Isn’t it amazing how sometimes we feel as if we’re better than others? While we may not knowingly exhibit this kind of condescending attitude, the truth is that it often shows on our faces. Those of us in recovery should know better, but sometimes it takes a gentle reminder for us to recognize that we’re engaged in such behavior.

Why is it wrong to be smug, to feel as if we know something another doesn’t or to act as if we’ve got all the answers? For one thing, it isn’t very charitable. It doesn’t say much about our character or our humility. In fact, it says something we’d probably rather not have broadcast about. It says that we don’t really care about other human beings and their feelings, or that we’re too wrapped up in our own concerns.

Something else may be at work here as well. It may just be that we’re trying to compensate for our own feelings of inadequacy. Maybe what we’re doing is trying to project an outward display of having it all together when, in fact, we are feeling rather uncertain or fearful inside.

If any of this strikes close to home, don’t worry. There is something we can do about it. The first step is always the hardest, recognizing what we’re doing. The next step is to take action to remedy our behavior. This holds as true in how we deal with others as what we do to promote our own recovery through following through on working the Twelve Steps of recovery.

We may actually not be aware that we’re being condescending to others. One way to double-check this is to ask our trusted friends and family members to let us know how they think we’re portraying ourselves. We can also talk with our sponsor and get a read from his or her perspective on how we’re doing in this regard. Be sure to keep an open mind and be receptive to what we hear, however, since it may not be all that pleasant. We could, for example, hear some rather unpleasant descriptions of how we’ve spoken to and treated others that smacks loudly of condescension.

Remember the saying from the Bible, "Let he among you who is without sin, cast the first stone." Not that being condescending to others is a sin, but it certainly isn’t very nice. And none of us is without our own fallibility. We’ve all got some amend-making to do, something in our past for which we need to take responsibility. We’ve all hurt others as a result of our addictive behavior, something that we’re working hard to change in the present.

We can just as easily change our attitudes toward others at this point. In fact, it’s a very healthy sign that we do and shows that we’re serious about furthering our recovery.

How do we start? Here are just a few suggestions:

• First, make it a point that you’ll say only something nice to or about another person today. If you find yourself ready to blurt out something that’s less than kind, zipper your lip and don’t say it.
• Second, go through your to-do list of actions for today and see if there’s an opportunity to do something for another person that you’re not looking to get something out of. In other words, go out of your way to do or say something nice to another without looking for anything in return.
• Third, at the end of each day, look back over what’s transpired and make a mental note of where you could do better. Then, strive to do better the next time, the next day.
• Fourth, adopt a different mindset, one that has you seeing things, people and situations in a positive light instead of always looking for the negative. By changing your outlook, you will be less likely to scowl and look down on others. You’ll be working hard to put an end to your condescending ways.
• Fifth, practice makes perfect. The more comfortable you become being amiable with others, the easier it will be. Pretty soon, you will have incorporated a healthy new way of interacting with others that will benefit all concerned, most of all you.

How often have we heard someone say about another: "He (or she) has an attitude" and think that this is a bad thing? Maybe we wouldn’t if we heard it said just slightly differently, maybe along the lines of: "She (or he) has attitude." With the elimination of the preposition "an" comes a huge difference, and it’s one that bears looking at.

Whether we think about it consciously or not, we all have attitude. What we think about a person, place, thing or concept is our own personal world view of it, in other words, our attitude. We are each a product of our sum total of experiences, some good, some bad, some falling somewhere in between. What happens over time is that our thoughts – and attitude – become colored or shaped by everything that we have witnessed, said, done and thought, along with what we think, see and say about others’ actions.

When we talk about recovery, having attitude is a wholesome and good thing to cultivate. Not the negative attitude, but the positive one. Having a belief in ourselves that we are capable and committed to maintaining our recovery and doing everything humanly possible to sustain it is a very beneficial attitude to have.

It does, however, take some doing. We cannot just suddenly have attitude, simply because we say we want to. We need to nurture it, cultivate it, and, well, work at it.

