The Art of Gracefully Not Getting Your Way – Don M.

Don, for the first time, we go a thing called the Southwest Regional Delegates Assembly. It's a place where all past delegates get together with the current delegates and alternates and kind of walk them through what it might be like to go to conference. At that time, I was a panel of 47, area 67, and Don was a pan of 47 area 10. So we started together as delegates, and we served at the General Service Conference. Don's a really good guy. you couldn't ask for a better friend hard worker he can do a lot of things and I've always admired him because sometimes I don't know how he gets it done but he does and they were really good to put them on the general service board as a trustee and sometimes it's always it's not always smooth going but You've got to say what you mean and do what you say. Here's Don. Hello, everybody. My name is Don Miller, and I'm definitely alcoholic. And I think I'm supposed to start with my sobriety date is September 20th, 1987. We are starting a new group called Emotional Sobriety and the Next Frontier in Denver, Colorado. And we are not the greatest group in the world, but we are good enough. That characterizes my train of sobriety is that I have done just enough, and it's just good enough, and the reason I like to mention that stuff, I sobered up. September 17th, 1987, I was following a parked truck. In a car I didn't own that wasn't licensed or insured. And the guy who owned the truck came out of the house at 1009 Lincoln Street, Louisville, Colorado. And he looked at me and said, man, you are really messed up. Why don't you come back tomorrow and we'll take care of that? And I looked at him and said call the cops. And they did. and today I can understand that and today I can explain that one of the things that I I didn't know how to ask for help the way I asked for help before I got here was I created a huge crisis in my life and hoped somebody showed up but by the time they showed up I was over the pain and I would slap them away and I can tell you that that is not a great way to have relationships and so when I showed up to Alcoholics Anonymous in September of 1987, I was mostly unconscious. I'm the guy that wakes up in trouble and spends all my energy trying to get out of it. And then once I'm out ofit, I pat myself on the back and I think of what a great guy I am and how well I work the system. But the miracle that night, and I'm going to talk a little bit about my story, and then it's got me listening to the GSO speaker and to avoid a couple of confusing things is I do not live in New York. I do not work at the General Service Office. You can double my salary, and it won't cost you anything. I have had the pleasure of serving in our General Service structure for a really long time. I'll talk a little bit about that stuff. But, you know, the cops showed up, and they gave me like six tries to pass the sobriety test. It was raining that night. they took me down to the police station and I stuck my arm out and said take blood. I was .302 about four hours after my last drink and I knew the cops in town I work a system like I said and I'm sitting there in the police station and he comes walking this guy Tim and Tim looks at me and he goes Don I said Tim and the cops go you know him? I go yeah he's a friend of mine from Boulder Tim's like what are you doing here? I asked Tim what he was doing here. Oh I just got a DUI on the way to your house and I said oh funny me too I had a gram of cocaine in my front pocket and had I been searched I'd have been probably arrested it would have been my second possession within a year I'd probably have been due in time they didn't search me they said you know him? I go yeah and they said would you sign for him? and they let me sign him out and signed me out and they didn's search me and they gave me a ride home it's done it doesn't work like that today i know that i mean i actually was sitting in a sauna with the sergeant that was working that night you know about five years ago when i asked him what it's like today he goes like it ain't the way it was when we were drinking and he said we get more we arrest more people leaving a liquor store than we do a bar today because bartenders and owners of bars get arrested if somebody leaves intoxicated and i'm like wow that's a lot different by the what's interesting to me about that night is that I didn't know how to, I just really didn't, I was unconscious and they gave me a ride home and the difference today, what happened that day was that when I knew I needed a good story for the judge, that's all so I called my employee assistance people and they said you know there's this outpatient treatment thing, you can go there, I had never heard of Alcoholics Anonymous I had ever heard of alcoholism and I didn' t know what an alcoholic was I just thought I was crazy and that I would outgrow this thing. And I just didn't know. I was unconscious, and I was confused, and then I was angry. And so anybody here come to AA with a bad motive? I went to 560 meetings my first year of sobriety. Now let me tell you how that happened. First of all, I went through this intake thing. And I'm sitting there, and this woman's interviewing me, and she's asking me how much I drink. And I tell her, she says, how much do you drink? I said, oh, I'll have a beer once in a while, which is true because I drank gin and tonic. And she's looking at me, and she goes, you know, we think if you're a middle or late stage alcoholic, we've already talked to your boss, we've уже talked to insurance company, we will let you try this outpatient program, but we have permission to give you UAs. And if you show up here with a dirty UA, we can lock you up for 28 days. And in the back of my mind, and pardon my language, but in the back of