Chris Janssen’s Background and Work

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White, and today we’re talking with Chris Janssen or Janssen if you’re in Europe. But let me tell you a little bit about Chris before she introduces herself.

So Chris is a leading results coach in performance and mindset, and she’s a best-selling award-winning author. She’s worked with hundreds of sought -after professional athletes, singers, dancers, Hollywood writers, artists, authors, military soldiers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses internationally to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be. She’s got a master’s in counseling psychology, and she’s a board -certified life coach.

She specializes in equipping clients with tools to substitute limiting beliefs and unhelpful narratives with certainty through utilizing her successful and sustainable living all in methods. Her upcoming book, Grace Yourself, How to Show Up for the Sober Life You Want, is a book for recovering perfectionists and for everyone who desires to release controlling thoughts. Grace Yourself will help you realize that your worth is not dependent on your actions or mistakes, but rather the power within you to live the extraordinary life you desire. And you are going to give us, you’re actually going to give us some tools so that we can get early access to your book and some prizes and a bunch of really cool stuff. So Chris, thank you for taking the time to chat with me today. This is going to be awesome.

Yeah, Jake, so good to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Of course. And can you give us kind of the good old intro, where you are, kind of what you want to share about yourself and what you do? And then, yeah, we’ll get chatting about your book and all things recovery and prevention.

Yeah, so well, thank you. Yeah, that intro says what I do professionally. This second book is called Grace Yourself, How to Show Up for the Sober Life You Want. so that wasn’t really part of my intro. That’s what is exciting about the book is I get to tell my story, why I’m sober, how I got sober, like my trip ups, how I got sober again for a second time. And I am not an addiction specialist. I have a master’s in counseling, I’m a board certified coach, all those great things you said. And in addition to that, I struggled with alcohol addiction. And so I’m an expert at my story, I’m not an addiction expert. And so that’s what’s fun about the book is it has my coaching tools, it’s also in order to share the coaching tools, share my own story.

Wow, it’s amazing to think that, like how we do need grace in areas of like, from the outside, probably looking at your life, Chris, people would think, hey, you’ve always had everything you’ve wanted. You’re this very smart, capable, amazing person, and you’re helping so many people. Meanwhile, you had your own thing you were struggling with. And what’s more human than that.

Right, that’s such a, in fact, I was at my support, I go to a community support meeting almost every morning and at the meeting this morning, the topic was the housewife at home, right? And I was, so I got sober back in 2007 and I was that housewife that exactly what you just said, I looked great from the outside. I didn’t, hadn’t, the what ifs hadn’t happened yet, right?

I didn’t have a DUI. I didn’t have these terrible things you hear happening to people that force them to get into recovery. I just knew deep in my gut that drinking alcohol wasn’t serving me and it was about to get really bad and really dangerous. And I had three babies at the time. Our kids, I’ve been married for 29 years and my husband and I have three kids and right now they’re 22, 25 and no, yeah, 25 and 26. So, but then they were babies and I didn’t want them to see me drunk. I didn’t want them to, you know I wanted to hold everything together. And so I went, I asked, and I tell this in the book, asked my, I went to a therapist one time, like I asked a therapist, I wasn’t in therapy, but I went and asked, hey, do I have an addiction? They said, probably not, but just be careful. I asked my pastor about it and they said, sent me to a faith based recovery program that told me I was codependent. I asked my medical doctor about it. They said I didn’t have a problem and I asked friends about it and they said, honey, you don’t need recovery. You’re not, that’s not you. And so very much from the outside, I looked like I had it all together and on the inside I really didn’t. And my husband was starting to see it too. And that is why I walked into an alcohol support meeting and got sober in community on my own. I had to, right?

Overcoming Shame and Guilt in Addiction Recovery

Yeah, great, because you knew what was off or what was missing more than anyone else could see. I would love to dive into some of your experience because the people that are listening to this, many of them have a similar story and they’ve seen the life that was promised to them through using substances and that it was without, it couldn’t live up to those expectations and ultimately was something that was hurtful. But now they’re in this stage of life like you, where they’re giving back, they’re paying the best things in life that they’ve learned, they’re wanting to share it and help the next generation. 

