High Stress, Low ABV

Business deals have long been sealed over cocktails; closings commemorated with a special bottle. Meeting timelines in a high-stakes environment invites indulging oneself and taking a load off at the end of the day. And schmoozing during the height of the holiday season usually involves a cocktail or two.

But Blodgett, like an increasing number of other business professionals, does without the imbibing these days.

It Helps

“Man, I wake up with so much more energy,” Blodgett says. “I’m so much clearer in my mind. I can go to networking events and not worry, did I have too many cocktails to where I shouldn’t be driving home? Do I gotta get an Uber, things like that. This just no longer becomes an issue … There were times [when] I look back at events I was at, and [I was] like, man, did I have too many drinks? Did I leave there feeling like I had represented myself the best way that I could? I think the answer is clearly no to those.”

Blodgett’s journey to sobriety began when he decided to do ‘Sober October’ in 2019 after listening to a podcast discussion between comedian Nikki Glaser and podcaster Joe Rogan on the topic.

“I had talked to one of my business coaches, someone in the mortgage industry who recommended that I maybe try taking a break once a year, and so I kind of landed on the sober October thing,” he added.

Glaser, who had already embraced sobriety, mentioned she was inspired by a book, Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Control Alcohol. Blodgett found he could relate, recalling his departure from cigarettes years earlier, aided by Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking. He downloaded the other book upon Glaser’s review.

“This was probably around the middle of October. I had not been drinking for a week or two and I still had the whole month to go. It’s a pretty short book so I listened to it in just a few days. And honestly, when I got done, I didn’t really think much about how it would impact my decision to drink in the future.”

Watch it on The Interest: Sober Success in the Mortgage Market

But Blodgett reached the end of October. While at a friend’s house with his kids going trick or treating, a friend asked, “Hey, you want a beer?”

Blodgett declined, and his friend said “Tony, it’s October 31st. You’re there. It’s okay.”

But Blodgett just didn’t feel like it, and that was that.

“I just felt so good during those 30 days. I didn’t feel like I needed to reintroduce alcohol into my routine,” he reasoned.

Then came the holidays, and all the gatherings. Blodgett abstained, and people noticed.

“Honestly, it felt very awkward to me. I found myself ordering a non-alcoholic beer or a club soda with a lime in a short glass,” he said. “People who knew I wasn’t drinking were like, ‘What happened? Why’d you quit? Are you gonna quit forever?’ Nothing had happened, I just had made that decision.”

Trying Again

As the new year rolled in, Blodgett decided to stay sober for 2020, and it paid off, especially when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the housing finance industry to a crossroads.

“A lot of people actually accelerated their drinking during COVID. I was at my sharpest. I really feel like it gave me an advantage during a really challenging time,” Blodgett recalled.

Rates were all over the place, uncertainty loomed; then things started really ramping up for the mortgage industry.

“It got really busy and I was able to really be on point to manage that,” he said.

When New Year’s Eve 2020 came upon him, Blodgett poured himself a bourbon.

“I just didn’t want there to be some weird situation where I wasn’t in control of my decision to drink. I wanted to feel like I was in control of it. So that started off just fine. I said, hey, I broke the seal, now I can casually drink. But I’ll be honest with you … within a few weeks, I was back to my normal drinking habits.”

This continued until April 2023, when Blodgett decided to do 75 Hard, a 75-day transformation challenge started by Andy Frisella, podcaster, entrepreneur, and CEO of the supplement company 1st Phorm. The challenge required several different commitments, one of which was abstaining from alcohol.

He was never “a problem drinker,” Blodgett asserted, but the time off had made him realize a personal potential that was once invisible.

“There’s no way that I was performing at my highest and best all the time because that only happens — in my opinion — when you’re completely clear-minded and not taking any alcohol.”

He revisited the book that helped him quit originally, then dropped drinking when his 75-day challenge began on May 1, 2023, and has been sober ever since.

“You know, it’s been a year and a few months, but this time for me it’s different because I don’t feel awkward when people ask me about it,” he said. “After seeing how I felt for those 15 months and how I felt for the two years afterward when I chose to indulge in drinking again, I’ve made a very conscious decision that for me, abstaining from alcohol 100% is not a difficult thing to do. It fits in very well with my lifestyle.”

Blodgett recommends the book he read to others who find themselves on a similar journey.

“I’m certainly not the only person in the mortgage industry who’s choosing to give up alcohol. Matter of fact, I know quite a few of them at this point because you tend to recognize those people when you go to these events and they are highly successful individuals. Look at most CEOs, people that are really achieving at a high level. I think it’s next to impossible to reach the real pinnacle of your own success if you’re setting yourself up to be foggy when you wake up in the mornings. You have to look at the positives of what you’re going to receive from it, and maybe that will help propel you through this thought of missing out on something.”

One Of Those CEOs

Tim Davis, chief growth officer at Canopy Mortgage and CEO of The Originator’s Guide, is one of those high-achieving executives.

“Prior to me joining the mortgage business, during college, we drank and partied way too much,” Davis told NMP. “One night we ended up locking one of our roommates in the trunk of a car, and we didn’t find him until the middle of the next day. I just said, ‘That’s it’ and I haven’t had a drop to drink since.”

At that time, the 53-year-old Nashville resident and Dallas native was studying the arts. He has been sober since about age 20.

“I never met anyone in my life who said this statement: ‘My life improved and got so much better since I started drinking.’ Anytime you don’t taint yourself with any kind of alcohol or drugs you’re going to live a healthier life; absolutely it translates into business and personal success,” Davis observed.

If you run into Davis at a mortgage conference, his drink of choice is a Diet Coke.

He and Blodgett are both accustomed to being around family, friends, and colleagues who drink alcohol, and it’s not a big deal to them.