mind I went, you bitch! But what came out of my mouth was, oh that's a good plan. That's what you got when I showed up to Alcoholics Anonymous. I had not been able to have a relationship that was honest and genuine with the outside world for a really long time because I was scared to death. I worked six times as hard to be twice as good so you had no reason to criticize me. I am, basically I'm a really insecure person and not much has changed since then. I'm still really insecure. The difference is that I have a different relationship with my insecurity. When I sobered up I was ashamed of it. I was embarrassed by it.I was angry at it and I didn't understand it. And I thought that you had to be in control and if you weren't in control You weren't much of a man, and if you weren't much of the man, you wouldn't be able to do the things. I wasn't going to be able do the thing that I thought you thought I ought to do to get the stuff that I though you oughta thought I have to have the life and happiness that I you thought you thought I oughta have. And if that sounds tiring, it's because it is. So what happened is I showed up to Alcoholics Anonymous and I went to a lot of meetings my first year of sobriety because they took my car. And the guy that worked down the street, lived down the street from me, went to the Boulder meeting. I opened this meeting at 7 o'clock in the morning. I live 10 miles from work. This guy went to this 7 o'. meeting every morning. And if I went to that meeting with him, I could get a ride and then walk to work. So I went to 500 and some meetings my first year of sobriety because, well, I could Get a Ride to Work. And if you have a really piss-poor motive for being in here, welcome. i i just do not believe that i i mean if i'm not the guy that woke up one day went well you know i've been having a little bit of problem with my drinking and i heard those people in alcoholics anonymous have a real good handle on that and i'll just go down and do some investigation and make some modifications to my life to learn to live without drinking that's not the way it showed up for me um basically i came in here and And I became more alcoholic the longer I didn't drink. I would listen. We're storytellers. And what I learned in here is that we talk about what happened, what it was like, or what happened. Sorry, what we were like, what happened and what we're like today. Not what it's like. It was like. It, the world, is probably the same as it was when I sobered up. I was reacting to it very differently. But what happened was that night I got that DUI or that, you know, I got tricked to come into Alcoholics Anonymous. And what happened is I was sitting in my first couple of meetings and I remember thinking, I belong here. Whether I like it or not, I belongs here. And so I would wear this big gray jacket and I would come and sit in the middle of the room and hide. And I got my first healthy resentment when I was about four months sober. and I was looking my biggest fear is that I'm not enough and then I found out from the members of Alcoholics Anonymous that my biggest fear is true I am not enough and then the other thing that I found out was that I am insecure and it took me a decade to realize that insecurity is an appropriate response to life Life is an insecure thing and the more that I go around and try to make it secure the crazier I get What I do is I throw certainty at insecurity and then i'm a really certain insecure person I throw competency at insecurity, and then I'm a Really Competent Insecure Person Have you guys ever worked with somebody who's a competent insecure person These are the people that get all the rewards of competency, and then they walk around trying to suck approval out of everybody around them. And the basic shtick I did was that I was trying to get you to tell me that I wasn't a good person. That I was better than you. That's like walking up to your ex-girlfriend and saying, I really need your approval for me breaking up with you. That's Like Shopping for a Sandwich at a Napa Store. Anyway, so what happens is I show up here and I'm insecure. The short version of the first part of my program is that I found some people in Alcoholics Anonymous who had worked the steps and they worked it out of the big book and I actually, I can't really explain what happened other than these people had a sparkle in their eye I'd say 90% of the people I met in AA I just didn't really have anything to deal I mean you guys some of you guys were just crazy But there's a small portion of people that had some light in their eye And you know what that's all it took my program has been basically a story of it counts and good enough Anything worth doing we're doing poorly at first And this is why it says progress not perfection And so what happened was I was I sobered up, and I let me give you a couple of things I was a software engineer, so I had picked a career. That was based upon my marriage my major character defects software engineers are isolationist you can do this work by yourself computers do exactly what you tell them to so as control software has to be perfect or it doesn't work and if you get really good at what you do you can tell your boss to piss off because there's only like so many people that can do works so I got to be a big shot and you know and then so that's what I did and So when I sobered up, I was a scared, lonely little boy in a man's body who was making pretty good money. I could get things that you told me that I needed in order to be okay. I was 28 years old, and about six weeks before I had my last drink, I was sitting in a room with a woman I didn't know about Reddit. Well, let me put it this way. I had a joint, some cocaine. I was smoking a cigarette. I had beer. Jack Daniels. And I was about ready to have