So I’m curious from your perspective, is you teach a lot about going from where you are to where you want to be. And the thing that caught my ear in your bio was limiting beliefs. I’m beginning to understand how powerful our beliefs are. And like that, you could be capable of incredible things, but just the power of your mindset could keep you from getting those things or excel you extremely fast towards getting them. And so I’m wondering if maybe coming out of sobriety or just in your professional experience, have you found any commonalities between if you are using substances, what are your limiting beliefs and that where do you go when you are getting help? Like, how does that change? Do have any perspective on that.

Mm -hmm. tons of it Yeah And it’s all in the book and yeah, so I love working with people on limiting beliefs. I mean it specific to addiction and my alcohol addiction Shame and guilt was huge for me. I had this limiting belief this is back in 2007 that I was a monster and I that was my belief I It didn’t matter that I had these three kids, I had a successful marriage, I was keeping a tidy house, I flossed my teeth, I got up and worked out before taking the kids to school. So far, I was holding everything together. That’s not to say had I kept drinking, I do believe it would have started to unravel on the outside, not just the inside. But so far, I was holding it all together from an exterior point of view. Inside, I had so much shame and when I say shame, I think of guilt as I did something wrong and shame, I’m a bad person. So when I say shame, I thought I was a bad person. I thought I was a monster because I could do all these things and I couldn’t stop drinking. And so when I found a community, I went to a 12 step support group that I just looked up online one night. didn’t know anyone. 

No one in my family had this issue, right? I didn’t know anyone who’d personally yet, who’d gone before me that I could ask this question to. So I looked it up online, went to a women’s support meeting the next day, and this woman in the group said to me, she knew it was my first time, I was like a deer in the headlights in there, right? And she says, it’s not your fault. You have, it’s like an allergy and you never have to have another drink again and stay here and we’re going to help you. And I mean, it makes me emotional now because in that moment, and I had been trying on my own for years to stop drinking, I’d go months or I’d even go a year and then it would just, I just couldn’t break the pattern. The second she said that, in that moment, shame just flew off my shoulders when she said, it’s not your fault and you don’t have to have another drink again. I was definitely one of those people at the point where not having to have another drink again was refreshing. Some people come into recovery and hear, I don’t get to have another drink again. And that’s fine too. We’re all coming in at a different space, but I was in a space where I didn’t want to have to have another one again. 

And so in that moment, my belief went from I’m a monster because I can’t stop drinking to I am deserving of a supportive community and recovery because I can’t stop drinking alcohol. That’s a huge belief shift, right? So, and at that point I already had my master’s in counseling. So I kept over the next few years and as I got years into sobriety, because after that I never had another drink for 14 years. And then I did and that’s in the book. have a little bit of you know, story there where I tried it again and I’m definitely sober again now. But for 14 years, didn’t have another sip of alcohol and I had this system and these friends to help me with it.

I just lost my train of thought. I didn’t know I was gonna say I so over the years I went back and got my I added a coaching certificate to my thing because I really wanted to serve other people in showing them how powerful belief is and so that’s actually in both my books this exercise where belief equals Truth plus story like there’s the truth which is a fact of what happened like in my case the fact was I was addicted to alcohol. That’s just a fact. The story was one story was I was a monster. The other story was I was deserving of recovery, right? So if you change the story, you can change the belief. And that’s my favorite thing to work with people.

The Power of Belief and Mindset

Wow, that’s so powerful. I’m relating everything that you’re talking about to our work with young people and helping them stay drug -free for as long as possible, knowing that if they wait until their brain’s fully developed and then decide to have a casual relationship with alcohol or something, that’s way better. And I’m one I still don’t to this day because I have this personal conviction that if I’m doing this work, I’m going to live this work. And one of the things that I talk about with parents and with educators is the power of belief. And I like how you talked about it’s the truth and the story because sometimes what we do unintentionally is we can actually crush a young person’s sense of belief by trying to be, quote, realistic.

