Step 8 and 9: Daily Housekeeping

We’re talking about alcohol and drinking alcohol and not drinking alcohol and things that you can do to create a life where you do not need alcohol.

Today, I want to talk about looking at your life every day now that we’ve cleaned up the wreckage of the past, looking at your life every day and dealing with things daily, so they don’t pile up. Every day and I like to do it right in real-time. Now I recognize in real-time when I’ve made an error when I’ve done something that’s going to haunt me, that I know going to haunt me. I deal with it right away. Now the best thing to do is every night before you go to bed, look back on your day and see, is there something causing you to cringe? Is there something that is causing you to defend yourself? Is there something that makes you want to not look at it?

That’s the point where you have to look at it and say, “What did I do there?” Because this is not about them. This is about you. This is about you freeing up your heart and mind so that you don’t have to defend bad behavior. Supporting bad behavior is exhausting and useless. It causes you not to want to be in a relationship with people or God, whatever that thing is. We’ve talked about that. So that you don’t want to be held back from having these full relationships with people or yourself, because to defend your bad behavior, you have to cut off pieces if not cut off, but suppress. You’re blocking things about yourself that you don’t want to see.

When I can say, “Oh my God, I was such a jerk.” I was a jerk. Then, and usually, I use a way worse word than that, that I did that, and to defend that means that I have to become just a whole different person. When I could just say, “Okay, I did that.” So one time I was gossiping, I was in this group, and I talked about people. We were all gossiping. I said something and the person I was saying about over it about overheard me, and she came to me later that night, and she was all in a dither. She was just ready to go right after me. She said, “You did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You said.” I said, “Yeah, I did. I was a jerk. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that I was a jerk.”

She was not prepared at all for me to own up to that. She was ready for me to defend me, and we were going to get into it. She was prepared for a fight. I took all the fight out of her because I didn’t try to defend myself. I didn’t try to lie about it or to pretend that I hadn’t done it. I just said, “Yeah, I did it. I was a jerk. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.” I didn’t. We were never great friends because she, quite frankly, wasn’t a charming person. It wasn’t about her. It was about me. It was about me letting go of malicious behavior, owning up to it.

Yeah, I was a jerk, and it’s like ripping the bandage off fast. It’s like it hurts for two seconds, and then it’s over as opposed to hanging onto it for the next ten years. Something that small more than ten decades can fester into something huge because you compound it, it compounds and gets bigger. I suggest that you look every day, and if you can do it in real-time, that’s great. If you don’t do it in real-time, try doing it at the end of the day and looking over your life, and if you need to go and make things right with somebody. Again, not necessarily saying you’re sorry, but to show up and to be a different person, that’s all it takes. You do that daily, and you keep it all clean and straight forward, and you get to live and sleep peacefully.

Thank you. Thanks for joining me. I hope you find this helpful. Bye-bye.

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