sex with a woman I didn't even like. And I remember sitting back and thinking, oh, God, this just sucks. I've got everything I want, and it doesn't work. But the thing is that that surrender for me that night had nothing to do with quitting drinking. And what that had to do with was that I didn't know what to do. It was six weeks later when I got the DUI, and a couple days later I went to that outpatient thing. And then three days after that I ended up in Alcoholics Anonymous at a third step meeting or a second step meeting coming out of the 12 and 12. And you guys used the word insanity and God. And my ideas of insanity was one flew over the cuckoo's nest. And what you guys helped me realize is that insanity can be nothing more than an inability to perceive reality. To be wrong. What a novel idea. And the God thing. And, you know, the truth is I just sat down and I gave this thing a try. I thought it would be done in about 30 days. I'd get my shit together and I'd be done and out of here. And what I found out is if you get your shit all together, it smells really bad. So it's better to leave it spread out and take care of it over a long period of time. anyway so here I was I'm an outsider, I'm a loner I'm insecure, I don't trust anybody and I was trying to live my whole life trying to prove I didn't need anybody and what I learned in alcoholics and I learned a lot of stuff and most of it I learned from participating in our service structure and one of the things I love about our service is that I think AA is amazing Who would have thought that 1.4 million self-centered, selfish self-centred people could get together and do something organized or semi-organized or produce what we've produced? To me, Alcoholics Anonymous, and I'm going to tell you what I really believe, I believe AA as a whole is, and I'll talk a little bit about the service stuff in my experience, but I think AlcoholicsAnonymous is tens of thousands of spiritual entities called groups that have a purpose. The purpose of those entities is to create recovered alcoholics that do 12-step work. That's what AA is. That's why I'm here. That's how we do. We produce recovered alcoholics that do twelve-step works. We tell stories. They're very powerful stories because as far as I can tell, anybody in here like to be told what to do? We are the biggest group of opt-in people I have ever met. We don't get sober because we think it's a good idea. We get sober because we believe we might have a shot at something and it might be better. So one of the things that I learned to do in here was I learned actually answer the question, especially when I talk about service, is what's in it for you? What's in me? What's it for me? And all I can really tell you is I sat down about 20 years or 15 years ago and I wrote an inventory. If it were up to me, I would take credit for everything in my life because when I get credit, I think I'm secure and I can reproduce it and then I don't have to need anybody. And what I found out in here is that the root of humility are the statements I need. I need you. I don't want to need you, but I need you. No group needs me, but I need a group. Groups need members. They don't need a particular member. And so in here what I learned is that I'm vulnerable and a friend of mine said early in sobriety, I heard this, he goes like if we were meant to be alone, if we were meantto be alone we'd be living on this planet one at a time. look around, you're not. And that same friend looked at me one day and he said, Don, you know, pretty much only the end of the earth is the end of the Earth. Everything else is some form of inconvenience. And I get lots of wisdom in AA. And so what happened with me is when I started to get that, I started To Work the Steps, I got a little more honest with myself, I started having a relationship with a higher power, and probably the biggest thing that I got out of all of that stuff was that I was going to have to give up this life of living alone with myself and I was gonna have to stop keeping secrets. Sometimes you hear people say secrets are what make us sick and I don't know whether I had secrets or not but I was pretty sick and scared and so what happened with me was I got involved in service right away and I'm a geek we talk about geeks I read computer manuals and I read computer manual because well When I read computer manuals, I understood how the computers worked and other people around me didn't. And so I could like do things that they weren't doing and then the people could look at me and go like, well, you're really smart and can you help me with this? And then I would have something on them and they would owe me. The reason I didn't want to give anything or I didn'T want to take anything from you is that I didn'T want to owe you anything. For me, it was a zero-sum game. It was like always bartering and it was like, I was like in this massive competition with God and with everybody. I was in competition with God, and I was in competition with the people around me, and they didn't even know it. I was battling my own internal war, and so what happened was I went through the steps, and i got some relief, and a little bit of peace, and started to show up in AA, and I remember probably when I said I got my first healthy resentment in AA. This whole thing about not feeling like I'm enough, I started to believe that my story wasn't bad enough. when I didn't hit a bad enough of a bottom. And then I was going to be 20 years sober and I was going to wake up and go, oh my God, I didn'T really hit a bad enough bottom and I'm going to have to drink. Let me tell you how my mind works. My mind can take 20 years worth of catastrophe and sink it into one second. And the way that I work is I either minimize something and I go, well that's not very important