And this, I remember this happening growing up to me. Our families do this, our friends do this with the best of intentions to protect us, right? They’re like, hey, maybe don’t shoot for a goal that high because you could get hurt. Or maybe don’t dream that big because realistically only this many people get to have that dream. And I don’t want to see you deal with failure. But what I realized is that if a young person or any of us believe that we can do great things, we are going to learn so much more going after that goal, becoming that person who goes to achieve it. Even if we fail, we’re going to be 10 times a better person than we would have been if we would have just not believed it in the first place and settled. And I think that’s something if people are listening to this podcast and you’re hearing Chris’s story, you’re relating to it. I definitely want to point out that there’s probably moments in your life when you’re dealing with someone who is in recovery or who is a young person who wants to stay drug free or maybe just somebody who has big lofty goals, is sometimes it takes an outside person like you to help them believe that they can do something better. And Chris, it sounds like that’s what that person did for you in an instant, in one meeting, in one encounter, gave you that belief.

Right? Right? Yeah, and I love that you just said that I’m a mom of three kids in their 20s, three adults in their 20s. And I’ve always said like kids will live, you know, they can live down to your worst fear for them or up to your greatest anticipation for them. So I love how you just like, you’re talking about planning the idea of failure. Like if you say, I just don’t want you to blame.

That’s actually planting the idea of failure in someone else’s, especially young person’s mind. Well, what if we plant the idea of success. Then what happens? And that’s what you’re doing through your podcast, right? You’re giving all these people, you’re planting these seeds of success and you’re living it. You’re walking the walk.

Yeah. Right. And I think what I love about it is when you share that, you give someone permission to start practicing more, to start reaching after higher goals, to prioritize their health and their body, to reach higher. And for us in our field, Chris, that’s the reason why someone is going to stay in this sober lifestyle longer, is because of this belief. How powerful is that.

So powerful. -hmm, mm -hmm. Yeah, so powerful.

Yeah, that’s so cool. I would love to learn more about like in your field and what you’re doing now. I know you’ve written this incredible book. You’re already an award -winning author. What does your work look like day to day and kind of how you’re working with people? Yeah, can you give us insight into that.

Mm -hmm. Yeah. Well, right now, because the book’s launching in a few months, it’s lots of hours devoted to book things. And in addition to that, I coach. I just love coaching. I love it more than speaking. I love being on podcasts. But I just love coaching. I coach one on one. And lots of just over the years, naturally, I’ve ended up with a lot of clients that are creatives and high performers, people really at the top of their game at what they’re doing. And then, you you asked a few minutes ago about commonalities I see with people. You know, I’m not I’m not an addiction coach. I’m not an addiction specialist. I’m not coaching people only in recovery. I’m coaching entrepreneurs and like I said, creatives. I do see, whether it’s people, high achievers and people that have maybe struggled with perfectionism do have some common things, right? Like we have this, and I say we, I’m a recovering perfectionist, right? And I think that we are the ones that typically will fall into addictions because we’re controlling our environment, like take people pleasing for example, I have a chapter in my book that’s the common things I see in people that fall into addiction. so like people pleasing is one of them. It’s not about pleasing other people, it’s about pleasing ourselves, changing our own state, right? If I can get or an avoid a reaction from you, I can manipulate the way I feel. And that’s all I’m doing with alcohol too.

