12 Steps – Byron F. – Life Beyond the 12 Steps – 2013

Coach Friday, Coach Byron Friday, coming at you. Athletes in Recovery, you can reach us at athletesinrecovery.com. Today is my audio journal, When Recovery Happens. And let me tell you, today I am fired up. One of my jobs that I worked at was servicing the exercise equipment at the Burns Studio in Burbank, California. And this studio was featured in the movie Rocky Balboa. And there was several scenes in that movie Rocky Balboa. And this is where I work, so I'm really inspired by this. And I don't know if you can really relate to that. But anyway, I'm going to attach a photo to this post. On the website, so you can see what I'm talking about. Anyway, so When Recovery Happens. This is a journal. I'm going to give you some insights and some thoughts about when recovery happens. Alright? Basically, let me kind of give you a big picture overview. Recovery happens when you identify your roadblocks. The things that are getting in your way. Issues. Let's say today, issues with your parents. Mommy and daddy issues. Okay? Learning and understanding what are the obstacles that are getting in the way of your personal growth. Let me make something very clear. Recovery and being in recovery. In recovery. Is, if I had to summarize it, it's personal development. It's personal growth. Because if you're not growing, if you're not developing, you're stuck. So, that's what I'm trying, that's my message today. How to get unstuck. So, there's a quote by Bruce Lee. And it's on YouTube. And I like to. Watch and listen to this. Bruce Lee talking. About being like water. Clearing your mind. And that actually doesn't really. I might have a hard time tying that. That quote from Bruce Lee into this. But, just put it this way. Being like water. Is when you. Are working towards. A state of mind. Where. Life is not getting to you and bothering you. And you have. Emotions. And feelings that you don't know how to deal with. When you have spent. Time. In recovery. Learning. About yourself. Learning about the truth in yourself. And how your mind. Works. And how you react to circumstances. There's a big benefit. To studying. Your own self. And learning about yourself. And identifying. Through. Say. One. One tool. Is using a daily inventory. At the end of the day. Or during the day. You do an inventory of yourself. And what's a daily inventory. And what's an inventory of yourself. Is where. You review. The circumstances. Of. What happens. Of a situation. Or a circumstance. In your life. life and you review it and you analyze it and with the goal of discerning and thinking about what happened, what it was like and is there a better way to deal with those circumstances to have a better outcome. Okay? Okay, so we're going to go on to a specific circumstance that I have learned from, have accepted and has helped me tremendously. I used to have, for decades, I had issues with my father. I also did have issues with my mother too. But. But for this, for the purpose of this specific talk that I'm having with you right now, I'm going to use my dad. Is, let's just say I had issues with my dad for when I perceived who he was and who he wasn't. Let's get on to the point about who he was. I would say that I have more. More negative memories of my father and things that happened growing up than I do positive. Now, I, there's some of the positives are very good because he, I, he's a funny guy, but certain things happened and I had major resentments at my father. One, let me give you one, for instance, a resentment that I had with my father and that was. I had a lot of bad experiences. When I was, it was graduation day for my high school class and I did not graduate. I watched part of the graduation from across the street on the road tracks smoking pot. And later on at that, at that time, I didn't care. I wasn't tripping. It was, I thought it was actually pretty cool. But I didn't care. I was just living my life. Because my parents hadn't been asking me about my report cards or my attendance at school. I was pretty much just living my life. Well, later on where I would develop the resentment at my parents and my father is that when I entered the workforce, I gradually started to climb the ladder of success. And I went from one job within my industry. And I gradually started to climb the ladder of success. And I gradually started climbing the ladder. I ended up into an executive level position or several executive level positions. And I didn't have the academic skills or the experience or the insight or the wisdom or the street smarts to know how to perform at these jobs. And let's say, do I want to say subsequently? I'm not going to use that word. What ended up happening? What ended up happening is over time, I would, because I didn't have the skills, I would end up losing the job. And one thing, probably actually one thing for sure that was the determining factor why I would lose a couple great jobs is honesty. Not being honest. And I had a major, major resentment at my father. And I had a major, major resentment at my father. Because I know, I know I said I was only going to use one for instance, but I kind of on a roll here. And I want to use this as an audio journal, not only for you, but for myself so I can learn to tell my story. That's one of the goals of me with this audio journal is learning to share and experience my story myself and learn how to tell my story. Hopefully in a future video. Hopefully in abbreviated fashion in the future. Anyway, give you just a brief background. During elementary school, junior high school and high school, me and my local neighborhood kids, we, the only trouble that we would get in is for stealing. Stealing candy at the stores. And that was it. But we did steal bicycles. Our big passion in our neighborhood was riding our bikes. Riding bicycle, motocross, BMX. And back then the bikes wouldn't hold up. So we didn't have much of a dialogue or interaction with our parents about the problems that we're having with our bikes and the problems with, with maintaining them because they were breaking down so much. Anyway, I came out of high school with a dishonesty program and not knowing about the problems that