it was, you know, with an independent group that scaled from two to seven locations in five years, and then switching to another group that scaled from six to forty-eight locations in seven years' time. I was hungry for more. I'm a hyperachiever. I love making a huge list of things to do and crossing things off my list. But the more money that I was making, the more my expenses were going up. The more that I became a little arrogant and thought, okay, now I can have the dream house. Now I can have whatever car I want to drive. I started to surround myself with these materialistic things that I thought were gonna make me happy.

I thought that's what I wanted my life to look like.

The hardest part for me, like I said, of stopping drinking wasn't the actual alcohol itself. It was giving up that entire life, a partnership that I'd been in for 20 years, a home that I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life in, a town, a city that I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in, and a community of people that I had surrounded myself with and that had invested in me for for 20 years. I

Early Sobriety And Social Survival

chose that really difficult decision because I didn't recognize myself in the mirror and I was completely disgusted with who I am.

And knowing knowing what I know now, five years later, I would make the same choice again and again and again. So in the early days of deciding to quit drinking, it was really hard.

And I think I I wasn't planning on doing a five-year episode, but I like I said, I'm a very I'm a hyper-achiever, and when I do something great or achieve something that's on my goal list, I spend about two seconds celebrating it and I move on. And I I thought it was really important to spend some time today reflecting because it every single year has been different for me so much since I made this decision. And I think back to year one and how hard it was to figure out how to even talk about the fact that I wasn't drinking anymore. Some people knew why, some people knew it was uh a you know a family decision for us at the time and that things had gotten pretty scary and out of control. But I had to I had to learn how to say to the public that I wasn't drinking and I was still living in Denver, and so I had to figure out how to actually go back out into restaurants again and be back in front of those people that we had known for years and years and years who would always greet us with a shot of tequila or some bubbles and stop them before they even started to reach for that bottle. I did this by scouting restaurant menus ahead of time so that I could see what non-alcoholic options were available. And five years ago, there weren't there weren't a ton. The you know, NA was just kind of coming on the scene. I don't drink soda. So it was a lot of club soda back in the day with Lyme. Um, I had to look at the menus ahead of time, though, because I wanted to prepare myself and feel really confident about what I could order. I didn't want to just sit at a bar or sit at a table and order a glass of water because I just didn't want the questions. I also went through in the very beginning, I went through a period of anger at alcohol where I wasn't fully taking responsibility yet for the choices that I had made. And I was I was upset about what had happened in my relationship as well. And so I really took it out on alcohol. I I was just very, very pissed off for a while. And I had to really accept um who I'd been and why I had been drinking, and that really took me doing some serious work with a therapist and a coach to get to the bottom of my alcohol usage, and it was because I was so burnt out at my job and because I was living a life that was outside of my values. Now, I was 40 years old, I had no idea what my values were. My coach helped me discover those. And as soon as I understood that living your values equals fulfillment in life, that's when I started to figure out exactly where I was out of alignment and understand that the career path that I was currently on and the leadership that I was surrounding myself with didn't align with my values. And that's why I was so burnt out and unhappy. And I was using alcohol to cover that up. So that was my first sign that I had to change jobs and I had to figure out how to reignite my passion for an industry that I had always loved, but had completely become disconnected with. I had stopped developing myself from a leadership perspective as well. And because I worked for such a larger company for the first time, and we had all these executives coming in who had experience with growth. I put the onus on them and said, okay, these people know what they're doing. They're the ones that are in charge of leadership development for me from now on. And that was a huge mistake that I will never ever make again because I came, I became resentful of them. Um, my direct boss did not believe in leadership development and was quicker to put us on a performance improvement plan than to actually sit down and show us how to use some of the tools and how to incorporate some of the philosophies that we needed to be really successful leaders in our position.