Right, is trying to manipulate the way I feel. So these ways that we manipulate our surroundings or people around us, circumstances, events, or ourselves in order to change the way we feel, we can do that not just with a substance, we can do it with other things too. And so it is common with people and you know, I think the difference between a high achiever and a perfectionist, a perfectionist will say, it has to be a certain way before I can reach my goal. A high achiever will set goals and go for them, right? So I’m always encouraging people, let’s be achievers, that’s fine. We don’t need to be perfectionists. And this has a lot to do with why I titled the book, Yourself, because it for me, and there is some of my personal faith in the book, I’m Christian. So for me, grace is unmerited favor, right? It’s what I don’t deserve, what I get free from my God that I don’t deserve. And when you’re controlling and when you’re in a perfectionist mindset, I would say, I will tell you what I deserve, right? Like I’ll tell you, like when I was stuck in that shame and guilt cycle years ago, it’s like, I’ll tell you how worthy I am. Right. And that’s part of my favorite thing to work with clients in is to go, you know what, tough, tough luck. You don’t get to decide you’re worthy. Suck it up. Right. Like you’re worthy and you’re valuable no matter what. And that’s what grace is. And so I write a lot about that in my book and that that’s, that’s really my mission is to help is to honor God by encouraging his people to see their worth. And I do that through writing and coaching tools.

Okay, that’s fantastic. And I the way that you said that of like, no, you don’t get to tell yourself that you don’t have worth. Or you could say that, but you are so wrong because you don’t define your own worth. That’s a gift given to you. That’s so cool. I love that. Well, I would love to chat a little bit more about if there’s any like last tips you can give us from your book. And then I want to learn how we can get a hold of it and any incentives you have going on. But is there anything else, an example from your book that you think would be helpful for people that are in this field specifically working in drug prevention and recovery, helping people in that space that you’d be excited for them to get from this episode and then read more about in the book?

Practical Tools for Personal Transformation

Yeah, I talk about in the book the difference between commitment and craving, right? It goes into our whys. For me, why I drank is not as important as knowing why I don’t drink now. And that can go for any addiction or habit that someone’s, or any pattern, let’s say, that someone’s trying to change, right? Know your why. Write it down. Recite it when you wake up and before you go to bed, turn it into a mantra, your why is going to keep you committed, right? And in the sober world right now, like a lot has changed since I first got sober. There’s a lot of new books and some of these ideas that we can be sober because we’ll just understand how toxic of a poison alcohol is for our body. Yes, that’s true. But I’ve read so many recent things saying, if you understand how toxic it is, you just won’t want it. Well, I experimented with that thinking a little bit. the problem I have is, OK, that’s a good idea. But what about the days when I do want it? I don’t eat much sugar just because it doesn’t line up with my overall health goal.

But there’s days during the year I’m gonna have a cookie or a Christmas I might have a piece of pie. So I can’t, what happens on the days I do want it. So that’s where I say commitment versus craving. When you have a craving, you can’t control all your cravings. We can’t control everything, even though we wanna think we can. So that’s gonna be when you go back to your why and your commitment and why you committed to this and then, and know that no craving is wrong. It’s just a feeling. And then I have a framework I love that’s so simple that I’ll leave you with. It’s the four F’s, I call it. Feel it, find it, fact check it, frame it. So, and I put it in both the books. So when you have a feeling you don’t wanna have, Stop, celebrate your awareness. No feelings wrong. It’s an action signal, right?

So then find it. What just went through my brain? What just went? Was it a lousy question? Like, why is this happening to me? Why do I have to be here? Those are called lousy questions. Our brain can only answer them with a lousy answer. So when you find it, then fact check it. Is that true? Is this the best? Is this serving me and the people I love and my mission? If it was a lousy feeling, it’s probably not. So then you frame it, which is reframing it to something better.

Right, and like if the thought was, do I have to be in this meeting? Well, reframe it to, know, who am I gonna meet today that I’m gonna learn something I didn’t know before? Even if you’re not jazzed about that, and even if you don’t believe it right away, say it anyway, like I said, commit to it, make it a mantra, it will grow into a belief.

That’s really cool. It’s… gosh, what is the word? In education, they use this a lot. It’s a growth mindset, right? It’s like you’re not stuck. You have the opportunity to grow. Your brain is not a fixed thing. You’re helping reframe it. So I love your four F’s. That’s super helpful. And I can attest to the power of this stuff. Like a couple years back.

