Creating Your Own Luck In Sobriety

In this St. Patrick’s Day–inspired episode of the Sober Butterfly Podcast, host Nadine reframes the idea of “luck” and explores how sobriety helps you create your own opportunities rather than waiting for them to appear. Instead of relying on randomness—or alcohol-fueled confidence—Nadine shares how clarity, alignment, and presence open the door to the connections, ideas, and moments that can change your life.

Inspired by Les Alfred’s “She’s So Lucky” rebrand and the quote “luck is the residue of design,” Nadine reflects on how removing alcohol allowed her to recognize opportunities she once missed in the fog of drinking. She explains how sobriety helps you move from reactive patterns to intentional living—making you more available for growth, meaningful relationships, and aligned success.

Nadine breaks down practical ways to create your own “luck,” including building trustworthy character (and offering yourself grace), expanding your circle with supportive and growth-minded people, serving others without overextending yourself, and developing daily habits that align with your goals.

She closes the episode with empowering “lucky girl sobriety” affirmations and a reminder that celebrations—St. Patrick’s Day included—can be joyful, meaningful, and memorable without alcohol.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why sobriety increases your ability to recognize opportunities
• The difference between random luck and intentional living
• How alcohol clouds judgment and leads to missed connections
• The meaning behind “luck is the residue of design”
• Building trustworthiness and giving yourself grace in recovery
• Expanding your social circle with higher-quality, supportive connections
• Being of service without overgiving or burning out
• Daily habits and routines that help you create opportunities
• “Lucky girl sobriety” mindset and affirmations
• Celebrating holidays like St. Patrick’s Day alcohol-free

Key Takeaways

• Clarity creates opportunity—sobriety helps you see what’s already around you.
• Being reliable, kind, and aligned attracts the right people and experiences.
• Your environment and social circle play a huge role in the opportunities that appear in your life.
• Consistent daily habits compound into long-term “luck.”
• Celebrations can be just as meaningful—if not more so—without alcohol.

Affirmations for Lucky Girl Sobriety

• I am clear, present, and open to opportunities.
• My sobriety attracts aligned connections and experiences.
• I create my own luck through intention and integrity.
• The right opportunities find me because I am ready for them.

