Failure Tolerance

In this episode, I get real about what failure tolerance looks like for women who keep trying to quit drinking or make big changes in their lives. 

I share how repeated attempts—even when they feel disappointing—are actually proof of your resilience and belief that something bigger is possible. 

You’ll hear why getting numb to failure is normal, how to recognize the lessons hidden in your attempts, and why resilience alone isn’t enough—transformation requires intentional action. 

By the end, you’ll walk away with a fresh perspective on your past attempts and a clear path toward the change you really want.

2026 is the year you stop making rules to break, and finally get to work. Join me in 90 Days To Alcohol-Free Freedom In 2026 - Get a once in a life time bonus when you sign up before 2026 Click HERE to Book Your Clarity Call Today! 

Download The Permission Protocol — my free 5-part mini-course — and start practicing the skills that make alcohol irrelevant on your terms.

DISCLAIMER: This podcast and its contents are not a substitute for rehabilitation, medical treatment or advice. It is for educational and inspirational purposes. I am not a therapist or doctor. The views here are expressed a personal opinion and based on first hand experience. Please consult a doctor if your mental or physical health is at risk.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Wild sobriety is for the woman who has outgrown alcohol and was never meant to follow the script. I'm Mary Wagstaff, a holistic alcohol coach, and after 20 years of daily drinking, I finally made alcohol irrelevant in my life. And now I help women just like you do the same through my proven five shifts process.

Welcome to Wild Sobriety. Feminine freedom beyond alcohol.

Welcome back to the show, my beautiful warriors of Love. It's wild sobriety. It's Mary Wagstaff. I'm gonna do a real time. Let's get some new inspiration for the holidays before 2026. Of course, this content is always evergreen. It will change your life. It will change a moment. What I [00:01:00] want you to know. Is if you are still here, especially if you've been listening for a long time, if you've been wanting to change your relationship to alcohol for 2, 3, 4 years.

For me, it was like 20 years. I mean, really. And then I just put it off because I had. And I do this, and we do this in our lives. We have something called failure tolerance. This is something that exists. I've experienced it in my own life. I in many other areas where you wanna create change. But you've kind of gotten used to being disappointed because you've tried so many times, or at least you think you've tried.

You've had the intention of trying and the result, you haven't got the results you want. So you've become kind of numb to the disappointment, but you haven't really experienced full failure because the disappointment. On this side, when you're still consuming [00:02:00] alcohol, you've really just numbed with alcohol, so you've never really gone through the full portal of failure.

But even if you have gone through the full portal of failure, which you probably have, you've probably cried over it, you've woke up thought, you know, I'm a failure. I'm disappointed. How do I keep doing this again? Most women I work with, you have tried to quit or cut back so many times that you develop this emotional callous and that just becomes just as normal as the other impacts of alcohol in your life.

You don't consciously choose it, but somewhere along the way, you got used to the cycle of intention attempt and then not following through the shame, and then you reset and you do it again and again and again. But. Uh, what you need to know is your attempt is really just a thought. It's just an intention.

There's not really a new shift in [00:03:00] perspective. So you come become numb to the failure, and it's not because you don't care, but because you care so much that you're protecting that, you know, protecting yourself becomes its own sort of survival strategy. It's like. In some way, you've just, you've come, come close to resigning to, that's just the way that it is.

But feeling failure deeply is what's going to create the inspiration for you to change. And what you really need to know is that there is a gift at all of your attempts. All of your attempts, even if they're intention, just intentions, that you, you know, really haven't understood how to fully execute. You just kind of have an intention and you just keep trying by making up rules for yourself, which is essentially what people do is like, oh, I'm just gonna make up this [00:04:00] new rule, and that will.

And then I'll just break it, right? So the gifts at this attempt are proof that, that you still believe something else is possible, but you have become tolerant to the failure. So you're not feeling the depths anymore of that disappointment, but you're not also finding on the other side of it that inspiration, that kind of fire under your ass that you need, and you.

But you wouldn't keep trying if some part of you didn't know that this was. Your that this wasn't your forever story. If you fully said right now, that's it. I'm just resigning myself to a life of alcohol. You just wouldn't be here. You would just give up now and that would just be your story. But you don't, because when you come here, you get an some sort of inspiration.

You get a little dopamine hit. You wouldn't be listening to this and other podcasts and reading emails and looking for new ways and Googling things and finding inspiration, [00:05:00] education, and resource if a part of you hadn't held onto that tiniest spark of hope. So failure tolerance isn't a flaw. But it is a sign of resilience.

It's a sign that you have allowed yourself to go through these attempts. It is evidence that you have a belief, even if it's a little tiny whisper. I just signed up for a challenge with my business coach, and this was the first thing she said. She said, you would not have signed up for this challenge if you didn't believe that the results.

