What's Dimming You? The Habits You Won’t Admit Are Holding You Back | Cecily Mak

Welcome to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavlosky.

Welcome back, everybody, to the Legacy All-Stars Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Pavlosky, and today I have the privilege of sitting down with someone doing extraordinary work at the intersection of personal transformation, entrepreneurship, and human well-being. Cecily Mack is the author of Undimmed: The 8 Awarenesses for Freedom from Unwanted Habits, published by Flatiron Macmillan. She is the founding voice behind the Clear Life Movement, host of the Undimmed podcast, and founding general partner at Wisdom Ventures, a purpose-driven investment fund with $90 million under management backing companies at the intersection of technology and human flourishing, which I love. Cecily is a tech executive, a startup advisor, attorney, breast cancer survivor, mother of two. All of this is a mouthful. Her story is one of hard-won clarity, and her mission is simple but profound: to help people break free from the habits that dim them without stigma, shame, or a one-size-fits-all approach. Cecily, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for the warm welcome. It's great to be here.

Great to have you. Let's get started with your journey. Your story is deeply personal as a mother, a breast cancer survivor, the daughter of a mother who struggled with alcoholism. When did all of that start to converge into a mission for you?

I was living what felt like a perfectly normal and suitable life. Full-time working mom, two cute little kids. Everything on the outside looked very kind of healthy and normal, but on the inside there was a lot of difficulty and suffering. And the primary challenge I was enduring at that time, this is about 10 years ago, was a combination of some disconnect with my career, which I was pouring an enormous amount of my life force into at the time, commuting to Palo Alto, helping to run a tech startup, and also some emerging troubles in my marriage of 10 years at the time. And so I took it upon myself to self-medicate it in very socially acceptable and normal ways with a cocktail or a glass of wine every night when I came home, partying on weekends. My then-husband was a DJ. We had a very vibrant social life and professionally as well. It was always something cool to do around alcohol. And at a certain point after a year of particular struggle, it became clear that I needed to conclude my marriage. And the day that I made that final decision, a friend of mine suggested maybe I'd just clear my head and heart and be really crystal clear and sober through what was about to happen. And that sounded very easy at the time, given everything else that was going on. So I started a 30-day break. That 30 days bled into 60 and then 90 while the benefits of living alcohol-free really started to pile on. And it was in that first few months that I realized maybe there's a bigger shift that needs to happen here. Maybe this isn't a short-term experiment. Maybe Maybe even though I don't consider myself an addict or having a problem or in need of rehab or AA, there's something that could be shifted for the better. And I think I'm going to stick with this. And that was really the beginning of this path I'm on now.

Yeah. You talk about dimming, this idea that we unconsciously numb ourselves. When did that concept first come alive for you? Was it with that end of the marriage and the transformation that you experienced then?

It was really more in retrospect. I wrote to understand what was happening for that first full year alcohol-free. I wrote essays and stories. I started an Instagram where I connected with people all over the world doing similar things. I read every little bit of quit lit I could get my hands on. That's my term for literature that's about quitting something or rock bottoms and all that world. Great, great reading material, right? But I couldn't find my place in it. I would go into some AA meetings just out of curiosity, and I couldn't totally relate. I never felt like I needed professional help or rehab to make the change that I was making. And I noticed that what I was doing was not necessarily an addictive behavior, but it was a self-soothing behavior that was dimming some of the really beautiful parts of my life as well as the difficult ones. And so I started using that word dimming in some of my writing as a way to describe what we all do in different ways at different moments, just to support living a tolerable life. We're human and things are hard. And it's not just alcohol. Dimmers can be excessive work, excessive exercise, too much time on Instagram, shopping, excessive generosity, perfectionism. The list goes on and on. And I realized this is kind of like a broader, very natural and human thing that we do.

Yeah. What started as a 30-day break from drinking turned into something much bigger. Can you take us through that journey?

