Vigorous Action and the Fourth Step – 12 Steps 12 Traditions Weekend Workshop – Part 4 of 5 – Billy C.

My name is Chris. I'm very grateful we're covering up all it, and one of my favorite things in the world to do is talk about this. I'm looking at that old clock I got you for 30 minutes, and I don't want to go over. When we just did the third step prayer, if you look at the very bottom on page 63, things to get started at. it says next we launched out on a course of vigorous action the first step which is personal house cleaning got next we launch out on the course of vigorous actions you know get the little visual little spaceship yeah it's amazing to me how many people out there want to just they want to do a third step and then they want sit on it for a while again it's the danger of compartmentalizing if you guys go on a bunch of the history sites out there they're all good stuff if you read the old articles of the guys that were originally doing all of this, they all work the steps quickly, folks. They just, this nonsense of taking your time again was just nuts, and you know, you get some power by doing this little prayer. You're all excited. If we could just, while we've got that momentum behind us to finish this four-step stuff, it's going to be spectacular. Too often though, I watch people not. They slow everybody down. Easy does it. We'll get together next week, and we'll start that fourth step. That is not the way this was supposed to be. We're supposed to be doing this all at once, and look at Bill Wilson, guys. He's on his ninth day in Towns Hospital. Most of that was detoxing. He's making his amends from the hospital, and he's working with him in the hospital. This was all done within a few days, a few weeks. This is what we were supposed to do. This craziness of taking a year to work the steps, I don't know who came up with that, but it is nuts. If you could take a year to walk the steps and stay sober, more power to you, but you're not like me. There had to be some changes, and I know it frustrates some of you. Again, this is a race. Before that little window closes completely and that obsession comes back, I got to get it, so one of the cool things about it, folks, we have to look at, I want to be, Mark used to talk about this, how free do you want to Be? We talk about it a lot. I don't want just be free from alcohol, folks. I want to be free from everything else. What happens is I get the alcohol out of my system and all of a sudden I start feeling everything. You know, I can put up with a lot of resentments and stuff when I was out there drinking because I kept it all tamped down. And now I don't have that stuff to do that and it starts to kick my butt. Little stupid resentments that are blocking me from the sunlight of the spirit. It's just Bill Wilson is brilliant in his writings about what he talks about. This is a fact-finding mission folks what we're trying to accomplish here is to understand some truths about ourselves this is not a life story okay please bill wilson is crystal clear the deal is is what i'm trying to do in the fourth step there's three inventories there's a there's an resentment inventory which is where most people get confused there's a little two-column fear inventory, and then there's a little sex inventory, which has got some very specific questions to answer. This is not some kind of novel. God, we have gotten so far off the page with this. It's just absolutely insane. Basically what we're trying to do is look at our mistakes out there in the real world so we can stop being a victim. I've said this from a gazillion podiums. I have no idea where I heard it, but most of my sobriety. Victimized people get sober every day. Victims don't. Did you get it? Guys, again, there's a lot of us in this gathering that have been harmed as children, as adults. I am never going to stand up here and make light of any of that. i'm saying if you continue to be a victim around that you will not stay sober we just read it selfish and self-centeredness that we think is the root of the problem driven by 100 forms of fear self-seeking self-self-pity we step on the toes of our fellows this this self-pitty is what gets us guys and i just i i don't want to it feels yicky to sit there and feel sorry for myself but if you look under my shirt there's a big v on my chest it's victim man i gotta i promise you I know I can pick them out of the crowd. They'll find me every time, and the freedom of getting away from that and not being a victim anymore changed my life. Guys, I gotta tell you, go into any meeting, any meeting out there this morning, tonight, whenever, and say, I'm working on my fourth step, and you'll get an audible groan. Oh man, that's so hard. It's not. Is it uncomfortable to look at? Yes, but so many of us, we make it more complicated than it has to be. And I just want to look at it real quick. Basically, I'll talk about this little four-column inventory. There's lots of forms out there. I can send you one that we use straight out of the big book. There's a bunch of good ones out there, but anything that tries to complicate this is not a good idea. Do y'all remember do y'all remember seeing cleaning what was the name of that book with michael keaton back in the eight clean and sober was that the name of it was that i get some thumbs up yeah i forget was a great move but i remember i was sober at the time when i just got sober and and when that movie