Values Burnout And Owning My Growth

So you know, contrast to today, um, the culture of the non-drinking space in the restaurant industry has shifted so much. I'm so grateful. Uh, I don't, it's so much more um genuinely socially acceptable now not to drink. Nobody's asked me if I'm pregnant. Nobody asked me why I quit drinking, nobody asked me if I've had a if I had a problem. Um, they're just they just accept it now. And there's so many more options available on menus. I don't have to look at menus anymore before I go out, but I do tend to frequent places that have a lot of care and thoughtfulness into their in a um cocktail program because it just feels more inclusive. So I think it's a real win for the industry. Uh and it's not just a person, it doesn't feel like just a personal win. So fast forward, you know, these five years, uh there has there's been so much that has changed for me in my life. I think you know, my physical and mental state has shifted completely, my community has shifted, my relationship with money has has shifted significantly, nutrition, um, my focus on nutrition and uh how present I am with people. So from a physical and mental state, you know, I it feels so good to wake up with great energy every single day, feeling great rather than trying to jump on the Peloton and work out as hard as I can to get rid of all the alcohol that that I drank the night before. I feel much steadier. I don't have these emotional highs and lows and some anger that would come up when I drank. And that is really that energy is translating to, you know, um running getting it into running again. I just ran my first trail half marathon up at Beaver Creek a few weeks ago. I'm running the boulders on to celebrate five years of not drinking with a girlfriend of mine. I did a fitness competition this summer and totally fell in love with it and just signed up for my first Hyrux competition in November in Denver. And I just don't even know what my body and my mind are capable of yet. And I love being in the space now where I'm pushing my limits and really starting to remove a lot of that self-doubt. When self-doubt comes up for me now, or the judge that I talk about a lot on the show comes up in my mind, I know that that's a trigger for me, that growth is on the other side of that, and there's an opportunity to push myself. Um, from a community standpoint, I've had to change my environment. You know, moved down to Arizona for three years and then moved back to Denver in August. And I'm single after 20 years, and I've had to completely shift my environment. And a lot of my relationships have changed. You know, those people that I had surface level relationships with around alcohol, they have um disappeared. You know, no, no ill will, no like hard conversations. It's just something that's kind of organically happened. Um, I've really, you know, chosen to join a running group, to join a gym where we have a great community of people that I work out with every morning. That community really helps me process my emotions and work through challenges and makes me feel a lot less lonely because I am an entrepreneur. And for those of you that are entrepreneurs listening to this, you know how lonely leadership is. And I work from home most times. So it's really important for me to get out and surround myself with like-minded people who really value their health. I'm thinking about longevity now, and that's something that I haven't thought about in years. I was very, very reckless with my body and my mind. And that is something that is so important to me today. My relationship with money has completely changed. A lot of that's because I'm single after 20 years, but you know, downsizing from a 27 square foot home to a 700 square foot duplex, you know, I have simplified so many things. I've gotten rid of so many things in my life that I thought meant something, uh, or that were impulse buys. And it just feels so good not to chase the next car that I want or the next house. I'm just really content. And it feels good to have. Of steady income coming in, which has taken me years to build with the business, and to have a team now. And that is just a completely different set of priorities, which is very, very exciting. Uh, from a nutrition standpoint, I had to teach myself how to eat after leaving the restaurant business. I was eating restaurant-sized meals every single day. I was eating on the run, I was eating as fast as I could, you know, jumping into the office and grabbing a bite to eat and then immediately jumping out on the floor. I can't count how many cold meals I've had over the years. And so learning how to cook, learning how to cook nutritious food, learning how to fuel for working out and training six days a week. Um, it's really made a huge shift. And I realize how much the you know our guts are connected to our minds. And so fueling myself properly first with great food and wholesome food absolutely translates to the quality of the work that I'm able to put out every single day and how present I get to be with clients, with our coaching clients. Speaking of presence, I mean it's incredible to be able to slow down enough to notice the sunrises, notice the sunsets, notice the beautiful flowers that are all around, catch a you know, a glimpse of the mountains, be in the mountains as as often as I possibly can. And I'm more present for clients, I'm a better listener these days. And my personal relationships that I've chosen to have are so much deeper and thoughtful than they used to be. I truly value those relationships so much more than I did before. And I constantly journal every single day to keep reflection really top of mind for me of what's working and what's not, and keep gratitude top of mind as well. Because again, I took a lot of things for granted over the years and when I was acting really, really reckless, and I want to make sure that I don't go down that path again. So

A New Body Community And Life

where I'm at today, I think the biggest shift for me isn't yes, it's been physical, but it's also my it's my identity. I mean, drinking no longer defines the way that I live my life or where I show up or how I show up. I manage stress and emotions so much differently now. I'm not reaching for something when when things get stressful. I really don't get super stressed out anymore because I know I've got all these tools now, whether it's breath work or meditation or going out for a walk with the dogs for 10 minutes or whatever the case is. So I'm so genuinely excited for the next 45 years. I would absolutely have not changed anything about the way that these past five years have unraveled and changed. And I'm just grateful for every single opportunity, you know, the good ones and the and the challenging ones that have come this way. So um I did a non-alcoholic episode over a year ago, and it's been by far our most popular episode on the show. And so I reconnected with Dana Benelli, who I who we recorded with and asked her to come back on the show. And after this, we are going to give you an update on our next episode of what's going on in the NA space because it continues to be a huge growing segment. We know that Gen Z and millennials are drinking a lot less than they used to, and it's not a trend. Uh, it's it's a huge movement. And so very excited to see people choosing healthier options in their life and being more present for everybody around them because we all need that, especially in this day and age. So

The NA Movement And A Challenge

um, I would invite you, if if this episode is resonating with you, to pick some time, spend some time with yourself reflecting on one thing that you're doing in your life. It doesn't have to be alcohol related, but one thing that's really draining you of your energy.

And think about how you need to shift your relationship with that thing. What would you have to give up to get the life that you actually want? Thanks so much for listening. Have a great shift. We'll talk to you soon.