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Transcript

0:00

Hello. Hello butterflies and welcome back to the Sober Butterfly Podcast. I'm your host, Nadine, and if you are new here, this show is all about exploring what life can look like after alcohol, from sobriety and wellness to relationships, travel healing, and building a life that you actually want to be present for. Today's episode feels very timely because we are heading into St. Patrick's Day, which means everyone is suddenly talking about luck. Luck in Booth. You know what's funny about St. Patrick's Day? It's one of the only holidays where people wake up and immediately start planning how drunk they're going to get. And for years, that was exactly how I celebrated too. But plot twist. Since getting sober, my life has gotten significantly luckier and not because I found a four-leaf clover or a leprechaun's pot of gold. Okay. It's because sobriety helped me realize something really important, which is luck is not random. Luck is clarity. I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately because in the years since getting sober. People will say things like, wow, Nadine, you are so lucky that your life looks like this now. And from the outside, especially on social media, like we know this, we see very curated, perhaps images plastered on our timelines around what life looks like for some, and oftentimes that life looks very perfect, which gives off this essence of like, wow, how does she have that life? Even myself, you know, I look at my page and I'm like, yeah, it's very. Glossy and I, I like it that way. Okay. I like it that way. And so you can easily fall into this fallacy that like, oh, Nadine is just so lucky. The sober butterfly is giving Lucky Gore energy. Which I do want it to exude that because the narrative still needs to shift in terms of sobriety not being this boring, depressing, lack deficit state. And a part of that for me is like, yeah, I wanna make it cute and funny and personable. It does sometimes give off this idea that like, maybe you assume that I'm just lucky. The truth is, sobriety helped me become someone who could recognize and receive opportunities. I'm gonna rewind that one more time. I'm gonna throw that back and say, sobriety helped me become someone who could recognize and receive opportunities, clarity, alignment, preparation. I can recognize and receive opportunities because I am present for them, and I want the same thing for all my butterflies. So how do you create your own luck? That is the focus, today's thesis, in my experience, creating luck. It comes down to a few things, and you're definitely going to want to stick around to the very end of this episode because I will share a few Lucky girl sobriety affirmations for this season. So let's get into it. Luck is something you create, and today I wanna talk about how sobriety became my best. Good luck charm. Before we dive in, I actually wanna share something that inspired today's episode. So last spring, I went to a live taping of Les Alfred's podcast when she rebranded from Balanced Black Girl to She So Lucky. If you've never listened to balanced black girl or she's so lucky, same show, different name, highly recommend it. Les is like the big sister you may or may not have ever had, but like also always needed, and I mentioned that live taping I went to because the whole theme of that rebrand was this idea that people look at someone's life and say, wow, she's so lucky. Oftentimes we don't see the work, the intention, and the choices behind the scenes that actually create that lucky life. And one of the ideas she talked about that really stuck with me, she said something along the lines of luck isn't just something that randomly falls onto your lap or into your lap. You create the conditions for luck to find you. And when she said that, I remember thinking. That's exactly how sobriety feels, because when I was drinking, my life did not feel lucky. It felt chaotic. Once I removed alcohol, suddenly these opportunities started appearing. That I swear were always there. I just could not see them. I was in the haze of a lot of things. Mostly alcohol, but some other substances sprinkled in what I've realized now, four years sober. What most people call luck is often a combination of clarity, alignment, and this is important preparation because when you are sober, you are more present. Clarity check. You make better decisions in alignment to your purpose. Check. You know this opportunities, and not only do you notice them, you are prepared for them. You're ready. You don't have to get ready'cause you stay ready. You know what I mean? You're not missing the moment because you're hungover or drunk or emotionally spiraling over some man who doesn't even matter. Trust me when I say I missed so many opportunities, so many moments. I was drinking and it's not that I am a different person, like I'm still made up of the same matter. I still have a lot of the same goals and ambitions and dreams I've always had since, since a child. Truly, it's just that now I am more ready to receive those gifts. I'm ready to start to hone and tweak and prepare and get ready and place myself in the position to be in alignment to receive said gifts and become lucky. I was thinking about time. And opportunities and moments as mentioned in all of the times that alcohol blocked opportunities for me, and that's not because I was a bad person. That's not because I was less intelligent or coherent or able. It's because alcohol makes everything foggy. There were too many nights, I can't remember. There were conversations I barely remembered having and people I barely remembered meeting. Oh my God, that was the bane of my existence. I cannot tell you how many people to this day actually, like I'll meet people from school and stuff and like they'll