Yeah, sure. So 30 days came and went, and I had a lot of positive benefits in that time. I felt better, I looked better, my sleep was better. I'd been struggling to keep up some type of a regular exercise routine for years, and all of a sudden I had more time and more energy because I was going to sleep earlier and waking up earlier and had time to get a run in before getting getting ready to go to work. And so I thought, I'll just keep going. Then 60 days, similar. 90 days, similar. And then at the end of that 90 days, I started to dabble a little bit. I call it affirmative dabbling in the book. It's around the holidays.

I like that. Yeah.

I was like, I don't have an alcohol problem. I just went 3 months without a drink and I'm in this beautiful restaurant. I'm gonna have a glass of Pinot Noir. And then it was, oh, but it's Christmas and let's have a couple fancy cocktails. And before I knew it, I was experiencing some of the negative effects of drinking, even in social amounts, in a way that I remembered and didn't like. And so I took a bet from a friend. How about a whole year? How about all of 2018 alcohol-free? And I thought, sure, heck, I'll do it. And then my dad didn't believe I would do it, so he bet $50 I wouldn't, which was an enormous motivator for me. My own father is betting against my intentions here. And, uh, by the end of 2018, I certainly had friends and colleagues around me who were saying, you know, can't wait for your New Year's. This is gonna be a big one. You're finally gonna be back off the wagon again. And the very last thing I wanted to do after an entire year without alcohol was have a drink. I felt amazing. I had seen things I had been unable to see. My relationships were shifting for the better. Yes, there were some challenges. Of course, my social life had to be a little bit rejiggered and I had to discover new ways to relax. And connect and socialize. But for the most part, the net positives were so much greater than any drawback that I just decided to stick with it. And here we are.

Yeah, there you go. So let's talk about your book. Undimmed offers a very different framework from traditional recovery models like the 12-step program. And you mentioned that. What was missing from the existing approaches that you felt called to address?

Probably the first anchor one for me was choice. I felt throughout my early weeks, months, and then years of living without alcohol that I was making a choice daily, if not multiple times a day, to not consume this thing. And I felt really empowered by that. When I realized that I was making that choice, I realized I could make other more difficult choices as well. I could choose what people I wanted to spend time with. I could choose whether or not I wanted to live with healthy habits. I could choose whether or not I wanted to stay in a role that was toxic for me at work. So that experience of agency started bleeding throughout the rest of my life and felt more and more inconsistent with the language I saw in other models, most notably AA. Now I have high, high regard for the AA model. I have people in my life who are alive and thriving because of the support that they've had through that, that work in the community. I mean, deep, deep bow. But it is not for everybody. And I found in my case, there were a couple of things that were challenging for me. First of all, I had to surrender to something bigger than me when I felt like I was the one driving the bus. I didn't feel like I needed to give over my power to something greater than me. I felt like that choice and decision-making center was inside of me, and I was consciously and thoughtfully using that every day to improve the way I was living. Second, I experienced with my own mother a real resistance to some of the terminology, specifically, I am an alcoholic. My mother, by most accounts, most certainly had an alcohol problem for many years before she died way too early at 64 years old. Of esophageal cancer, very clearly attributable to her drinking habits. She would never actually step into a room and accept help or even exploration or a conversation about help because a condition of that first exploration was saying, I am an alcoholic, or I have a problem, or I am an addict. And so I realized that like my mom, there are probably many of us who don't get curious about our relationship with this addictive thing because we feel like we have to first accept a diagnosis or a label or something that could be easily viewed as stigmatizing. And so it robs a lot of people that would benefit from a refresh on their habits of even the initial exploration. So again, I felt like it had to serve the people, the A model that it's intended to serve. But there was this body of people, it turns out in the United States alone, there are 80 to 90 million Americans questioning our relationship with alcohol that needs something else. There has to be a different way to explain our experience, to understand what's happening when we pause something that it might actually be difficult to stop. But that doesn't necessarily mean we need to go into rehab or abstain forever or have an intervention. It just means it's difficult to do. And there are other ways to support ourselves in making those changes.

Yeah. Let's talk about the 8 awarenesses. You talk about those. Can you give us a sense of what those are and how they work together?

