Back to: KCB Recovery MasterClass
Transcript:
In this session, I’d like to talk about paying attention to areas you do well in and measuring them. By measuring them, you can understand better what you are succeeding in and what you can work on more. Remember, failure is not a bad thing unless you’re giving up.
So how do you measure success? One way of measuring success is by measuring how many days you’ve been sober.
Now, If you tell yourself that you’re gonna take 30 days off and you do great for 3 weeks but then one day in the 3rd week you use, drink, or smoke, or whatever the problem is, then you go back to the drawing board, you’re back to square 1, you’re back to ground level.
Now if you get back on the horse instead of giving up, and you spend the last week sober, then you had 7 days of being sober. It’s less than what’s expected, but it’s still better than giving up.
Measuring the number of sober days is not the only way to measure success. You can measure your success by percentage. Now if you tell yourself that you’re going to be sober for 30 days, and you do great for 3 weeks, and after that you fell off for 2 days, then you got back on track, then at the end of the 30 days, you were sober 28 days out of 30 days. That’s a 93% success rate which is pretty great.
If you measure only by consecutive sober days instead of by percentage, it seems as if you’re not making much strides. So it depends on how you measure your success.
You can also measure success by how many drinks you have. If you are drinking 8 glasses per day and you say for the next 30 days you want to reduce it to 2 glasses per day, and you do great for 2 weeks, and after the 2nd week, some days instead of having 2 glasses per day, you have 3 glasses per day, that’s still success because you are not drinking 8 glasses per day. I think you would agree that 3 drinks are better than 8 drinks. You have reduced your drinking by 63% when you have 3 drinks per day, and by 75% when you have 2 drinks per day. Even if by the 2nd week you started to have 3 drinks instead of 2 drinks per day, you still achieved 50% of your goal by drinking 2 drinks per day in the first 2 weeks, and even after the first 2 weeks, you were still drinking less than 8 drinks per day.
Now here we have introduced 3 different ways of measuring success rather than using the all or nothing method. Now you can use these methods to start measuring your success and identifying room for improvement. You can try out all 3 methods, write down your results and compare them.
We also gave you the life score sheet tool that you can use to track and measure the different areas of your life. Use that tool as well to measure your success and identify areas that you can improve.