so I can ignore it and take no action or I scare the hell out of myself and guess what? Take no action. So pretty much when I'm taking no action, my ego is in there unless I'm purposely not taking some action because it's a wise thing to do and I've never really been accused of a whole lot of wisdom. So anyway, so here I am. I'm sitting in this thing and I remember sitting in that room and I was like, oh my God, I'm not bad enough. They're going to find out. And I looked up and the 12 traditions were on the wall And one of them says the only requirement for memberships is a desire to stop drinking. And I thought, you son of a bitches can't kick me out of here. Which is one of the reasons I love our service structure so much. Is that I can do things in our service infrastructure I would not imagine doing at my job. And since you can't pick me out and you love AA so much as much as I do, you will correct me. So it's like a free university with no tuition that has lots of instructors and lots of good positive feedback. And if you want to get participation in Alcoholics Anonymous, do something untrustworthy. What I learned in AA is that if you're paying attention to the group conscience and you're serving really well, most people don't need to do anything. I think one of the reasons that the GSO and the AA Grapevine and all that stuff don't get a lot of attention from AA members is because they're actually serving needs. It's like electricity. When do you notice electricity? When it goes out or you get the damn bill. And I think that when we, I run a service business. I run software business and I can tell you that my customers after a year or two are working with our software and they're just plodding away they get to the point where they go this is working fine for me I don't need you. But in the background every one of the people that work for me do testing, training and tech support. Every one of them are testing the software with new versions of the software so that when your world changes underneath you we're there to support you. but from an individual's point of view and that's what I learned in AA is that I'm part of something much larger than myself and this is one thing I love about AA and it still cracks me up we show up at AA and we're like thinking well, we should be a really spiritual organization and we shouldbe really kind to each other and weshouldbe wonderful and then I remember I'm a selfish self-centered alcoholic serving with self-centred and selfish alcoholics who are trying to help selfish and self- centred alcoholics that are still drinking And then I wonder why things go off the rails. And I wonder why I need tolerance and love as my code. And I can tell you it's because we do incredibly weird crap to create the illusion of security and one of the biggest things that I'm learning in here and I'm going to tell you about some of my service structure experiences which have been really great, is that basically I think that the art of living in AA living in AAA is the art of gracefully not getting your way. I hear people talk, I've heard a bunch of great quotes these days. One of them was, the only thing that AAs hate worse than change is the way it is. I rotate into a service position and a lawyer friend of mine who's known me for 10 years calls me up and I'm telling him what I'm going through and he's like, Don, all I can really tell you is it's probably not your fault but it's definitely your turn. and uh we rotate into these positions and we rotate and then one of the things that i learned in alcoholics anonymous is how to separate what's mine and what's not mine what i get to be personally responsible for and there's we have a rule 62 right don't take yourself so seriously there's a rule 63 well don't tak those other people so seriously either you know a good sense of humor helps with a lot of this stuff and um when i wanted to i'm just i'm sorry i'm gonna ramble on through i have been blessed i started out i got to be a gsr and when i was a gsl in 89 or whatever um i uh i read all of our material i read our service manual i read a comes of age i read book called bill w i read not god And while I was doing that, I was serving as a GSO. It hit me. All of AA's history is about maturing and growing up. And I was 28, 29, 30 years old. And what it hit me at the time is that that matches my personal path. I don't know where I got it. I can't tell you what they were teaching when I was growing up, but I'll tell you what I learned. What I learned was the world is untrustworthy in a hard place. I learned that being an adult sucks. I don't want the responsibility, I don' t want to get hammered. And when I learned in here and I looked around and I saw a bunch of men and I see a bunch people that cared about something larger than themselves. And when i was working software, have you guys ever seen the movie Eraser? Or Clear and Present Danger? There's a robotic unit in that that I wrote the software for when I was drinking. And it didn' t kill anybody. you know but but one of the things that I remembered about I got to work before I even sobered up with a group of people that actually did something larger than themselves that changed an entire industry and even before I got To Alcoholics Anonymous what I learned from that experience was I can go on my individual way and create something that might be kind of cool or I can participate with a Group of People and produce something that's bigger than me And when I do that, what I learned is that there is conflict. Conflict is inevitable. It is going to happen. The difference between me today and me then is that now I understand that conflict's inevitable. I have a different relationship with it. Conflikt is actually the beginning of creativity. Conflik is when I served as a delegate for