Sure. So the 8 awarenesses came to be because I came home from one of that, you know, handful of experimental AA meetings one day, and I took the 12 steps off of the website and copied and pasted them into a document on my computer, and I started editing them to more accurately reflect my own experience as I was navigating these years of choosing to live alcohol-free. And over time, I think it was about 4 years instead of 12, I had 8. And instead of the 12 steps, they read more like 8 mantras. They're kind of 8 8 brief statements that we can say silently or out loud to help us orient around this shift from being dimmed out, self-medicating, self-soothing, to present and aligned and free and self-aware. And so each of the 8 awarenesses kind of takes us through this process of, of choice. The first awareness is my life is better clear. So simple, but we actually need to have that feeling first before we start tinkering with whether or not we want to remove our dimmers. I learned this because in trying to help my own mom, I thought she would be better off without alcohol and some of the prescription drugs she was taking, but we weren't getting anywhere until she thought so. So it has to come from the person first. The second awareness similarly is I choose what I consume. And it's just this reminder that if you're gonna have a drink, there are probably 20 choices and decisions you're gonna make from the initial thought to it going down your throat. You have to go get it, you have to pour it, then you have to pay for it. You have to put it in a cup, you have to do this, blah, blah, blah. You have many, many, many opportunities to change course. And so that was that one. And they kind of go on through, you know, thinking through intuition, relationships, how we wanna spend our time. Thoughts around not judging other people based on where they are in their journey, you know, kind of helping shape an orientation with our life is one that we're defining ourselves with a lot of healing and self-grace along the way.

Yeah. I love the self-grace part. I mean, that's so important. Yeah.

Yeah. And for those who don't immediately get what that is, I mean, that's the best way I can describe self-grace is hand on heart or how human of me, my friend Elena Brower says, you know, we are going to make mistakes. We are going to be imperfect. We're going to set goals and miss them. We are going to look back on our lives with remorse and regret, some of the decisions we've made and things we've done. But it's really not doing us any favors to get caught in some shame spiral about it. You know, we're doing the best we can.

I've said this a few times on the show, but my favorite show on TV is Ted Lasso. And that's because I love the concept of be a goldfish. Goldfish has the shortest memory of any animal. And you have to learn not only to forgive yourself, and let things go, but forget them.

Yeah, bliss.

Yeah. The book covers a wide range of dimmers, not just alcohol, but overwork, perfectionism, digital distraction. Guilty. Why was it important for you to broaden that lens?

Well, this whole journey actually isn't about alcohol. Anybody who's successfully rewritten their relationship with something that had become unhealthy or addictive can tell you that it's not about the thing. It's about what's underneath the behavior. There's something that is unpleasant or uncomfortable or unresolved. And so because we are human, we reach for things to soften and soothe that discomfort.

Right.

So I was, you know, a year into living alcohol-free when I realized, oh, this actually isn't about alcohol. I was using alcohol to limit my difficult experiences, but it's about something much bigger. And if I can get to what that is I was trying to avoid, and I can work through resolving or healing that pain or those wounds or those challenges, then I actually won't want to self-soothe with alcohol anymore. And that's the freedom. The freedom is not self-restraint, but shifting what we are reaching for. I had somebody in my home in my first year living alcohol-free, and he opened the fridge, family member, and saw a bunch of ice-cold Stellas. It was a hot day. And he looked at me and he said, how do you do that? You keep the stuff in the house and you're not drinking? And I just love that moment because it was so clear to me, and it still is today with plenty of alcohol in our house to serve to our guests if and when they want it. I'm choosing every day to not do this thing. I mean, even just in the last 2 hours of being out for lunch and seeing a friend, I've been exposed to the option to drink multiple times. If I was having a big internal battle with myself every single time an offer or an option came up, What an exhausting life that is. So the key is to realize what do we need to do to free ourselves from that desire to be less present?

Yeah.