we're having with our bikes. Not knowing about the truth about if you're a thief, if you're dishonest and you steal things, the potential impact that will have on your life. And why didn't I have this resentment? This didn't come until I was in my forties, early forties, where I developed this resentment. I found out when my father was on his deathbed that when he was an LAPD officer that he was not a thief. He did something with his, with his co-police partner and they got in trouble. I still don't know the whole story. And he ended up doing prison time. And this prison time was when I was growing up, when I was probably from an infant to a couple years old. And so my, my father did prison time and my resentment was that I didn't find out that I was a thief. I didn't find out about this until he was on his deathbed. I felt so disappointed, even more disappointed. I don't want to over dramatize here and say that I was devastated, but I was just so surprised that my father, my father's life lessons that he would never confide in us and use these, use this as an opportunity when we were getting in trouble stealing. And in fact, during one of his jobs, when he had, when he was a meat packer, he actually, we, we actually contributed to him stealing meat from the meat packing house. It's a long story, but, um, clearly what ended up happening is I didn't know about, I didn't learn about being honest and how stealing was bad and I didn't know the reasons behind it. But after losing a couple of jobs, I was like, I'm going to go to prison. I'm going to go to prison. I'm going to go to prison. I'm going to go to prison. I'm going to go to prison. I'm going to go to prison. I was losing a couple of jobs because of stealing and being dishonest and then learning that my dad didn't have it in him to teach me the life lessons about these exact topics. And I was just so, so disappointed and really, um, for a while I would say that I was devastated because that really, my mom, I also took that resentment out on my mom. And, uh, I'll talk about my mom in another audio journal. But anyway, getting to the conclusion here is that here I am a 40 something adult in a 12 step program, actually in AA and NA and thinking that my issues are with addiction when the truth is. My issues. My issues are my main problems in my life are inability to cope with my feelings and learn how to, how to, how to deal with my, with my feelings. And if I had a psychologist, I could have worked through that, but it was just me, myself and I navigating my entire adult life hood. Even I would say from age 30, probably 10 or 11, 12, 13. I navigated from those. From those years in my life, early childhood to adulthood through my all by myself without advice from my parents. So if I had a bottom line, summarize what my point here is and what my life lesson is here and what my message is, the big picture is that one, I didn't know how to deal with my feelings. I had issues with my parents and I didn't know how to cope with it. These, and these affected me in a negative way. These negative emotions. And today being in recovery is I've come to accept and understand that, uh, let me make one observation about my father. This is where a tremendous amount of insight and growth. Came from is I realized that number one, my father was raised by a single parent, his mother, my grandma, Nana Myrtle Friday. And uh, her husband, my dad's father walked out when he was a, I believe an infant. So basically if my dad was not raised with a, with a father and mother. Yeah. And as an adult, my father had shown had challenges. If he doesn't, if he wasn't raised by a father and a mother, two parent family. Okay. How in the world should anyone expect him to have all the skills and all of everything he needs to raise a family? Yeah. And so I think that's really going to be difficult and I'm getting too long winded here. So here's the message is recovery is a journey and personal development and personal growth happens over time. I would say my journey in recovery, it will go on until the end of my life. It's always a struggle. Okay. And so we've learned to accept these struggles and not let these, um, emotions and circumstances that happen in our life affect us in such a negative way. We learn how to cope with them and not get overwhelmed like we used to. So I was inspired by Seth Godin to, to go ahead and, um, not expect perfection. Uh, I'm just totally losing here. I've been meaning to do audio journals and I've been recording them for a couple of years, but I haven't had the bravery to upload them and record them. I have one, maybe one out of maybe a hundred. So with the idea here is get on here, publish these audio journals and if just one person can get some insight from these, it would, it will have been worth it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. And also if it helps improve my skills, my public speaking and helps me learn how to tell my story and I build confidence over time, then it's done its job. So I'm going to link to the, to the story, the Seth Godin blog posts that I read today. Seth Godin is one of my favorite authors for many reasons. And um, you can reach me on Twitter. We're at sober coaching and also at athletes in recovery and that's athletes and recovery.com and this is coach Byron Friday and I hope you have enjoyed. If you haven't enjoyed it, maybe you've made it through part of this audio recording or the full length of this audio recording. Hopefully there's some actionable items that you've taken away from the words that I've just spoken and um, you can, you can leave a message or leave a comment on the bottom of this post on the website. Okay. And uh, thanks very much on the website. Athletes in recovery, recovery. Last thing. Okay. So the first thing I want to talk about is you can leave a audio message. If you have a computer with a microphone, it's a little speak pipe widget. You can leave a 90 minute, excuse me, 90 second comment or question. Also if you'd like to leave a question or if you have a thought about recovery for coach Friday and this podcast. You can email it to us and the email is on the website on the contact button. Thanks so much and have a great day.