be like Nadine. In fact, actually this just happened to me. True story. When I was in Dubai, one of my girlfriend's, girlfriends, so my friend Kim. Invited her friend Denise, and we all apparently met once in Mexico City. We had a night out together, and I could not remember this girl, Denise was like, oh my God, yeah, we've met before. I'm like introducing myself like, it's so nice to meet you. Um, I am so excited for this trip. And she's like, um, Nadina, we met in Mexico City and I had no recollection. That happens to me way too often and especially back when I was drinking. Yeah, just missed opportunities, missed connections. And opportunities I missed because I was either hungover or maybe emotionally reactive in moments or just not showing up as my best self. And one of the biggest lies that alcohol tells us is that it is helping us, right? This myth that alcohol helps you socialize and connect and be successful. But in my personal experience, it's actually doing the opposite. It was draining my energy. Clouding my judgment and keeping me stuck in patterns that were not aligned with the life that I actually wanted. When I stopped drinking, I started to notice some interesting things. Doors started opening for me, and that's not to be conflated with sobriety automatically turns life into some kind of mythical fairytale. It is not always, you know, unicorns and rainbows and butterflies, even though the show is called the Silver Brother Ply. But Ardi did give me something incredibly powerful and as mentioned, that is clarity. I cannot overstate how refreshing it is to be clear clearheaded, because with that clarity comes better choices, better boundaries, better intuition. You start waking up with more energy ready to like take on the day instead of letting the day take you. You know, I started to follow through on ideas that I had. I started building things like this very podcast. So how do you create luck in your own life? There's a famous quote that I love and live by from Branch Ricky. He's the former Brooklyn and LA Dodgers owner. He said. Luck is the residue of design, meaning luck is often the result of preparation, intention and effort over time. When I first heard that Ricky quote, I thought, yeah, luck is the residue of design. It reminds me so much of sobriety because everything does No, but because when I was drinking, I was like in this passive state. What I mean by that is I was just going through the motions of life. I wasn't actually taking an active role and understanding that I always have choices. I can show up every single day the way I intend to, or I can not show up. I can drink myself into a state of oblivion, or I can choose to do something differently. Luck is not passive. Luck is something that you actively have to design or create for yourself, just like sobriety. Sobriety was not a random act. Okay? Someone choosing to stop drinking is not a passive act. Usually there's intention behind that and work that also goes behind that, and it's not magical in the sense that it did, did not fix everything wrong with me. Trust me, there's still a lot of things wrong with me, but sobriety definitely put me in a position to notice and receive those opportunities that we talked about. So I wanna help you create your own luck, and from my experience, it comes down to a few things, but I wanna succinctly summarize this as much as possible and not let my A DHG brain take over. So here we go. Step one of creating your own luck. It sounds simple, but it's powerful. Be a good person. Be kind when you can. Be generous when you can. Be someone people can trust and want to work with. Because something I've noticed over the years is that opportunities often come through people. Someone may recommend you or refer you or invite you to something someone thinks of you for a collab. And if you consistently show up as someone who is kind, honest, reliable, supportive, those opportunities always have a way of circling back to you Call a karma. Call it energy, call it alignment, but good people attract good things and don't forget to extend that goodness to you. I feel like this needs to be said. We have to remind ourselves to give ourselves grace. So just as I'm asking you to show up and be kind and generous and you know, cooperative with other people. You need to also apply that same principle to yourself because not only are you deserving of goodness and kindness and honesty and reliability and support, the law of attraction tells us that we don't attract what we want. We attract who we are. So you need to also embody those things for yourself. So could not, okay, step two is hard for me. Aries. Oh my gosh. But step two, expand your social circle. This is something that I, surprisingly, in sobriety, am struggling with more than when I was drinking in my former life, my past life, my drinking days. I was very social. I was so social. I would go out like four or five times a week. I don't even know if that was just being in my late teens and twenties, my party heyday. But yeah, I just felt like I knew so many people Now in that same breath, I would also say that I knew so many people, but I feel like they didn't really know me and I didn't really know them like they were, I guess, acquaintances. And there's nothing wrong with acquaintances. I feel like acquaintances really gets a bad rap. Listen, not everyone needs to be a friend. Okay? Let's classify people correctly. Not everyone's a friend. I would call'em a friend back then, but the truth is they were like acquaintances. They were drinking buddies. They were people I just knew out and about on the scene, but like not friends. If you're not forging or forming, I should say deeper connections and bonds. I'm not gonna define friendship free, but like for myself, I knew a lot of people. I was very social. But the