I had another big sporting weekend. I had teams playing in different sports and with different expectations. My wife often reminds me that everyone isn’t as into sports as I am, but bear with me, I’ll try to make this quick.
Last year my English football team, Arsenal, started the season out at the bottom of the league. Literally zero wins, zero goals, nine goals against after three games…the worst team in the league. This year we are sitting at the top of the league after nine games played. It is the proverbial “worst to first” scenario. How did we do it? Lots of things came into the picture, least of which were changing a few players, changing our attitudes, and a lot of hard work.
Amazon filmed an “all access” documentary on the team last season and it was released this fall at the start of the new season. It was very eye opening to see behind the scenes. The massive change in the team looks rather similar to the change I see in people who go through Celebrate Recovery. Changing players looks a whole lot like changing the people that we hang out with. They same players will often yield the same results, and the same company will often put us in the same situations. If we want a different life, we need to do life with different people.
We also saw changes in attitudes among our players. Our manager rooted out the malcontents and ne’er do wells and replaced them with people who wanted to focus on getting a job done. If I approach my recovery with the same attitude that got me into recovery, I’ll never change my life. The same stuff will usually yield the same stuff!
A final thing we saw in the documentary was the level of work that the team puts during training sessions. Going through a Step Study, writing that fearless and searching inventory, making those amends, all of that and more are the hard yards that need to be put in if we want our recovery to be successful.
My life is demonstrably better than it was before I started on my recovery journey. Before recovery I was doing everything I could to stay out of prison and now I spend most of my time trying to get into prison! I sleep well at night and I don’t panic when I see cops and courthouses. Last season the rest of the league wrote us off as done and dusted. They all looked down the table at us. Now, the only thing above us is the title of the league. We may stumble, and we may drop down a few places, but for now, we are flying high and soaring with the eagles. Every year starts a new set of challenges with a new set of promise. Don’t let yesterday become concrete shoes that hold you in the mud. Put your head down and…
–Rise Up!!
Minister Of Mocha 