Craig Perra

I am ready to rock and roll and launch my friend. Thank you so much for having me.

Craig Perra

I’m a function of the system not working. There are times I sometimes think to myself, “How dare I? A failed executive, life-coach challenge this disease base model.”

Craig Perra

When I was at my lowest point six, and half years ago, I tried to kill myself. I was fired from a six-figure executive job at Esurance, national responsibility, moved my family across the country for that opportunity, and large part because I got fired from my previous job. The drugs and the sex started to bleed over. It no longer was a hobby that I was able to contain. It began to bleed over.

You talked about lying. Before, I lied to my boss in my previous company about something stupid. He asked “Craig, did you do this?” and all I had to answer was, “Yes boss. I goofed. I made a mistake, ” and I said, “No.” The next day, I was fired.

The comeback kid, I get a better job making more money with more responsibility. I moved my family across the country. Within seven months, I’m in an inpatient drug facility after trying to kill myself snorting bath salt, if that gives you a sense of how low I sunk.

When I was seeking help, I would interview with a therapist and with a counselor. I just heard the same things over and over again like “Go to the meeting,” “Surrender,” “Be powerless.” Just the thought of doing that again, going to therapy, and talking about mom and dad again or talking about the pain in my past of being touched as a child, I just couldn’t do it.

I started to seek out alternative approaches, and in that journey, one of the first things I learned was the efficacy of this model that people were telling me that I had to do the professionals I was entrusted with my future and my family future was penniless. I was shocked to learn that 12 steps and according to a study from Cambridge, has a success rate of 10-20%. I went, “Oh my God. Wait a minute. There’s a whole another world.”

I got some great help from George Collins, who’s a provider of Walnut Creek, California, who started to introduce me to some Eastern concepts like meditating. I thought that might be helpful. Little did I know, here we are in the cosmos of this mindful revolution.

Craig Perra

I started to study habits, and I became obsessed with them. I became obsessed with them because I learned some very powerful things.

In this dark place, I’ve read Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit. I read a quote I’ll never forget. “Habits cannot be eradicated or erased. They must be replaced.”

I’ve always been a system’s guy, a system’s thinker, and that said to me that “Why am I obsessively focus on not doing the thing when the success is a function of me doing something else?”

Then, I also learned that these triggers we have as an addict is a trigger to self-deprecate, to use, and to act out weren’t going away. I said, “If those aren’t going away, then we have to incorporate that reality into the model instead of the shame and disgust I would feel every time I had what I now knew was this naturally occurring event.”

I became obsessed with habits, mindfulness, the science of success first, to put my life back together, then to build a better mousetrap, and help people recover quickly and in so, doing creative, sustainable infrastructure in their lives to support long-term success. That’s where The Mindful Habit was born.

Craig Perra

That’s a great question.

I love starting clients in this place where I have them obsessed as they do over their addiction around their habit cycle.

We’re creatures of habits.

Craig Perra

Scientists say that we spend 50% of our waking hours, automatically, instantaneously reacting to external stimuli. We’re programmed like computers. That negativity manifests itself every time through this habit cycle.

The triggers we experience, that energy shift in the body from positive to negative when we screw up, make a mistake, see something that might trigger our addictions, these triggers aren’t going away. I want my clients to understand and learned this cycle they experience.

Then, after these triggers to the addict, come the thoughts, that mental chatter, self-deprecating, self-loathing, and using.

Then, what comes next is action. We go through this cycle; trigger, thought, action again and again.

Craig Perra

The first phase of the process to transform your life is to bring a level of awareness to this cycle literally by tracking your triggers, your thoughts, and your actions for seven days. Write them down. What triggered you? What put this in motion? You’re going to find there are all sorts of different things.

Many times, the addict finds that it’s not the thing, the substance, or the act, or the behavior that’s triggering them.

Craig Perra

Understand how the negativity manifests itself in your life through these habits cycle, these triggers, then these thoughts that follow, and pay very careful attention to those thoughts. Literally, like a court reporter or a journalist transcribing them.

What exactly is that mental chatter that’s framing your reality, and that’s habitually framing your reality? And then, what action do you take?