socialization piece really just. Aligned with my drinking, and that was my priority. My relationship with alcohol was complicated and simple. The complicated piece of my history and story with drinking is that I just knew that I was always an alcoholic and I was always afraid of being an alcoholic. And I didn't wanna be an alcoholic, so I would like drink with other people mostly. And obviously there were points in my story, inflection points, especially in COVID where I was drinking a lot more isolated and alone. Which was great data for me to eventually get help. But beyond that, the simplicity of my story is similar to so many people that I've spoken to in sobriety. I used alcohol for many things, and one of those things was to socialize. It was still a passive activity. I wasn't actively forging deeper connections with people when I was drinking. Drinking is so like surface level. It's so ego driven and outer worldly. Even if you think that you're using alcohol to connect.'cause that's also a part of it. Socialization is you trying to connect with people. I found that a lot of my conversations were. As mentioned surface level, like they wouldn't really go deep physically. You are vibrating at such a lower level. Like if you think you're connecting with someone, but you're both under the influence of one person even is under the influence, how can you trust that all parts of you are truly in sync? I could go on about this and I feel like once again, I am losing the pot guys. Okay, let's bring it back to this. So step two, expand your social circle. Because luck often happens at like this intersection of. People and proximity. So the more environments you put yourself in, the more possibilities that exist. That is just basic math. When I think about expanding your social circle, I think it's more to do with quality, and it makes me think about the phrase, your network is your net worth, which emphasizes pretty much that the five people you spend the most time with significantly shape your mindset and your habits and your overall success. And this concept does not always apply to just financial wealth. It can also include your emotional and intellectual and professional growth. A key takeaway for me from this five people concept involves taking inventory and auditing your circle. So who are the five people your closest connections, and are they adding value or. Draining you. Are they depleting you. And when I was drinking, you probably guessed it, my inner circle, those five closest connections were not, were not adding value to my life. And you know what? To be fair, I probably wasn't adding value to their circle either because our common ground was so low. Vibrationally, I'm sure I wasn't inspiring. Anyone else in that inner circle either. So there's no wonder that I felt uninspired from that inner circle versus today when I think about the five closest connections I have, these are people who are ambitious and positive and knowledgeable. One of the key distinctions for me in creating my own luck happened to come through sobriety. Because of that clarity, it becomes impossible to continue to ignore. Some of the toxic relationships perhaps, that you still have in your life. It's not just a substance. Sometimes it's people. And then you start to look for connections with people who can serve as a catalyst for your own growth instead of any negative influences that hinder your true potential. I want you to think about. Your closest connections in regards to the rule of five and just take inventory of that. But like in the broader sense of this step and this theme of creating your own luck, you do want to expand your network. And expansion should not feel depleting is the point I'm trying to make. The quality of the connections you make is really what I wanted to emphasize, and if you're in the space where you're like trying to figure out how to network or how to expand your social circle. I have some ideas that I'll share and things that helped me figure out like how to connect more wellness communities and creative communities and sober communities or places to start. But beyond that, another powerful way to build luck is to be of service, be of service to other people. So that could look like volunteer work or joining an organization or supporting a cause that you care about. If you're good at something, like if you have a skill, share that with the world. Share that with someone or something bigger than yourself, because when you contribute to communities, you create relationships and trust and something beautiful happens when you give without expecting anything in return. It's this idea of being selfless. It reminds me of like, I wanna say it was friends. It was this episode where I think it was friends. It was Phoebe. I could be making this up. I have not seen all the friends episodes, and I know people go hard for the show friends, but I think it was on Friends where Phoebe was talking about like altruism and basically how giving was an act of selflessness because she wasn't expecting anything in return. And then someone like countered, maybe it was like Monica or Joey or someone countered actually like. If you are giving and it makes you feel good.'cause that was her whole point. She's like, I don't expect anything in return. I just like to give things to people'cause I feel good. And then they were arguing like, well, if you feel good, then it's not a selfless act. So it reminds me that you're always gonna get something back because when you're giving from like a place of goodness. Going back to step one, be a good person, not because you're people pleasing. That's a whole different situation. I've been there. And then you end up presenting someone for like giving something that you didn't really want to give, whether that be something tangible or your time or whatever