came out and everybody at aa up in the dallas area was laughing about that movie did you see he went to the diner and he was going to do a four-step and he had a little two little pieces of notebook paper and that was going be his four-stepped And everybody was laughing because they said you couldn't do that. See, he was doing it the right way. We came into a period of time in the 80s and 90s where everybody wanted to make this big, long, drawn-out deal. I had a guy in AA one time tell me, if you don't have at least 500 names on your inventory, you're not doing it properly. I'm like, who are you, Satan? What, you hated everybody you ever came in contact with? That's ridiculous. us. Guys, if you haven't thought of a person in 20 years, don't you dare put him on this inventory. You're just wasting your time. Everybody in this gathering, I got to tell you, we've got 500 people in here. Everybody here has got at least the top. I'd rather see you do the top 10 or 15 people and do the writing on that and finish it so we can go make some amends than to sit there for, you know, you hear people in AA all the time. I'm working on my list. I's come on. You're not. all you're doing is sitting there trying to remember somebody that you're mad at why would we ask you to do that downstream if another name comes up you can do another little four-step on them as i've done that i i do a four-stepper every year uh just to stay current with the stuff that i don't get in the 10-step stuff it's just yeah sit there and ask god the prayer is god show me the people i'm pissed at and start writing the people institutions and principles that i'm mad Yes? And you start writing the list. Do it separately. Just get out there by the picnic table, left alone by yourself or at your desk and start writing this little list. When the names stop, let's go. Let's start finishing this work here because you're going to get caught. Yeah, we're wasting time. One of the things that I say, and I don't know if I'm doing a workshop out there in public and I start talking about this. one of the things that ends up happening uh when i mention this is that i end up irritating some people and they want to come up after and talk to me it's amazing how many people guys listen read my lips put your name on this inventory i'm telling you the book tells you to do that i know kerry's shaking her head it tells you to do that. I'll show you. It's not something that you got to just do pages of writing about, guys, but some of you in here, your own worst enemy. I can't find it. I will find it in a minute. Next time I get up here, I will show it to you. Put your name on the list. Write the list right up here. We are going to do columns on it. You can do it on a little notebook. I don't care. Try to keep it organized. You put the list up here, put who you're mad at. I'm mad at mom. Cause why you're bad at mom? Just real simple. You could have more than one resentment against mom, whatever. Just make a little list. Just number them. Affects my, there's seven areas they're affected by this information is what my pride, my pocketbook, my, you know, y'all understand my self-esteem. You can just go right straight down the list it's you can show it to you guys it's it's a numbers game you're going to see how much one little resentment can affect so much of your life and then the fourth column is my mistakes the big book is asking us specifically to look at areas where was i selfish in this deal in other words judgmental where was I full of fear where wasI dishonest guys Guys, please, because a lot of y'all, when I talk to you, y'All want to change this word mistakes and y'ALL put my part. And guys, and I did for years, I'm going to tell you, I did workshops and I would put it up on the board like this while we're doing it. I was like, okay, now what's your part? I hear people in treatment do it. It just drives me crazy. There was a nice man in Seattle. I was doing a workshop in Seattle one time, and he came up after this little four-step workshop deal I was doing. He came up afterwards, and I wish I had his name. He was the kindest, sweetest gentleman you'd ever come across. He explained to me that that is not what the big book says. It asks you for your mistakes, not for your part. He says some of us have been hurt as children, and we play no part in it. I started to defend myself for a second because I'm a poot, and then realized exactly what he was saying. So he did be such a good service by explaining that to me. And it's absolutely true. Guys, I make mistakes. I've been judgmental. I know people that were hurt as children who continue to make the world pay for that. You know, that's a mistake. But we're not in any way or form trying to balance this out. I've heard people come up to me and talk to me about four-step stuff. I knew I caused all of this to happen. That's ridiculous. There's a lot of stuff that happens to us folks that we had nothing to do with just please, you know, I, one of my problems is my judgmentalness and I have to look at that because I'm a finger pointing fool. And I just, it's, I get to see my truth in this fourth column. It works out great. Then I go back over here and I put dad's name on there some girlfriend, whatever. And I get the ones that I want to put down there that I want to deal with. And like I said, again, if something comes up later, you can go back and do another one. But our urgency to finish this is