Your ultimate job in life is not to be smart or creative or even sober.  It is to be effective.

“Effectiveness is not inborn.  It can be learned.  In fact, it has to be learned.”

Peter F. Drucker, in his 1967 book “The Effective Executive,” shows that effectiveness is a practice.  You learn it, like most other things, by making it a habit.  Let me repeat that thought.  If you want to get good at anything — playing the guitar, parenting, skiing, sobriety — you have to practice it.  Do it daily.  Make it a habit. Make it muscle memory — something you don’t have to think about.  You just do it!

Getting back to effectiveness.  Drucker says that there are five essential practices that make one effective.

1. Effective men and women “know where their time goes.  They work systematically at managing the little bit of time that can be brought under their control.”  After sleeping, eating, work and mandatory chores you have very little discretionary time: make it count!  Track your time.  Manage your time.  And, consolidate it into meaningful productive periods.  Plan your day on a calendar and then work your plan.
2. Effective men and women “focus on outward contribution.  They gear their efforts to results rather than to work….”  How many times have we spent a day or a week working relentlessly on a project but accomplishing nothing?  Very frustrating. But, more than that, that time is gone.  You can’t replace it.  Don’t waste a moment in mindless work that accomplishes nothing!
3. Effective men and women “build on their strengths….  They do not build on weakness….”   If you get lost in stamping out all of your defects you will accomplish very little in life.  Take care of the major defects that negatively impact your life.  Then focus on your strengths and the strengths of those around you and use those strengths to climb the heights of your possibilities:  most of the rest of your defects will take care of themselves.
4. They “concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.  They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions.  They know that they have no choice but to do first things first — and second things not at all…”  Maintain a prioritized “To Do” list and do “first things first” no matter how daunting they might be or as Brian Tracy say:  “Eat the frog!”
5. They, finally, “make effective decisions.  They know that this is, above all, a matter of system–of the right steps in the right sequence.  They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on ‘dissenting opinions’ rather than on ‘consensus of the facts.’  And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions.  What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions.  What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.”  A lot of us in recovery rely on “gut decisions” or the quiet voice within to guide us but, in fact, they should only be a small part of your decision making procedure.  We learn, in the program, to rely on a sponsor and/or a spiritual advisor for input on our decisions:  make sure you have good ones!  But also make sure to investigate the facts not as you want them to be but as they are.

Take a little bit of time and reflect on this.

Do you want to be effective or do you just want to wander aimlessly through life in a hit or miss fashion?

Your life is what you make it.

1. Perception of Reality: These individuals tend to have a “superior relationship with reality” and are “generally unthreatened and unfrightened by the unknown.” In fact, “They accept it, are comfortable with it, and, often are even more attracted by it than by the known. They not only tolerate the ambiguous and unstructured—they like it.”
2. Acceptance: “Even the normal member of our culture feels unnecessarily guilty or ashamed about too many things and has anxiety in too many situations. Our healthy individuals find it possible to accept themselves and their own nature without chagrin or complaint or, for that matter, without even thinking about the matter that much.”
3. Spontaneity: The behavior of the self-actualizing individual is “marked by simplicity and naturalness, and by lack of artificiality or straining for effect.”
4. Problem Centering: Self-actualizers customarily have some “mission in life.”
5. Solitude: Self-actualizing individuals “positively like solitude and privacy to a definitely greater degree than the average person.”
6. Autonomy: “They have become strong enough to be independent of the good opinion of other people, or even of their affection. The honors, the status, the rewards, the popularity, the prestige, and the love they can bestow must have become less important than self-development and inner growth.”
7. Fresh Appreciation: “Self-actualizing people have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others.”
8. Peak Experiences: It’s been called “flow” or “being in the zone.” Whatever you want to call it, self-actualizers tend to experience it more often than average.
9. Human Kinship: “Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.” … “Self-actualizing individuals have a genuine desire to help the human race.”
10. Humility and Respect: All of Maslow’s subjects “may be said to be democratic people in the deepest sense… they can be friendly with anyone of suitable character, regardless of class,
11. education, political belief, race or color. As a matter of fact it often seems as if they are not aware of these differences, which are for the average person so obvious and so important.”
12. Interpersonal Relationships: “Self-actualizing people have these especially deep ties with rather few individuals. Their circle of friends is rather small. The ones that they love profoundly are few in number.”“They do right and do not do wrong. Needless to say, their notions of right and wrong and of good and evil are often not the conventional ones.”
13. Means and Ends: “They are fixed on ends rather than on means, and means are quite definitely subordinated to these ends.”
14. Humor: “They do not consider funny what the average person considers to be funny. Thus they do not laugh at hostile humor (making people laugh by hurting someone) or superiority humor (laughing at someone else’s inferiority) or authority-rebellion humor (the unfunny, Oedipal, or smutty joke).”
15. Creativity: “This is a universal characteristic of all the people studied or observed. There is no exception.”
16. Resistance to Enculturation: “Of all of them it may be said that in a certain profound and meaningful sense they resist enculturation and maintain a certain inner detachment from the culture in which they are immersed.”
17. Imperfections: Actualizers “show many of the lesser human failings. They too are equipped with silly, wasteful, or thoughtless habits. They can be boring, stubborn, irritating. They are by no means free from a rather superficial vanity, pride, partiality to their own productions, family, friends, and children. Temper outbursts are not rare.”
18. Values: “A firm foundation for a value system is automatically furnished to self-actualizers by their philosophic acceptance of the nature of self, of human nature, of much of social life, and of nature and physical reality.”
19. Resolution of Dichotomies: “The dichotomy between selfishness and unselfishness disappears altogether in healthy people because in principle every act is both selfish and unselfish.”