Colorado, and people go, What do you think about being a delegate? I go, What's your job? What's Your job being a delegator? And I said, my job is to be the human contribution to conflict resolution at the national level. I'm going up there to slug it out with 133 people in the conference so that you don't have to. That's what we do. And I just, I got to tell you, we, it is an amazing thing. If you think about, we talk about not trusting, right? We talk about non-trusting. We have 133 people that are making decisions for 1.4 million of us. That's trust. The good news is that if we get something wrong, we hear about it pretty quickly. Do something untrustworthy if you want to increase participation. So here I am. I'm starting to – I'm probably two or three or four years sober. And I'm just – I can't separate my personal recovery from my service life. And the main reason for that is somebody early on in sobriety, what I found out is that I react out of my defects when I rub up against things. And when I run up against people, I generally don't get my way and I'm in conflict. And I have a lot of internal conflicts. And when i run and I hit those conflicts, if I pull out the pens and paper and I start doing inventory, what I get to do is I get discover not the things that I need to do to change you, but I get to use that information to make adjustments in how I relate to the world and let me tell you you guys can be in conflict all you want but I want my peace and what I discovered is that that's priceless it's worth any amount of effort that I have to put into it in order to learn the things that I need to learn in order to forgive people I needto forgive when I'm wrong I wrote an article for the grapevine in I don't know 1990 or something and it starts off like this I learned three three word sentences that actually save my bacon I was wrong, I don't know and I need help and I ended the article by going well I kind of lied because that's what I can do now the way I actually started was I might be wrong I might need help and I might not know and so the reason I bring that stuff up is because I've had the pleasure of serving as a GSR, I was a district treatment chair I was an area treatment chair for Colorado and then I got elected treasurer of Colorado. And just to let you know how many second chances we get, I defaulted on my IRS notes on Colorado. I had $50,000 in debt. And I paid that stuff back, and I wasn't going to stand for treasuring. And I'm like, why not? I said, well, because I had all this debt. They said, Well, it's paid back. I said、Well, I'm not qualified. Why don't you get an MBA? Yeah. What's it in? International Business and Accounting and Finance. And I will use any excuse to get out of taking something that feels uncomfortable. And that's what I was doing. So I put my name in, I stayed in long enough to come out of the hat, I ended up being treasurer for Colorado, and at the end of my first six months in term, I got a job offer. I quit my job, I took a leave, I was finishing my MBA, and I was going to travel around the country, and I got an offer to go work in Switzerland for a year. and of course I thought well I have to pick one or the other right? And I had an attack of common sense and somebody said well why don't you just ask? So I asked my boss and he said well you can't stay in the country longer than three months at a time and we'll send all your mail to you so I went to my area assembly and I said I can do this and they want me to schedule my time back so it coincides with the area assemblies and I went through my area And I said, I can do this. I'm going to be living in Switzerland for a year. And I understand if you want. I'm open for feedback. And three people in the front row said, good luck. So I served as treasurer for Colorado while I lived in Switzerland for a years. And at that point, I started to think, you know, some people come up to me and they go, Don, you think out of the box. And I go, what box? And a part of what we get to learn in here, one of the things that I learned in here that I really love a lot is that I found out in Alcoholics Anonymous through working with people and being in the service structure is that i have basically three components to myself i have an emotional component besides a physical piece but i have a emotional component an intellectual component and i have intuition and i don't know about you but i never really exercised my intuition too much until i got here and what i've discovered is that through prayer and meditation and showing up and living is that my intuition allows me to actually operate on the correct balance between emotion and intellect. Because the only couple of examples I get for that is if I'm driving down the street and you cut me off, not a good idea to have an emotional component really high. Intellectual component works really well for that. When I get home and I'm getting ready to hang out with my partner or I'm coming home, an intellectual component to that relationship does not work as well as an emotional component. And that's what I learned in here from showing up and being here. I learned, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the grapevine, is that right now, I'm sorry, this is a GSO award. I'm actually serving on your grapevine board. A number of years ago, I served as an AWS director. And I want to tell you, if you think, if people walk up, they go, how do you do that? How do you doing that? And I'm like, well, you show up, you put your name in, and somebody calls you up and says, come do this. And then I don't know about you, but I spent my first year as an AWS director insecure as hell going they picked the wrong person. What are you people doing? And then it occurred to me that that was really arrogant. There were four or five people