Craig Perra

Once you understand the cycle, now, you have an ability to create space. That space, that moment, that hiccup, that speed bump, and that at the moment mindfulness exists between thought and action.

The cool part about it is what the addict is doing that which drove them insane, those triggers and those thoughts. Those triggers and thoughts don’t go away. I still self-deprecate.

I was walking on stage at the Steve Harvey Show, and I look over. I see a beautiful woman sitting in the audience, and my first thought was, “Oh my God. There’s a prostitute.” What? There’s no prostitute. Yes, all the prostitutes get together in the afternoon and watch the Steve Harvey Show. That was fear. That was the numbing, coping, and escaping like “Uh oh. There it is. Let’s get away from this.”

Craig Perra

Instead of feeling shame or disgust, recognize that this trigger doesn’t go away. You can now use it to empower yourself.

Recognize that energy shift and those thoughts and then do something different.

The first step of the process to transform your life is mastering that habit cycle and understanding exactly how that negativity is manifesting itself in your life by obsessively paying attention to that cycle, and tracking it for seven days. Literally, writing down the trigger, thought, and action.

Craig Perra

Once you’ve got the data, now, you can do something about it to transform your life.

Craig Perra

That has become so deeply entrenched in my psyche. It’s so much more than a cute internet meme or a cliché. It is a matter of scientific fact.

If you are going to counterbalance decades of negative habitual thinking, and acting out, numbing, coping, and escaping behavior, you have to do something different.

What I teach clients is once they developed an awareness of that habit’s cycle, I teach them about this concept of space.

Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, founder of Logotherapy, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, talked about this idea of space in his book when he said, between stimulus and response, and that’s the trigger. The response is the action between stimulus, and in response, there is a space.

In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. This sentence was uttered decades before we have the neuroscience research we have on the brain because that stimulus doesn’t go away. How do we respond?

Craig Perra

You can use your awareness of those triggers and those thoughts to cue a different action to transform your life, and that different action I teach is a trigger response plan. That is a series of five steps the client can do to interrupt practically that pattern.

Here’s the part I love about the system because the customer starts first in a very practical way seeing their ability to regain some power just by paying attention, being mindful of their habit cycle.

As they’ve been paying attention those thoughts, what we do next is ask “Who said that? Where did that thought come from? In the universe of ideas, why, when I tripped on the sidewalk in front of people, my first thought is, “You piece of S-H-I-T.” Why that thought?” We Use those bread crumbs to do a real deep dive on the cause.

Where did these habits come from? Why the numbing, coping, and escaping strategy?

Craig Perra

We use this concept called subpersonalities, which are the separate and distinct parts of ourselves. The client can learn to “Who is this addict? Where did he come from and what does he need?

Craig Perra

It may be incredibly unhealthy, but it’s doing something for the addict. Those needs have to be understood and have to get met in a healthy, constructive way.

Simultaneously, while we’re going back, we’re using the data we’ve acquired from those thoughts to do that cause from a very practical perspective. How is the negativity of the past habitually manifesting itself in the present?

This trigger response plan is something I just came up with for me because I kept getting triggered. I kept having thoughts. Once I accepted their reality, I came up with this five step triage plan that I teach the clients and ultimately, they use it, or they create their own, but it’s very simple.

Craig Perra

The first step is “Wrong Thought, Right.” That’s a cognitive behavioral thought replacement tool, and that’s like I caught the hiccup or the speed bump.

As soon as you’re aware of that negative thinking, instantly to erase the wrong, insert the right thought, and that maybe it. That might be enough to shift that energy. More often than not, at least for me, it wasn’t so I go on to step two.

Craig Perra

The step two is where I embrace this form of aversion therapy, and I’d snap this elastic band that I have on my wrist. I didn’t know it was aversion therapy at that time. I just will snap it because it felt like the right thing to do, and then wrong thought, right, and snapped back to reality.

Then this third step, five deep mindful breaths. We all know the power of the breath and mindfulness. Sitting and breathing are changing the way. We are treating mental health all over the world for good reason because it’s efficacy is very high so says science time and time again.