there. When I get that done, folks, I'll tell you real quick, when I sit down with a little sponsee and we do a third step prayer and I'm sitting at my little desk with him and we did a little third step prayer and I got my little date planner. I'm a paper kind of guy. You know, I got Google stuff. I know all that, but I open up my little date planner and I says, OK, a week from this Saturday. Let's see this next Saturday. That's the 13th. And we'll do your fifth step then. I give my guys a week to do it. And that's magnanimous as I can be. You know, they got job. I can bend a little bit if they got scheduling conflict. This nonsense of giving the newcomer all the time he needs to do is is again one more way that we slow this miracle down. As a result of the steps, I'm going to have a spiritual experience. why in the heck would i want you to go slow through this work come on let's go but if you give me a week come on guys yeah i give my little sponsee a week i guarantee you six days six six days in y'all follow six days and 20 hours in there he's writing like a son of a gun to get this all done you know he if i'd given him a month it would have been 29 days he'd been he'd been he starts working on it again just yeah quickly i give him a little fair inventory the book asks us to list our fear and why we think we have it guys some of the one of the best pages in there is on page 67 just out of time i don't want to uh get in there too far to read it but on page67 it talks about this one of my favorite lines in the book there it talks about fear was the evil and corroding thread i read that when i first got sober and thought you know bill wilson and his little his little prose you know he's just trying to be but you know the truth of the matter is that's true. It was an evil and corroding thread. I told my sponsor when I first started working on this, I'm not afraid of much. And he says, oh, really? Hmm. Are you, this was back in the 80s, guys. We were all afraid of getting AIDS. So are you afraid of getting sick? Yeah, of course. Well, you're afraid of being broke? Well, yeah. You know, everybody's, well, are you afraid of women? Well, that's a cheap shot. Well, yeah. Y'all after about 15 minutes of this, Chris, why don't you just make another little list of things you're not afraid of? You can put little bunny rabbits on there. It'll be shorter and we can make, you know, an evil and corroding friend. Guys, my life is riddled with it. I wake up in the morning and I'm scared to death. And the truth of the matter is, yeah, if I'm not careful with it, it still affects me today. Fear inventory. List the fears right off to the side why you think you got it. At the bottom of the page, it's going to tell you. Wasn't it because self-reliance failed? I'm believing that it's just me that's going have to push through this world. Guys, God has been watching my skinny little butt all my life. There's a power out there greater than myself and I don't know. It's pretty cool to see it on paper in black and white. Sex inventory. it's so funny when we sit and talk to people about this, the guys start doing the sex inventory where we're doing fifth and they just get all excited. Oh, let's talk about those women. You know, and they're always, I said, buddy, you're, you didn't do it right. Okay. If you're excited about talking about this year, shame on you. I've had guys I've sponsored to do fifth steps, the sex imagery with women I know in the program, buddy will bust a hole in your bubble. You want to talk like you're proud of your behavior. Yeah. But Bill Wilson gets really clear in there, guys, and he's talking specifically about my book Closed on Me. Sorry, guys. Again, Bill Wilson in the pages on 69 when he's talk of this, we don't be the arbiter of anybody's sex conduct. It drives me crazy when Billy was talking about it earlier. When we get to a little place where we start doing stuff that makes us sound cultish, it drives me crazy. When we want to be the arbiter of anybody's sex conduct, I mean, if you're telling somebody out there that they can't date for a year, just be careful with that, guys, because that makes this look cultish. You know, the bottom line is they're not drinking because of some girl or some guy. Look at some of the faces on your face. You just look like you've been slapped. I'm sorry. You're not drinky because of som guy or som girl. You're drinking because you haven't finished this work and been taken to a position of neutrality. Guys, any of y'all want to visit about it, you call me and we can do it face-to-face. We can talk. Stop blaming external things for your relapses because it's not true. Just what the book says. That's what my experience abundantly confirms. In this way, we try to shape a sane, sound sex ideal by looking at our sex conduct with women. So people always talk about, I'm going to write this little scenario. If you want to write a few paragraphs about the relationship, that's fine. But I've seen guys write a novel. You know, it's like page after page. Well, we met in high school and I don't care. Bill Wilson, what he's asking you is some specific questions on page 69. We reviewed our own conduct over the years past. Middle paragraph. Where have we been selfish? One more time. Selfish, judgmental. Where would we be dishonest, inconsiderate? Whom did we hurt? Y'all follow with this hurt? I was always seemed like I was some of my long-term relationships were