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COMING NEXT
The Chicken & The Eagle Part II:
Giving the Eagle a Human Face
“What human beings can be, they must be.”
— Abraham Maslow

LAST WEEK

If you were to go on a journey with someone for several decades, how important would the relationship between the two of you be?  Of course, it would be essential to your well-being.  Unfortunately, that someone is your inner-critic and most of us don’t get along with him or her at all.  We offered 5 solutions to ease the relationship, a lovingkindness meditation and discussed making it bearable.  We didn’t solve everyone’s problem but certainly took a step in the right direction.

THIS WEEK

A few weeks ago we told the story of the Chicken & the Eagle.  It was inspiring and thought provoking.  Now we give the eagle a human face in the form of Maslow’s Self Actualizing man.  Not saying we should wake up tomorrow and be him or her but it is an ideal we can shoot for – an ideal that will help us FLOURISH.

Look forward to seeing you there.

The next meeting of the FlourishInSobriety Group is on October 21, 2016 at 6:00 P.M. at the Sycamore United Methodist Church in the conference room.

For those who haven’t been there:  come in the side entrance and turn left at the corridor.  Walk about 100’ and the conference room is on the left.

As always…  If you can attend, we’d love to share your company for an hour or so…

If you can’t, do us a favor and do three things:

• Mark your calendar for next Friday – we’ll be there – same time, same place and the same goal: to help each other Flourish In Sobriety.
• Spread the word. Let your friends in A.A. know that there is a different kind of meeting in Sycamore every Friday night that they’d really benefit from attending.
• Give the topic of the meeting – “Self Actualization” – some serious thought and either email (flourishinsobriety@comcast.net) or call (779.368.0075) to let me know how best to handle the topic to be of benefit to you, your sponsees and others around the tables. As always I value your opinion.

1. We admitted we were POWERLESS over a lot more than alcohol — that our lives would continue to be UNMANAGEABLE until we took responsibility for creating a true masterpiece of our existence
2.  Came to believe that a power greater than our own resources, ego and awareness could lead us to wisdom.
3. Made a decision to accept truths revealed in our search for wisdom and make choices and decisions in support of our DESTINY without reservation.
4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of our character strengths and virtues.
5. Admitted to ourselves and others the exact nature of our strengths and virtues.
6. Were entirely ready to embrace my strengths in pursuit of flourishing as a human being.
7. Humbly sought help from whatever source to unlock my potential.
8. Made a list of all beings we should love and became willing to actively help them flourish.
9.  Made a direct effort through my life and my calling to love all beings and to help them flourish throughout their lives.
10. Continued to monitor my life values, goals, and accomplishments through personal logs, journals and the input of trusted advisers and when we strayed took corrective action on an immediate basis.
11. Sought through prayer, meditation and reflection knowledge of our true place in the universe and how best to contribute for the betterment of all.
12. Having had a psychic awakening as a result of these steps we carried the message of a life filled with flourishing to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Too many of us get sober and try to make up for lost time.  We work long, hard hours on a job or two or even three trying to get our financial house in order or trying too restart a career laid waste by alcohol.

We feel that we can’t fail if we put our nose to the grindstone and don’t look up but way too often the really important things in life like those important relationships with our significant others, our children, our friends,  even ourselves get lost in the dust.

Work can be as mind numbing as another addiction.

If your work is simply a job, look for something else.   Look for a “calling” where you can add true value to your community.

Anything less is a waste of your hard won sobriety.