Craig Perra

90-80% of the time you’re good at mindful breathing. You’ve been able to reset that energy, regain control, create that space, and embrace your power of choice. If that doesn’t work, you can proceed to step four.

Step four is doing jumping jacks, push-ups, screams, and some way to engage the body because that means that the energy shift was so powerful. The wrong thought right that snapped back to reality and those mindful breaths weren’t enough. You had to do something else.

Craig Perra

The last step, which is step one in other modalities. The reason why its final is because no one ever takes advantage of step one. Just call somebody. Connect with someone to transform your life.

I’ve had clients called their bankers. I’ve had clients call me. It doesn’t matter.

Just create that human connection because every addict knows there’s no acting out when you’re connected.

Craig Perra

Yeah, put your banker on speed dial.

What my client did since he didn’t know who to call, he said, “You know what? I got some business to do.” So he called his banker, and they had a conversation. “How are the kids? How’s the family? I don’t know anything about you. Tell me something about you.” Then, they got down to business, and they did their thing. By the time he was done with that call, his energy had reset, and he had regained control.

The problem is I learned that to call somebody is the first thing you do. There’s a reason why they call it the 2000 pound phone because nobody picks it up. It’s so damn heavy.

Craig Perra

So I put that step at the end when hopefully, you’ve been able to create enough space through doing something, shifting that energy to create the capacity to call somebody if you need to reach out. That’s essentially the trigger response plan, which I call Risk Management 101.

I come from a business background. If you know something bad is going to happen, then you got to plan for it.

Craig Perra

You better get ahead of it. This realization that these triggers aren’t going away was life changing for me. I wept when I learned that because I would drive home from the therapist having this in-depth session. No job, living in an apartment, not sure where the next check is coming from, my wife was accustomed to a real high standard of living, and there’s nobody within 50 miles who wants to employ direct compliance at the level I was at.

I had to do something. I had to take action.

Craig Perra

By creating this space, by realizing that these triggers aren’t going away, then that means systematically, you have to use them to create positive growth.

I had a pilot client say it best. I love this quote. He says, “You don’t see aviation engineer sitting around complaining about gravity, do you? And neither should we about our triggers because they’re a gift. They’re an opportunity to wake up and use that which drove you crazy. Maybe to your lowest place, use that as an opportunity to create that in the moment mindfulness so you can embrace that power of choice that we all have if we know the tools.”

Craig Perra

That’s beautiful.

What you did there is you used that trigger to prompt a different outcome to transform your life.

You’re right. They don’t go away.

Craig Perra

Here’s the thing. I have never worked with a single client whose number one problem was using the thing whether it would be sex, drugs. Every client comes to me with that belief, but within 30 days, we shattered that because what they see behind the mask of an addict, once you engaged this part of you and you learn “Who is an addict? Where did the addict come from?”

You see that these responses you’re exhibiting today have been conditioned since you were a child for the ever single person I’ve worked with.

Craig Perra

They’re wrong, and you’re right.

Craig Perra

I believe, firmly, in the lives of my children, and I think that science will bear this out. I believe it already is, so there’s a revolution in the addiction space. As you know, approaching it from a different perspective, mindfulness, tools, teachings, techniques vs. labeling yourself for the rest of your life as the worst part of you.

Surrendering, powerlessness, I’m an addict. Goodness, gracious. No! Goodness gracious, that’s terrible!

I believe that it is inherently harmful to identify as the worst part of yourself primarily. I think it’s terribly unhealthy. Does that mean we forget? Not! Goodness, gracious, but that doesn’t mean you identify yourself this notion of a disease. That’s a made up concept.

You will find just as many neuroscientists saying that the data around addiction in the brain is [huy].  You’ll find a whole bunch of other saying it is black letter science. It’s golden.

What I find when you’ve got so many people with opposite extremes, probably, they both have certain elements of truths to it.

But to answer your question, I agree with you. Luis, it is inherently harmful to identify as an addict long term. It doesn’t mean you forget, but I believe it is detrimental. I think the literature continues to test the efficacy of the different models.

Craig Perra

Thank you so much. It’s a privilege.