that made that selection for me to pick to come up here. And what I realized is I was pulling a rank on all those people. I think in AA what we do for each other is that I you see things in me that I can't see in me and you encourage me to get uncomfortable and take steps that I normally wouldn't do. And I do that for you. I see in you things that you can do that you may not feel like you need to, that you can, and I ask you to step up. We do together what I cannot do alone. And I served as a delegate on the 50th anniversary. I was at the 50TH conference and Beth was there and Mike was there. And I got a chance to go to the 50ETH Convention of Ireland, the University of Ireland convention when I was living in Switzerland. And what I learned from all of this stuff is I'm frequently wrong and thank God for that. That a chunk of this stuff is not about me getting my way. It's about me finding out what the group conscience is and participating in the group conscious so we can get our way. If I want to be successful and get things done and be happy, what I found is that I'm better off throwing in my part and finding out what we need in order to serve alcoholics who still suffer. And then I walk away with the benefit of that, of belonging to something larger than myself. And I served as a director for AWS from 2003 to 2006. I didn't get selected to move on as a trustee. And people have come up and said, they didn't pick you to be a truste. Do you feel like a failure? And I go, well, I don't have to feel like a failure, I am one. There's a difference. I mean, I'm feeling fleeting. Me? Insecure? Yeah. No, actually what I did was I told the person, I said, actually from being, from practicing the concepts and the traditions in my own personal life, in my own business, what I learned was that, what I learned is, well I learned, yeah I just forgot my train of thought there. Mostly what I learned is that it's okay to be frequently wrong and then step up and ask for a lot of help. And then what happens is we do together what I can't do by myself. And magic, getting my way results in only one thing for me. Disappointment. Because I never dream big enough. I never allow magic. When I operate in a group of people with you, we come up with magical solutions that I couldn't have imagined. And when we do that together, I get to experience the love of people who care about things larger than themselves. The love of a bunch of people whose self-forget to be in a room together is pretty powerful stuff. And that's what I learned in here is that there's a part of me that's an individual that needs to be an individual and there's another part of my that needs belong to something larger than myself. And unless I have both of those components working, I'm pretty much not a very happy person. So about two years ago, or three, four years ago I get this phone call from Ray Massey who's chairing the Grapevine Nominating Committee. And by the way, he's going through a lot of changes right now in case you haven't noticed. And he called me up and he's like can we put your name in for trustee for the Gravevine? And I'm thinking, sure. Doing his job, just collecting his resumes, no problem. you know and he said looked at me and the next thing comes on the phone is can you be here September 19th for an interview? And I'm like oh my god I'm on the short list. So I flew in, I did the interview and I got picked and I walked in in 2009 and the grapevine had been losing money for 14 years. I'm sure everybody's heard the grapevines are in a lot of trouble. The grapevine is in a horrible trouble. A grapevine is oh my God it's catastrophe. But I'm looking at I'm a business guy. I just look at things a little differently than some people, and I looked at it and I went, so we've lost $1.7 million on $40 million in revenue in 15 years because, let's see, we missed the baby boomers. We missed the print, the demise of print, and we missedthe rise of the Internet. Hmm. That's a 4% problem over 15 years because, well, AA has a tendency to surrender to the future late and slow and sometimes we don't like change but what I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous is that pain is rarely related to me needing to change. Pain is almost always related to change that has already occurred, usually called growth, that I have not accepted and relished and put into my life. So when I'm in pain, it's not because there's something wrong. It's usually because there's something right that I haven't recognized. And so when I'm going through this and we sat down to have a group conscience, and this is the one thing that I love about the way Alcoholics Anonymous works, is we don't have an... AA doesn't have a central point of authority. We don't deal well with it anyway. So we turn one of our greatest weaknesses into a huge strength. We are completely decentralized and I'm sitting in that board and we had to ask some questions. What I'm learning through the service structure is that when I'm having troubles finding answers, it's time to pray for different questions. And the question we had to ask was not how do we make money? The question we had to ask what's the grapevine look like four years from now if we don't make changes? And I got to be part of a group that had that discussion. And that group had that discussion and they came back and they said it is dishonest to walk up to the general service board and pretend like a $40,000 budget deficit budget is going to help three four years from now we don't get to punt that problem down the road and so we made some changes and by the way if you think Alcoholics Anonymous deals with change well come talk to me but the one thing that I want to make really clear about all that stuff is is we have the temerity within our fellowship we have The Strength Within Our Fellowship to walk through all this Alcoholics Anonymous has been around for a really, really, really long time. And the reason it's been around for a real long time is because we have strength and we have conviction and we can make these adapts and this works for us. And at any rate, I wanted to hit a couple points in here, things that I've learned in the last probably four or five years. First of all, we're going through some media changes and I'm happy to answer questions. I don't want to take up a lot of time with a lot information. Information, by the way, is available about what the board does and what your corporations do and what happens at the conference. So Jimmy was talking about being a geek last night. You know, I'm a geek. I'm an nerd and a geek。 