And if we can free ourselves from whatever it is that's making us not want to feel life, then we can be exposed to all kinds of temptations and they're just not going to be our problem. Same thing goes for social media. Same thing goes for shopping. I mean, there are all kinds of things we can do for kind of a quick hit of feel-good. The goal is to no longer rely on those quick hits of feel-good so that we can have a more fluid, spacious, free relationship with life.

Yeah, I love that. I want to discuss the Clear Life Movement, and I also want to discuss entrepreneurship as impact, which is a topic I have great interest in. Yeah, the Clear Life Movement is growing. What does Clear Life mean to you, and what does the community look like in practice?

Yeah, so it's really a group of people around the planet who are choosing to live with some form of clarity or some form of freedom from some dimming habit that they're aware of, they have had, or they do have. And generally, you know, some members of the community have kind of been through a more conventional recovery program. Many have been through some type of a rehab or maybe many years in the AA model, and they're realizing, no, I'm just actually choosing every day to live with clarity. I'm choosing every day to embrace the benefits of a life without this thing that I used to think was so essential or important. It's a very diverse group of people. I mean, I have, I have members in TOUCH of every age, you know, including a lot of young people who are kind of breaking away from some of the habits that their peers might have. Many elders really all over the world. Some of my most kind of consistent and loyal members are in Europe, and people are just delighted generally to learn from each other. There's no fee to join, there's no, you know, prescription to follow. Everybody's experience is going to be unique to them, and people also plug in and connect in different ways.

Yeah. You spent 2 decades as a tech executive, advisor, and attorney. How did that background shape the way you built this movement, the ClearLife movement?

I need rational structure and good facts-based justification to do most things. So I, I am always a little bit skeptical. My legal training gets me into worst-case scenario. I like to know the underlying why between any investment of my time or energy. And it might not always be linear and not following a plan or a model, but at least I have some thread of the purpose behind something.

Mm-hmm.

And so while it's been very organic, I've also worked to maintain a, a standard of how this feels and works and what kind of a shared space we can co-create. And I think that that's very similar to building a company or growing a team. You want to leave enough room for how it's going to naturally evolve, but you also need to have a real clear understanding of what the motivator is. And that serves as a North Star, even as you're making your sometimes not straight line across, across the path.

Yeah, no doubt. Let's talk about Wisdom Ventures. Wisdom Ventures invests at the intersection of technology and human flourishing. I love that. I love the phrase. What kinds of companies excite you most right now?

So, we're currently investing out of our second fund, and we have been for about a year. I would say that almost everything we see is leveraging AI. It's almost, you know, a year ago we saw a lot of pitches for companies saying, we're an AI company. Well, it's kind of like saying you're an internet company in 2000. Well, of course you are, because if you are a successful company, you're relying on this technology to be successful. So, First of all, good, smart, reasonable uses of AI we see across the board. Second, I, I really love encountering founders who have a personal story and motivation for building what they're building. They saw a gap not just in the market, but in their life, and they realized there should be a solution to this problem that I'm experiencing. How can I take what I've grown or developed in my own career so far and channel that capacity and those resources into a solution that's going to be of service to others? When we hear those stories, they're stunning. And you can imagine there are many because people building tech-enabled solutions in mental health or education or healthcare, many of them have actually had the negative or difficult experiences that sparked the idea in the first place. And they could be off. With a much more secure, much more lucrative job in another tech company, but they're passionate enough about what they're building that they chose to pour their life force into this new undertaking. You know, there's this misunderstanding in the world that building a startup is really fun and sexy. And I think media and TV have contributed to that. Building a startup is extremely difficult and exhausting and challenges health and relationships and finances and sleep and all of it. And so the founders who have a personal motivation to build what they're building, are often the most exciting for us to meet and hear from because we know that they're going to make it through the toughest times and be able to have the most impact and build value along the way.

Yeah, you may not have noticed, but I took a deep breath when you talked about the difficulty of startups because I've been involved myself and I can definitely relate. So, yeah, it's definitely not a picnic, but I couldn't imagine a life without entrepreneurialism because that's just kind of who I am at my core. So, yeah, I love it.