women with kids. And then when the relationship exploded, it wasn't just the woman that got hurt or me that got her. Those kids got hurt. They loved me to death and I just walked out of their life. And I have to look at my behavior when I do that. did we unjustifiably arouse jealousy suspicion or bitterness where were we at fault what should we have done instead we got this all down on paper and looked at it these are nine questions that bill wilson is asking us to look at folks nine specific questions he's asking us about our sex conduct he's not asking us any details about sex yeah everybody thinks that i've read i've read uh listen to guys fifth steps and wanted to blush i didn't i don't want to hear all that stuff stop we're not talking about that how did i treat the opposite sex i go through my life i was in the food business guys i was a professional chef for years i mean i just brutalized waitresses just treated them like garbage you know i have to look at my behavior if it was a relationship with an opposite sex I'm going to put him on this inventory didn't have to be consummated with sex you'll follow i'm the world's worst at flirtation hey chris we lost your volume which is weird because he's not muted must have held my mouth wrong or something because i don't remember hitting anything but sometimes i apologize one of the things that we got questions so that's where we lost you yeah can you still hear me yes we can now the um if you put in a bunch of names on there the average stuff guys with the little newcomers when they first coming in if you can get uh 20 names on their name you're pushing the envelope my experience is most of the folks that when they get down and they start putting these names on theirs guys are this give me good 10 ones and i will be okay you're not drinking because of somebody again that you didn't think of for the last 30 years. You've got current stuff, bosses, significant others, kids, whatever that you want to put on that list. And again, stop with this idea that you've got to have so many names on there. Get it done. I heard a lady not long ago talking about writing stuff down. Just work on it a little bit every day. My experience is this, folks, is that it's a bad way to do it. It's like you've gotta get in gear with this. If you start writing, you'll get a head of steam behind you and before you know it you'll look up and four or five hours has passed done and you're done you know usually it'll happen really fast if i'm having to write a little bit now and then you know i'm going to wait and then two days later i'm gonna come back okay where was i where did i leave off and i'm you know I get columns confused and I just it just works better for me if I'll just sit down and and knock it out at one time usually if I'm doing it today, I'll take off in an afternoon and go lock myself here in this office, and I'll knock it out. If I can do it all at once, it goes quicker. This idea, yeah, y'all good with that? It's really, really quite simple, folks. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob, if they talk about it, I mean, trust me, Dr. Rob sponsored over 5,000 guys in his 15 years of sobriety, guys, his life there in sobriety he sponsored over 5 000 guys he's doing fifth steps with these guys they're not doing them like we hear people talking about today these long drawn out we'll talk about that when we do fifth step stuff guys but uh if y'all got any questions y' all holler at me okay guys thanks thank you so much chris thank you and now we're back to billy for a 20 minute presentation on tradition four yep thank you billy and by the way i love the comments about your jacket but i hope you someday meet john s from the fifth tradition group in atlanta uh because you and him would be good shopping buddies that's what i can tell you i'll look forward to that you would be Good Shopping Buddies so tradition four and i believe i have 20 minutes i want to make sure that i am on time um i'm going to read the long form with respect to its own affairs each aa group should be responsible to no other authority than its own conscience but when its plans concern the welfare of neighboring groups also those groups ought to be consulted, and no group, regional committee, or individual should ever take any action that might greatly affect AA as a whole without conferring with the trustees of the General Service Board. On such issues, our common welfare is paramount. So let's talk about a simple rule, and there's a lot of people in here, but here's my experience. I can pretty much guarantee that anytime someone brings up Tradition 4 in a meeting, a group or a business meeting about three to five other traditions are about to be run over with a Mack truck and backed up over. That's my experience with Tradition4. And I just want to point out tradition four does not apply to the other 11 traditions it has nothing to do with the other 11 traditions now if you yourself want to change one of the other eleven traditions there's good news you can do that you just need to get 75 percent of the known group's permission in writing inside the AA conference charter process. So if you don't like a tradition, you can write to GSO and say, I'd like to put on the conference agenda that this particular tradition is no longer fits in today's world. That's your right as an AA member. and that happened a couple of years ago on tradition 11 people wanted to change the