I mean, I read all 50 conference reports and created a spreadsheet with all this data in it from 1950 to 1999, which actually allowed me to sit and look at the 30, 50 years of history of the grapevine and go, well, it occurred to me that most of the people that show up at the confidence have never known the grapefine to be successful. because their period of sobriety is less than the grapevine's been in trouble. But until 1993, we were fine. So I just started looking at the turning points around that stuff. So what I'm getting to in all this stuff is if you – there's a lot of – the things that show up in my inventory as a result of being in service, and a lot OF it has to do with getting my way and dealing with conflict. And I have a thing that shows up in My Inventory a lot called how convenient. Oh, you're an asshole. How convenient. I don't have to talk to you. Service is political. How convenient. I don'T have to participate. You're critical of this. How convenient? I DON'T have to listen to you, and what I learned in the service structure is that I learned to put that stuff aside and what's really powerful for me, freedom is the ability to be who I am, where I am and authentic in all circumstances. Freedom for me comes from dealing with these conflicts and being able to sit and look at you in the eye and go, I was wrong. But when I'm not wrong, I get to go, I don't think I'm wrong. When somebody looks at me and they say, how come you think you're better than us? And I go, well, I don'T. Is there a possibility that maybe you think you're less than me? Now, I would have never been able to... And I don' t do that in a mean way. But if you're going to have authentic conversations with people, sometimes you have to sort that stuff out. You don't get to blame me for your crap. I mean, you can. And if I like you and I want to help, I might actually say something back. If I don't like you, I'll let you believe in it. It's okay with me. You want to hang yourself? Go ahead. I don'T care. And one of the things that I'm learning in here and I learned from my 12-step work and I think we cut ourselves off a lot. I do. From the growth that's possible because I'm afraid to be uncomfortable. I'm afraid to take a risk. I don't want you to not like me. I want to be strong. I want all that stuff. And I do, I do want that stuff, I have ambitions. But what I learned in here is that Henry, I think it was Henry David Thoreau or Emerson, one of them says that the unexamined life is not worth living. What I learned in here is that the unlived life is not worth examining. Sometimes the biggest risk that we take is not taking risk, is not taking the chance. How many times have you been in a room in a service thing or you've been in your own home group or you're been sitting around with somebody and you have an intuitive thought that says I ought to do this? And how many times do we dismiss that thought? And then how many time do we not follow through on it because we think we're crazy? And than how many have you guys actually followed that thought and it turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. Let me tell you, the thought of reading all 50 conference reports set me up to be ridiculed for a really long time by a lot of people. Don't you have a life? Well no not while I'm reading these I don't. But I'm expecting it to somehow pay off later. And those are the things that I learned in here and that I learned from you. I love Alcoholics Anonymous and I can't sit around and say I love AlcoholicsAnonymous a lot without feeling kind of corny and hokey. The truth is that I'm a spiritually grounded person. To me, I was in Kansas and somebody said, you're our spiritual speaker on Sunday. And I'm like, it's Saturday afternoon. I'm going, not unless something really strange happens between now and then. I really don't make a distinction between practical reality and spirituality. To me I think that spirituality ought to reek of common sense. spirituality be ought to be something we can touch and we can be tangible with and when i look at you and you're making a suggestion i don't have to jump through hoops to figure out whether i'm crazy or you're crazy i can listen and we Can come to something that actually works and as far as i can tell our program is based upon that kind of practical spirituality if you notice we give a lot of freedom for the fringes but the fringing exists so that we can find the middle and that's what i think we're doing in alcoholics anonymous right now it's actually a it's a huge pleasure to serve you as a, and I'm going to close on a couple of things. And one of the things that happened when I was going through this insecurity, and I am an insecure person, and if you are insecure, come talk to me. I have discovered in Alcoholics Anonymous and in life, insecurity is no impediment to great living. As a matter of fact, I have a friend of mine, his name is Jack Scott. I've known him for 24 or so years. I used to work for him, and I was talking to him about self-doubt and not