Beautiful.

Many of our listeners, speaking of that, are high performers, athletes, executives, founders. High achievers often have a complicated relationship with the habits that both fuel and deplete them. What would you say to that audience?

Mm, just, I think, being aware of what we're doing and most importantly, why. Behaviors aren't necessarily the problem in most cases. I tell people all the time, you know, there are certain great moments in life to have a glass of wine or a slice of chocolate cake or have a shopping spree. You know, these are not on their own bad things, but we can use even healthy behaviors and habits in very toxic ways. And so for somebody who's a high performer, overachiever, you know, serious athlete, It's okay to have intense habits, but if you can notice when and why you're reaching for these things, and if you can notice that maybe they're not always coming from the healthiest place, that's a, that's a little opportunity to open up curiosity and start paying a little more attention.

Yeah.

Almost anything can become compulsive or escapist if we do it enough or in a certain way. You know, we all have a friend here in the Bay Area who's just gone completely off a cliff with their exercise routine and they're just obsessive about their physical health. And if you get into a deeper conversation around what it is, what's driving that for many of them, same thing goes for entrepreneurs, founders, you know, who just can't stop working. What's underneath is sometimes this compulsion. It's not because it's good for the company or it's good for my body or it's good for my health or whatever it is. It's It's, if I don't, something bad is gonna happen. Or if I'm not doing this thing, I start thinking about that other one. And that's really difficult for me to feel. That's when you can kind of open up, say, okay, is there another way to maybe process this? Is there another way to maybe soften the edges of your life without doing this activity in such an intense and maybe unhealthy way?

Yeah. Yeah. Awareness is obviously the key and what I might refer to as, or what alcoholics might refer to as a moment of clarity. Clarity, you know, that's important for people to be honest with themselves. So yeah, thanks for sharing that.

Of course.

Let's talk about your breast cancer journey and how it changed your relationship with your body, with alcohol in such a profound way. What did the illness teach you about being present?

Mm, that's such a good question. Well, I think first and foremost, it's kind of all we have. Like, I don't really care what we're doing if we're doing it absent-minded or thinking about something else. Or half in the room, we're not really doing it. And the most important example of that is in our relationships. Mm-hmm. There's nothing more precious in life than being with someone we care about and feeling their full attention, and then being able to in return extend to them your full attention. And I think in our hustle culture, we're all moving so quickly. We have these incredibly addictive, distracting devices in our hands, our pockets all the time. We're kind of half there all the time, or even less. And when you are faced with a life-threatening illness and you kind of have to confront, oh yeah, this whole time thing isn't forever. I don't know if it's going to end now or later, but there's something about our mortality that kind of wakes us up. We realize, how are we with the people that we care the most about? Are we actually in the room with them? Most certainly as a mom, I've, I have, uh, 3 sons, 15, 18, 23, 1 by marriage, 2 by birth. And, you know, I, I have a lot of remorse over not being present with them in their younger years, you know, at the playground, looking at my phone, giving them a bath while having a conversation with somebody else. Half reading a bedtime story so I could get back to the grownup conversation in the kitchen. And if there are any things I reflected on when really being startled by the reality of a cancer diagnosis, it's wishing for a second shot to really show up 100% for the people that I love.

Mm-hmm.

If nothing else, it's not the gifts, it's not the fancy events, it's not the vacations. It's really just like they're eating their cereal and they're telling you something they're scared about. Coming up at school that day, and you just stop doing whatever you're doing, look them in the eyes and listen to them and notice how their mouth moves or a little shake in their hand, or did they actually eat all their cereal? Like, kids often communicate more with their actions in these ages than they do with their words. And if we're not paying attention, we're gonna miss it. And then you realize the same is actually true for adults. So much of our way of sharing what's actually going on is not with the words coming out of our mouths. It's, it's our body language. It's our temperature. It's whether or not we're willing to actually hold a steady gaze through a conversation. And when we can show up with full presence for somebody, it's the most precious thing we can give them.