language now the conference decided they did not want to go down the route of contacting groups but if you've never read our conference charter both the original and the current one they're in the service manual they lay out the process for changing the steps traditions or concepts or Article 12, the warranties. And 75% of the known group's permission in writing, 75% of those who respond have to agree to change it. Tradition 4, on the other hand, has absolutely no application to the other 11 traditions. The word we have to think about is custom. custom is very different than tradition customs are things like i said before earl gray tea versus english breakfast or maybe somebody likes a particular brand of coffee or maybe your group is a big book group or maybe an open discussion meeting or maybe you're a big person and you're not a big fan of the same thing your group meets at 8 30 while other groups like to meet at 6 p.m maybe your group asks people to dress a certain way when they speak there there's lots of customs inside alcoholic synonymous they're they're all over um but what you don't get to say is i'm gonna change the open meeting blue card in the spirit of fourth tradition you don't get to say that you don'T get to say we're gonna make this meeting about a lot of other things not just alcoholism you DON'T get to do that either tradition four is about customs and where we really go wrong a lot because the literature is often misquoted is we talk about a group's right to be wrong if you read the original grapevine essays on the traditions particularly for or aa comes of age there is an underlying principle in there and that principle says your right to being wrong is more important than my right to be right. However, what it does not say is your right to be wrong makes you right. It does not say that. People often misinterpret that. No, no, it says you're wrong. It says my right to be right is just not as important as your right-to-be-wrong. But it doesn't say because you don't like the way AA does it, your right to be wrong means it becomes for you the right way to do things. But often we have people quoting that literature, that their right to being wrong. I mean, nowhere else besides AA are people more proud of being wrong than AA. I mean it is really unbelievable when you think about it. There are so many unbelievable things about the makeup of our DNA and what we're proud of, and other people would just be. The rest of the world won't admit they're wrong. We, however, we act like if we're wrong, we're right. This tradition is super important regarding AA's reputation. You know, it says if you're going to do something that affects AA as a whole. Well, let me start with a group of people first that I want to talk about. Newcomers to AA. Newcomer's who are impressionable. Newcomerns who don't know what AA is and what AA is not. if you are telling newcomers it's okay to run over certain traditions you are affecting aa as a whole you are polluting the rest of alcoholics anonymous because what you are telling them is traveling with them to wherever they go to whatever next meeting they go to you are greatly affecting aa as a whole now our relationship with the outside world i already talked about a little bit we uh our reputation is super important our reputation is really all we have we want anybody that's broken spiritually emotionally physically financially we know the people who come to us they're totally destroyed usually the old joke is no one comes to aa on a winning streak right we we need professionals we need our landlords we need all of them to uh know that aa is a good and safe place so when you have a convention at a hotel and you destroy it i just want to let you know the the people who work at the hotel they don't remember that the so-and-so roundup or spring fling or whatever you call your convention destroyed their carpet no no they remember that alcoholics anonymous is not a good group to ever allow in their building that's what they allow when you're a tenant in a community center or a church basement or wherever else you rent space if you treat that landlord of that property bad and you think somehow you have the right to because of the fourth tradition. All you've done is prevented probably other AA groups from ever being able to meet there again, because that's all that landlord is going to remember. AA is a bad tenant. You know, and I hear people, you know, the narrative in the 12 and 12 says, you know, autonomy is a $10 word. I think that's giving it a lot of benefit. You know, it's not a $ 10 word to me. It's probably places I've seen the most misuse. And we have autonomy that groups carry out without even going to the autonomy some of our members carry out. Remember what I said about closed meetings? They're for people who have a desire to stop drinking and the drinking problem. How about the kid who tells me he's going to a meeting and I'm like, isn't that a closed meeting? He's like, yeah, I said, I thought you said you never drank. He's Like, well, so and so told me not to worry about that. Just say I have a desire to stop thinking. Well, that's not what the group conscience of AA as a whole says. And I say that because that is the beauty of our conference-approved literature. Our conference-approved literature, what it does, let's just say I meet some young guy at a meeting and let's just say I wind up in a Denny's having a cup of coffee. When I'm