“I don’t judge. I have beer in my fridge right now. I have a wine fridge full of wine,” Blodgett said. “It’s never been a thing where I feel compelled to drink if it’s around.”

He still goes to all the same happy hours and networking events, but it is more apparent to him when someone else has had a bit too much.

“I think everybody has this point where they cross over from it just slightly reducing their inhibitions to turning them into someone who maybe loses their filter, talks about things that maybe shouldn’t be talked about, or just gets to a place of inebriation and probably shouldn’t be in a business setting at those times. My tolerance for that is probably lower than it was when I was right there with them having a few drinks.”

Working The Crowd

The libations are handcrafted and plentiful during events like Beer & Real Estate and Wine & Real Estate, hosted by Chief Growth Officer at Interstate Home Loan Center, Eric Braun.

The 29-year-old resident of Brooklyn, NY brings together real estate agents, loan officers and other housing finance professionals over food and drink during several yearly events.

“The last brewery event that we had, there were over 500 people and most were drinking,” Braun says.

One person that wasn’t? Him.

“I’ve actually never had a legal drink, I like to say. I’ve had plenty of illegal ones, but I got sober when I was 20 years old,” Braun said. “It’ll be nine years since I’ve had any mind-or mood-altering substances, God willing, August 22.”

Braun speaks to teens at his old high school each year about his sober journey.

“I went from struggling emotionally, spiritually, physically due to addiction and everything that comes with it, to coming out the other side, being of service and not only in the capacity of helping hopefully other struggling addicts and alcoholics but also service to our clients and everybody on our team,” he said.

Braun’s approach with being sober is to take each day one at a time.

“People are like, ‘You’re so young. Do you think you’ll ever drink again?’ There’s no way to answer that other than, ‘One day at a time. I’m just not going to drink today.’”

He was taught that mentality, along with the fact that it’s smart to stay away from situations where one might be tempted early on in their journey.

“Being a person like myself, to not desire alcohol or substances is like a miracle,” Braun explained. “But I believe addiction is a disease, and I have to respect my disease. There’s a saying that if you go to the barber shop every day eventually you’ll get a haircut. I think that’s 100% true.”

Braun did the work, put himself in positive environments, and transcended the grip of drugs and alcohol. Now, he says, he isn’t even tempted when out with friends. This also appears to be true in a video of him on Facebook, where he can be seen walking across a vineyard with a glass of wine to promote this year’s Wine-RE event.

“I think after you’ve had a spiritual experience like I’ve had and you have a foundation, then sobriety should be free. If you are hiding and still operating that way, then you’re not quite free yet. Nowadays I go out to these places and I don’t even realize people are drinking. Like it’s completely removed from my world.”

High Stress Environment

Without a doubt, the mortgage industry is a high-stress one at times. Fluctuating rates, losing out on deals, squashing homeownership dreams, and the potential for all this and more are out there waiting for one misstep.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” Blodgett admitted. “When it’s busy in our industry, people definitely get overworked and really have to put in the extra time and hours.”

Drinking to “take the edge off” and be more sociable at networking events and conferences can be avoided with simple preparation, according to Blodgett.

“I think I would just remind people that you are who you are regardless of the alcohol,” he said. “It might make you a little more willing to go up and talk to someone that you might otherwise not talk to; you might be more willing to ask for business; it tends to lower your inhibitions a little bit. But I think that could be accomplished through training, scripting, and being mentally prepared on what you want to accomplish at a networking event.”

A goal might be to introduce oneself to five strangers. Think of an introduction and how to make the other person feel comfortable enough to exchange business cards.

“Maybe do a bit more preparation,” Blodgett added. “When you go to a networking event make sure that you get out of it what you want. You can absolutely accomplish that through mindset, training, and preparedness, without having to rely on alcohol to give you that courage.”

Being an addict is just that, according to Braun. It has nothing to do with your profession.

“Listen, our industry is stressful,” he says. “There’s a lot of pressure on us from all parties, almost on all transactions, it seems, especially right now. But we can’t use the excuse of, ‘how can I ever do this sober? How can I deal with borrowers and Realtors and everybody without having a drink at night? Everybody does it. It’s accepted.’ Those are all just justifications to the fact that you think you have a problem.”

Braun began his mortgage career as a telemarketer and worked his way through the ranks. Now he manages a division of about 50 people, in addition to being a loan officer and working on recruitment and marketing initiatives.

“If you look closely enough, you’ll find that there’s a lot of people there that aren’t drinking or they may just have one drink,” he says of industry events these days. “I think it’s important to differentiate between somebody who drinks and somebody who has a problem. I’m an addict, so I can’t drink or do substances successfully. There are plenty of people who can and accepting that early on in my sobriety journey was one of the keys to me achieving long-term sobriety. I admitted I was powerless and my life had become unmanageable. I had to adopt that belief early on so that I can see things a little bit clearer and navigate those environments.”

Braun encourages other mortgage professionals who think they might have a substance abuse problem to be honest with themselves and find a mentor who can help them work through it.

Keeping Balance

Even as they live sober and lead successful careers in mortgage, these pros aren’t without any vices.

“I’m definitely not a monk by any means,” Braun says. “I don’t ever want to portray that image where I’m super-disciplined, wake up at 4:30 a.m., do meditation … that’s not me at all. I fall short a lot and I have other vices that are just not as detrimental in the short term, I would say, as drugs and alcohol.”

Talk to his friends, family, and girlfriends, and they would say that he loves working — maybe a little too much sometimes. But because of his past experiences with addiction, he knows when to reign it in and take a step back.

“When I’m stressed, I like to work. When I’m happy, I like to work,” Braun says. “There are points throughout my week or every few months where I have to try to get back some level of balance.”