Yeah, that's beautiful. For someone who feels stuck in a pattern they know isn't serving them, but they can't seem to break, what's the first awareness you'd invite them to explore?

Yeah. So look, we all, we all have our own ways in. For me and for many people, it's actually taking a break. Just disrupt the pattern, disrupt the habit. Sometimes the pattern is so deeply grooved. That it's, it's almost impossible. Don't get spun up on that. Don't get into this whole head case around, oh no, I'm in crisis. I get really creative about how to disrupt the pattern. Maybe you can't control the temptation to pour a glass of wine when you cook dinner on a weeknight. Find a way to cook dinner at a different time and go for a walk during that hour. You know, I know people who have cooked their week's meals on the weekend, or they wake up an hour early and cook dinner in the morning so that then when they get off of work, instead of that impulsive go for a cocktail or a glass of wine or beer, they can exercise between 5 and 6 and then eat after. And then there's only a little bit more time left to deal with the temptation of having a drink. And you kind of get 3, 4, 5, 10 days of that under your belt, you're kind of in a new world.

Yeah.

You know, other habits, the social media one is really intense for many more of us than we are willing to admit. And frankly, I think news is just as bad. And that addiction can be NPR in the car. I mean, it's like seemingly benign stuff, but it affects our nervous system. And you know, there are ways to just kind of tinker with your system a little bit to disrupt the habit. So Delete the podcast app or put one of these great screen time controlling apps on your phone. One of the companies we invested in at Wisdom Ventures is Opal, the focus company. It's this amazing app. I think they're up to almost a million monthly active users at this point out of Paris. You can program it to make certain apps unavailable on your phone, you know, chosen by you, times a day, week. And I literally just removed my news apps access during the week. I removed my social media access, you know, certain hours of the day. And it kind of forced me to develop awareness, not necessarily at the end of the week counting, oh, I spent less hours on that, but noticing how many times in that first few days I picked up my phone to go for something and then it wasn't there. And then I noticed, oh, I'm just standing in line at the post office and Isn't that interesting that I can't just stand in silence for 2 minutes without a distraction? And I'm— I like to see myself as a meditator practitioner. So that's like, hmm, like, so I don't know, finding hacks to kind of shake things up a little bit is sometimes the most helpful.

Yeah, for sure. You know, I talk about legacy a lot on this show, and I'm going to ask you a legacy question. When you think about what you're building, the book, the movement, the fund, the podcast, What legacy are you most committed to leaving? Hmm.

I think I want people to see that there's room to do things in a different way. I want to leave behind an alternative approach to difficult problems. I, I have really strived throughout my career to do difficult things well. Um, and most recently, I think with the fund and Wisdom Ventures and this book in particular, which are both kind of big efforts in the last year, you can apply really wonderful business and smart skills to high-impact work. It doesn't have to be only supporting a company, you know, selling widgets or ad clicks and software. It is possible for most of us at some point in life to take an inventory of what skills and capacities we've accumulated along the way, and they're going to be different for all of us. And think about how can I apply these to something that's really meaningful to me or to my community or to my family, something that I would be proud of. And that's been, that's been really the gift of this work is doing difficult things for positive outcome that goes beyond just myself, not just my own ego or feeling good or paycheck, but how can we give back if we're fortunate enough to be living in this time and with the resources and freedoms that most of us have who are in your podcast community. It is really a great opportunity to pay it forward.

Yeah, that's great. Well, sadly, we've come to the end of the show. Cecily, I thank you for your courage, your clarity, the extraordinary generosity with which you share your story. Undimmed is definitely powerful. I want to dig into it myself. I think there's things that I could utilize that are going to be really powerful for me. So thank you for that.

Absolutely.

To our Legacy All-Stars community, I hope you're inspired by Cecily's story. You could check out everything she has at Cecily Mack mak.com. And that's M-A-K is the last name. So check that out. We'll post all those in the links and on the episode. I'm Alan Pavlosky, and this has been another episode of Legacy All-Stars Podcast, where we celebrate people using their success, their story, and their lives to make the world a better place. See you next time.