My name is Bryan Hullihen and I am in recovery from Alcoholism and Drug Addiction. When I began the recovery process this last time in May of 2012, after several years of previous failed attempts, my immediate goal was to simply get through each day without using drugs or drinking any alcohol. With sobriety as my daily goal I knew there were some things that I’d have to do each day to be successful which I did and my goal was achieved day after day and my length of sobriety started to add up. In the beginning of my recovery journey I didn’t understand how mental programming works which is why, over time, I began to slip into old behavioral patterns and started to let up on the daily practices that allowed me to get the early success that I had. One day I was hanging out with a guy that was explaining how he lives his life; the maxim by which he achieves his results and continues to grow in effectiveness and understanding. At the time I wasn’t thinking about how my patterns were starting to shift back towards another drink or drug use but this one simple idea opened up my life. This simple idea is what Charles Duhigg in his book “The power of Habit” calls a keystone habit. The one thing that, if changed, can unlock a tremendous amount of future growth and make all other desires fall within reach. This man told me that he doesn’t live by how he feels he lives by what he knows. That’s it, that’s all he said and I could see clearly how I was living by how I felt and how that was going to kill me. I could see how I was no longer doing the things that I needed to be doing at the level required to go further in my development due to my living by how I felt. That simple idea saved my tail more times than I can think of and I began each day for a while by recognizing how little I felt like getting out of bed, going to work out, hitting a recovery meeting, being of service to others, or going to work. In the beginning of my recovery process I didn’t feel like doing any of those things but after being given this direction I could see how I knew I needed to do these things and I simply did them. So those were the big things in life that I feel most of us will do even in a perfunctory sense just to maintain survival but what about the little things? What about the things like morning meditation, writing gratitude lists or strategizing about our day in order to get the most out of the experience of life? Those little things that are easy to write off as not important and easy to say that we don’t feel like doing them? Well those are the little things that we must be aware of and the things that we must learn to make a regular part of our lives. Those little things that contributed to our current success, however limited, are the things that we must continue to do or our old programming begins to take over and we end up back where we started or worse. So the solution is awareness of our behaviors and the idea that many times we may not FEEL like dong something but we do it anyway because we KNOW that if we don’t we will never experience the positive change we are looking for.
Thank you all so much for your continued support and I look forward to reading your comments. These writings inspire me to go further in my development and allow me to be of service to as many people as possible. I hope you found this article helpful and begin today with living by what you know.
Sincerely,
Bryan Hullihen 