There wasn't a possibility of you creating this result. So here is the shift though that I want to offer you, is that failure tolerance keeps you in the cycle and transformation moves you out of it. Failure tolerance says, I'll keep trying again and again, but transformation says I'm changing the system so I don't have to try this hard [00:06:00] anymore.

What? What am I believing? That is, that's not working for me. What is the thought that I keep thinking over and over again that keeps me in this cycle of fail and then repeat and on and on and on again. And chances are it's that I don't have enough willpower. I just need to create more restrictions for myself.

Um. Blaming something outside of your environment. It's gonna be a perfect time when I just get through the holidays when the kids are just not at school, back at school, um, when I'm just less stressed at work. Right? So there's all of these. Sis this, this failure intolerance that you keep doing again and again and again because you are not actually shifting the belief that you actually need to shift, which is what do I need to believe about myself?

So instead of putting alcohol at the center of change, I'm gonna put myself at the center of change. I [00:07:00] need to get reinvigorated and re-inspired, and that's exactly what my 90 days to alcohol free freedom. Program is built for. This is not another attempt. This is a transformation. This is for you to actually come in and unpack that habitual cycle that you've done for the last 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years in a structured, supported, and emotionally attuned.

System where you stop relying on sheer willpower and your old beliefs that you just can't see and really uncover your blind spots. That's what's coaching is all about. It's uncovering the blind spots that you can't see, so you start building this new sense of internal safety, which is what you're lacking right now.

You have, you're on one cliff and, and alcohol freedom is on another cliff, and between you is a huge. Gap, right? Is, is a ravine. And it's like, how the hell am I gonna get from where I am to [00:08:00] where I wanna go? There's no bridge, there's no rope, there's no nothing. Well, this is what we do. This is the system that I've created, is that I walk you through.

Step by step, plank by plank, we build the embodied evidence together. You are never doing this alone. You're taking one step at a time together, and it's actually fun and it's actually exciting. And every single week, every single day, there is a new win for you. So this is. Really for the woman who is seriously sick of negotiating with her potential, like you are just sick of hearing your own excuses.

You're sick of hearing one more reason why it didn't work. Sick of waking up one more Monday morning with the, you know, the Sunday scaries or the Monday disappointment and waiting for the right time to figure it out. But that is what this process is for. This is the system to figure it out. 'cause you'll never figure it out.

With the same brain that got you to where you [00:09:00] want to go. Because if you were able to do it on your own, you would have done it on your own. And I'm not saying that there's not a possibility for you to find that shift of perspective that really anchors you in, but if you wanna guarantee your results and you wanna stop.

Leaking energy by going over this again and again and again and get in here in 90 days and get it done. This is the opportunity for you. This is going to change your 2026 trajectory because we are gonna decide on your whole year ahead of time, so. If you want your mental health as the foundation of your family, because that's what it is, a mother's mental health and a woman's mental health is the foundation of an abundant and healthy family.

You want to be the woman whose children get to learn from her as an inspiration that of what's possible and not the woman. Who needs a drink to deal with her children? The woman who wants to feel her body again, to [00:10:00] know what the sensations of her body and the emotions of her body are actually telling her.

And to celebrate yourself for real, not this external thing that's synthetic. You want to really honor your accomplishments. You want to honor your cha. These shifts in life, these changes in life. So for every woman that books a clarity call. For the 90 Days to Alcohol Free Freedom Program, this is a private mentorship between me and you.

If you book your Clarity call before 2026, you are going to receive a very, very special bonus that I've never given before. It's valued at $1,200, and this is my way of honoring your courage and your inspired action to get beyond failure tolerance. And to start feeling the disappointment of failure, not from a place of shame.

I'm going to teach you how to fail in that failure. I have a, there's a class in my program [00:11:00] that is about failure gold. It is about failing forward and how we have to. Become good at failing. Like we want a certain level of failure tolerance, but not to the point where we're numb to it, right? We want to be able to move through failure as the sign that we're actually doing something different, but it's the inspiration to be like, okay, how do I do it better next time?

So this is for you. And you are ready for finally to take that resiliency. It's like I've gone through this again and again and again. I can, you know, muster through this, although you're using alcohol probably to numb some of that when you're using alcohol to numb a lot of other things in your life that you've just kind of become complacent to your relationship, your love life, your work.

No more of this. This is, this is your one. In only beautiful, sacred life because, and it's not about changing the circumstance, it's about changing how you show up in your feminine [00:12:00] power to really transform your life. And that is everything that we do inside of this program. You are not done yet, and your resilience and your being here is proof of that.

Everything that you need to know is in the description right here, and I will see you on the next episode. As a thank you for being such an important part of this podcast, I want to gift you my brand new free mini course, the Permission Protocol. It is a five part journey to help you rethink everything you believe about the pleasure that is possible in sobriety.

And the radical freedom that is required to get to the other side, and it's available for you right now inside of my free wild sobriety community where we can hang out, support one another, and grow by honoring our authentic expression as women. Everything you need is right here in the description. I will see you inside of the [00:13:00] community.