explaining what AA is and AA isn't, I can't go wrong if what I'm telling them is based on our literature, our conference-approved literature, because our conference approved literature has a lot more weight than anything i could ever say it means that the general service conference of alcoholics anonymous that 130 so people are at 93 of them area delegates from the u.s and canada that at least two-thirds of them have voted that this is our group conscience And when you use autonomy to do things like, well, you know what? We're going to read this other book in our AA meeting because I think it's helpful. It's really helpful. It's real big in the recovery scene right now. I mean, let's face it. Again, I go back to we are filled with bad ideas. It's not just about literature. I mean, AA people, when they get into something like we're a dog with a bone. You ever meet somebody in AA who just got into CrossFit? They're going to invite you like every day for a month because they think CrossFit fits perfectly in with AA. You ever met somebody in AAA who just Got into yoga and is now floating on their spiritual high? they're going to tell you that yoga fits so good in with this aa way of life and in the good old days we talked about landmark recovery and the forum and s and a whole bunch of other things but the truth is inside an aa meeting for 60 minutes the newcomer we have a duty to them to only present aa that's it just aa so that they're not under any misconception that something else is not aa and and let me just say a lot of the books i'm talking about or on my nightstand or in my library or in my office at home I have a lot of those books the big book tells me libraries are filled with thousands of spiritually related books and in our personal lives we're encouraged to embrace anything that could possibly help us but that's where i have to sacrifice that 60 minutes i'm in an aa meeting you see even though that book has helped me a lot the rest of aa hasn't decided it would help you and i can't make my so-called wisdom more important than the group conscience of Alcoholics Anonymous as a whole. The group conscience of Alcoholic Anonymous has a whole always has to beat me out. There's a great book that's been written by somebody in another fellowship the last couple of years who happens to be a he also happens to be a rabbi and I think it's one of the greatest books out there. I really do. But it has no business in my group or meeting. It just doesn't belong there. Now, I know we can talk about the 24 hour a day book and that it was here before the daily reflections, everything else. I'm not here to debate that. What I am here to debate is I don't need to be reading my personal religious or spiritual material in an AA meeting. I don' t have that autonomy because one of the biggest mistakes we make in Alcoholics Anonymous, which actually is very insane if you think about it is sometimes we expect somebody with three days to act like they have three years and they don't they have three days it might be their first or their fifth AA meeting anywhere and so when they leave your meeting and they go to the next one and they don't hear the book you read, read at the next meeting? They have to say to themselves, wow, I wonder why they didn't read that book. You see, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of us in this 478 people. I'm sorry, I don't know. I'm not sure there is a whole lot of you who hate hearing how it works right at the meeting. There are a whole ton of people in AA who don't think how it worked should be read at every meeting. But at least it's our literature. now there are meetings in certain parts of the countries called ftl meetings out of respect for alcoholics anonymous i will not say the first word but the first Word begins with an f and then the next two words are the lamination so f the lamina tion and the reason they have these ftl meetings is they want newcomers to know that the literature isn't on some laminated sheet of paper that gets thrown in a closet you know they don't want people to think that the promises mysteriously come your way just because you went to enough meetings today they want the newcomer to know that oh that how it works the person reading it was reading it out of the big book it's inside our literature or when people refer to things as the promises and not the ninth step promises you want the newcomer to see the person in the big book so that maybe they even ask a question hey where are those things you read in the book oh they're right at the end of the ninth step they're right there but when we read and use outside literature and let outside influences come in aa we're affecting aa as a whole that's not an autonomy issue that's a that's tradition to group conscience issue and in aa the last thing i'll say is we have different levels of group conscience your group has a group conscience for how you want to deal with your group but there's no such thing as a group conscience on aa approved literature there's no such thing as a district conference on aa approved literature and there's no such thing as an area conscience on aa approved literature we only have one group conscience for AA literature. And that is the General Service Conference of Alcoholics Anonymous that meets once a year. And so, like I started out in the beginning and said, no tradition is more misapplied any day of the week than tradition for. Thank you very much.