it may be. Or doing them a favor in any capacity. If you don't have the bandwidth to give, then don't. Okay. So like I wanna be clear about that.'cause I've also given too much more than I was able to and then ended up feeling like sad in the corner or salty about it. Like. Months later. So don't do that. But when you give out of the trueness and the goodness of your heart, and because you're able to actually give you feel good, so you're always gonna get something in return, even if you're not expecting to. And sometimes the universe truly has a funny way of sending opportunities right back to you. Maybe someone remembers that kind act or invites you to work on a project or connects you with someone or something unexpected. It's not always transactional, but it's actually amazing how often good karma will circulate right back around. So the last way to build your own luck is through habits and alignment. At this point in the episode, you probably realize that luck is not about being at the right place at the right time. It's about being ready when the right moment arrives. And readiness usually comes from like the small things you do consistently every day. And last week's episode I talked about Atomic Habits. I cannot recommend that book more. It is a phenomenal book that talks about compounding habits and how small actions lead to big lasting changes with time, sustainable changes with time. Your readiness usually comes from the small things you do every day. So your habits, your routines, your mindset, your discipline. This is where sobriety actually changed everything. For me, when I was drinking, my life felt very reactive. I was always reacting to situations, right? Like. My emotions and reacting to stress and reacting to whatever chaos was happening around me and alcohol was then my way of coping with that chaos. But when you remove alcohol, you suddenly have to learn how to design your life with intention, and you start asking yourself questions like. How do I want my mornings to look? And how do I want my weekends to look? And what kind of energy do I want to bring into my work and my relationships and my creative projects? And when you start to build habits that support the life you want, something interesting happens, your life becomes interesting. First of all, you become more of an interesting person, and then your life becomes more aligned and that alignment leads to more opportunities, for example. When you wake up with energy instead of a hangover, you might then go to the gym or take a walk or work on something. Creative journal. When you're not spending your evenings drinking, you might have the clarity to start something like a podcast or a business, or pursue a passion that you've been putting up. You start to optimize because you're recognizing all of these opportunities that you may have missed before. Sometimes the outside world may look at that and think that all of a sudden you are a lucky person, but what they're actually missing is that the result of your habits compounded with time, and that is why I love that quote. Luck is the residue of design because you were consistently putting in the work and the time to show up for the life that you want and deserve. When you are building those habits that align with your goals and your values. You are essentially creating an environment where good things are more likely, if not inevitably going to happen. It's not magic, it is alignment and sobriety makes alignment so much easier because your energy and your focus and your decisions are no longer being hijacked by alcohol instead of chaos. You get clarity, and clarity makes everything easier. It makes it so much easier to build a life that looks. From the outside, very lucky, but from the inside, you know exactly how you got here. Okay, one habit, one choice, one aligned decision at a time. Before we wrap up, I wanna leave you with a few lucky girl sobriety affirmations, and if any of these resonate with you, feel free to repeat them in your mind or out loud. Even if you're in public, it's okay. People love to pretend they don't talk to themselves, so it's a fine. It's fine. Feel free to repeat after me. I create my own luck through the choices I make every day. Sobriety helps me see opportunities that chaos once hit, the energy I give, the world comes back to me in beautiful ways. By being kind, curious, and present, I invite new possibilities into my life. Every sober decision I make moves me closer to the life I truly want. My clarity allows me to recognize opportunities that once pass me by. I trust that the work I'm doing today is creating opportunities for tomorrow. My sober life is aligned. Intentional and full of possibility. Good things find me because I'm building a life that welcomes them. I am building a life that feels lucky by design. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure you're following the Sober Butterfly Podcast wherever you listen. If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend who might need a reminder that luck is not something. That just finds you. It is something that you create. You can find me on Instagram at the Sober Butterfly, where we talk all things sobriety, wellness, and living alcohol free. I love you butterflies, and remember this as you go forth into your day, sometimes the luckiest thing you can do is simply choose yourself. Choose your health, choose your peace. Choose the version of life that you actually wanna wake up to, and if sobriety is a part of that journey for you, just know that every step you take toward clarity is a step toward a life that feels more aligned, more intentional, and yes, more lucky. I wish you all the luck in the world. Butterflies. Have an amazing St. Patrick's Day. If you're celebrating, you don't need to drink to celebrate, and I'll see you next Friday. Bye.