I was probably working with 10 to 15 schools a year, doing great, the same great work, and started implementing these practices, right on your mirror, the things that you are, and assume your best self, and just start saying it. It feels really weird at first, you know? But you get into it, and all of a sudden you realize, wait, I’m making decisions based on the person I want to be, not that other voice of who I used to tell myself that story, like you said, and I can fact check it. So I just I love everything you’re doing, Chris. It’s so cool. It’s so life changing. Before I ask you about your new book, what is the title of the book that you’ve already written?

Mm -hmm. Yeah, thank you. It’s called Living All In, How to Show Up for the Life You Want. And it’s full of coaching. I wrote it for my clients, really. It’s just all my favorite coaching tools and there’s blanks to fill in the blanks. There’s exercises almost in every chapter.

Okay, perfect. So we can hop on Amazon and grab that right now.

Pre-Order ‘Grace Yourself’ and Access Additional Resources

You can hop on Amazon, grab that right now, and then one chapter’s on patterns, and that is where it touches on addiction and habits. Just one little chapter, and so that chapter, I turned into a second book, because I felt like it needed more space.

Yes. Awesome. And then please tell us more about how we can get a hold of your new book when it comes out and any plans you have to stay in touch with you. That would be great.

Yeah, it’s called grace yourself how to show up for the sober life you want and it’s available now for pre -order you can go it’s you can go to Barnes and Noble Amazon Amazon’s probably the easiest go there pre -order it and If you do that now hang on to your pre -order number because go to grace yourself book calm and put in that pre-order number and I’m just as incentives for pre -ordering it ahead of time. I’m offering you’ll get my for free my master class which kind of Highlights just in one hour. Here’s the book right all my favorite stuff a workbook with some video with video course. It’s a you can use it for a book club like discussion questions or by yourself and then I also am setting up or I’ve set up a grace yourself community. It’s a secret Facebook group and it’s not, I want to be clear, it’s not another online recovery group. It is a place that can be anonymous, all be in there where you can just save space to ask questions and then hear from me specifically. I can help you get plugged into a recovery community. There’s so many to choose. There’s wonderful options right now so I can help you with and those things are available until the launch. So it officially launches in March. By pre-ordering now though, you get this stuff now, which I’m only offering until March. So, yeah, yeah.

Okay, that sounds great. It like we get the best content that’s in the book to right now. We get some video courses with you. We get a community with you. So this is awesome. If you’re listening to this call and you’re like, hey, I want to hang out with Chris and dive into this book, that’s where they can go and pre-order it.

Yep. and I, I’m sorry, go on.

And you said graceyourselfbook.com is where they enter their order number.

Mm -hmm. Yes, that’s right. And I should have been clear. It needs to be the hardcover. So there’s a hardcover. There is an e-book. These offers are for the hardcover. And you’ll want that anyway because it has exercises in it. You’ll want to be able to write in it. My website is chrisjansencoaching.com. You can also get to that, this place from there as well. And I’ll have links on my website where you can buy it as well.

Okay, that sounds perfect. Well, thank you, Chris, for sharing all of your information, your enthusiasm for this work and giving us an in to get a sneak peek on everything. I just appreciate all that you’re doing and using your story to help other people. It’s really, really awesome.

I appreciate you heaps

Absolutely. And for everyone listening, just keep up the great work. Remember that we’re better together and we have all different resources and strengths to lean on. So if you have anyone you want us to interview for the podcast, send them to me, jake@vive18.com. If there’s anything that you want to discuss or learn, I am open to feedback and all of that. We want this to always be a great resource for you. And if you haven’t in a while, if you love this show, please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts because that helps other prevention specialists and people in our field find us and we’re just gonna help spread the good stuff that we’re doing. We hope that every episode you get a new idea and you learn something and you grow. So hopefully this episode was part of that experience and then we will see you next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power.