knowing what I'm doing. And he looked at me one day, and he said, Don, have you ever considered that self-dubt is the root of humility? I was like, oh, my God. This is a man that's never drank. I mean, he doesn't drink. He's not an alcoholic. He's a really wise man. I really love this guy a lot. He's on in the program. And I thought, you know what? If you don't have the ability to doubt yourself, how can you be humble and be open-minded and listen to things? And on that note, I want to tell you how open-mindedness starts with me. Open-mindedess doesn't start with, oh, well, that's a really good idea. I think we ought to do that. Here's how open mindedness starts with me, no! You can't do that! We're going to die! That's how it starts. Now if I'm having successful with those steps, it ends up with, well, maybe I was wrong. Let's try that and see what really happens. So anyway, Anyway, so I just, what I really want to express in here is that we have, Alcoholics Anonymous is very powerful, very strong. We can take the risks that we need to to be available for the next generation. And about six years ago, I was doing a workshop up in Longmont. And I was talking about how I was in early sobriety. And I had chatted a little bit about, you know, I Was an Angry Young Man and I Was This and I was Just Bitter and Angry. and Deirdre came up to me afterwards and she said, Don, I was there when you sobered up. I sort of really don't remember you being angry. I sorta remember you being pathetic. And I thought, you know what? She's right. I rewrite my history to make myself feel better and the damn it, the thing that I notice that I have to watch in the service structure as I end up being in these positions where I'm given a lot of, temporarily given a lot of responsibility and authority, is not to try to make AA be the way that I thought it was when I got here. We have what we need. We're here. What I learned is my job is to be sponsored into the future by people that aren't even here yet. Let me put it in a different way. We don't have an international convention that we planned 12 years out that's going to be mostly volunteer staffed by people that are four years sober. So that means we're planning an event that's going to be mostly manned by people who are sober. People that are drinking today. They're like eight years from now. I'm like, I'm looking at these people and I'm going, let's see, I'm in Atlanta. I wonder how many of these people are going to be greeting me. I mean, at a bar. And so I just, for me it helps to keep all this stuff in perspective. I wake up in catastrophe with my mind going 100 miles an hour about all the stuff that could be wrong and it takes a jolt of reality and a jolts of spirituality and a jollts of somebody for me to remember what could be going right. I think it's a lot easier to tear a thing down from the outside than it is to build a thing up from the inside. How many times did I spend in my early sobriety tearing you apart on the outside to make you look like I felt inside instead of spending the time and the effort to build myself up on the inside and then give some of that to you? Now, the reason that I bring this stuff up is that I really believe that Alcoholics Anonymous not only saved my life, but it gave me strength that was not normally mine. And I owe everything to AlcoholicsAnonymous. And I wish I could take credit so that I could create the illusion of security for myself. But that's just not the case. And then I'm going to end up, the last thing, a couple things I've been learning lately which has been really great is if you can't do what you want, do what You can. Powerful words. It forms me, takes me, makes me start taking action. And the last think that's been happening is a friend of mine, I'm gone through a lot of changes. My business is in a lot trouble. I lost a house. I don't have a car. And one of the things that shows up is, how many times have I mistaken it not working out for you betrayed me? How many times am I just wrong in my assessment of life? And what I'm learning in Alcoholics Anonymous is that it's okay to be wrong. It's expected to be right. And it's really hard to get it right if you're never wrong because you never take any risk and you never take any chances. Your general service structure is in good shape. You have great delegates. We could always use more and better delegates. You never know where you're going to show up in here. Like I said, I was a guy that went in the back of a room and wrote software. If you would have told me one day I was going to get a phone call to come be a trustee on the grapevine board, I would have laughed at you. I'm a guy that was an introvert, that didn't like dealing with people, that was scared to death of himself. And 25 years later, 24 years later whatever it is, I have the pleasure of standing up and dealing with conflict in a way that's respectful, meaningful and produces something that will help future generations and my name does not have to be attached to it. That's freedom. And I think that's available for every one of us and I wish I could give that to you but I can't. All I can do is be there on the path while you find it for yourself and we help each other. And so I'm happy to answer any questions you guys have about anything that's going on in the office. Yeah, there's a lot of change, and yes, Alcoholics Anonymous surrenders to the future slow and late by choice. The problem is that we should not be expecting ourselves to catch up really fast and it not hurt. So we hurt for a little while, we get caught up, and then we move on. And it's a pleasure and a privilege to serve AlcoholicsAnonymous, and I hope some of you can join me on that. and with that I'm going to sit down and shut up and let us have the rest of our afternoon and day. Thank you