How do we do this? Is it possible for each of us to do it? The answer to the second question is yes, unquestionably. As for how to cultivate our attitude, we have to first figure out what it is that we admire and want to incorporate in our own behavior. When we admire another individual, perhaps for his or her stellar example of solid recovery, for example, we can find ways to model our own behavior based on what we see that person doing. Not that we copy everything, or steal it, but that we are inspired by that person’s behavior and seek to uplift our own so that we may achieve positive results in our own recovery journey.

The important point to keep front and center is that building our positive attitude takes time. It won’t occur overnight. And even when we realize that we have attitude of a positive leaning, it doesn’t mean that we won’t encounter obstacles and challenges that task our outlook. Sometimes things happen that we’re not really prepared to deal with. When that occurs, we should seek help from our trusted advisors, our therapist, our loved ones and family members, talk with our sponsor and listen to what others have to say in the rooms. With support and encouragement, we will be able to navigate the tough times and get through uncertain times.

This will also help shape our attitude toward our prospects in recovery. And we definitely need to fashion ongoing goals and make action plans that we intend to follow in order to achieve those goals.

Looking at recovery as an ongoing process, knowing that it takes time to learn and grow and heal, it only makes sense that we would want to adopt the best possible attitude toward our future life in sobriety. So, bottom line: we all should definitely have attitude. Without it, we are shortchanging our recovery potential. With it, we can expect to build upon our successes with each passing day as well as have a reservoir of confidence for dealing with the unexpected challenges that come our way.

It’s a subtle difference, perhaps, but a big one nonetheless. So go to it. Have attitude, and make it a good one, a forward-looking, optimistic view of our future and our ability to make good choices and pave the way for a stronger foundation in recovery.

How important should we consider dreams in our everyday life, particularly those of us who are in recovery? For some, the idea of dreaming may seem, at first, to be a waste of time. After all, we’re so heavily invested in keeping our sobriety that we have to concentrate diligently on all the things we know we need to do in order to hang on to our recovery. At least, that’s what we may tell ourselves.

Others among us fancy nothing better than to dream about something other than our current reality. We don’t much like where we’re at. It’s too difficult, we’re often fearful and uncertain, or harbor no goals much farther than getting through today. Escaping in dreams is preferable to wallowing in self-pity or hopelessness.

But the truth is that all of us need to dream and dreaming is both helpful and energizing for us. When we are in early recovery, granted we are focused on becoming more grounded in the principles and this new way of life, one of sobriety that we have chosen for ourselves. That’s to be expected. But it doesn’t mean that we should eliminate dreams and dreaming from our daily activities.

We can experience little pauses during the day when we allow ourselves to envision a goal that seems desirable. Call this daydreaming, if you like, but it is an exercise that will prove beneficial to us as we move forward in recovery and begin to strategize and plan for things that we’d like to accomplish. So, dreaming during the day and not at night, is that what we’re advocating?

In a word, yes. It takes a conscious mind to take various considerations into account, including hopes and aspirations, even if those were submerged and ignored as a result of our addiction, our strengths and areas where we need to learn more skills, even occupations or scenarios that we’ve seen and want to emulate in our own lives. Sure, we can gain glimpses of a future in our nighttime dreams, and it’s true that these may inspire us during our waking hours, but when we are fully awake we have the cognitive ability to make plans to help further those dreams, to allow us to make progress toward achieving this or that goal.

In case we may think this is a lot of hooey, consider some of our nighttime dreams. While it is true that our subconscious takes a lot of our unresolved situations, things we might be worried about or a problem for which we cannot seem to find a solution and works on them while we’re asleep, how much of what we dream do we actually remember upon waking?

We can, of course, learn how to train ourselves to remember our dreams and this could be a useful exercise in helping us to branch out and sketch new goals for ourselves that would otherwise be considered a stretch, given our current capabilities and mind-set.

In reality, we need to do both: dream at night and dream during the day. There’s really no magic formula and no one way to do this that works equally well for everyone. All we need to do is give ourselves permission to dream, and then carve out some time when we’re not going to be disturbed for a period of 15 or 20 minutes or so to engage in our little hiatus of daydreaming.

Try to envision a scenario that we want for ourselves, and then allow our mind to take us there via a progression of action steps. What would we do first, get information, enroll in a course, meet new people, take a trip? Once we can see a goal and begin to arrange the logical steps to get there, our conscious mind will help us fill in the gaps and begin to turn a daydream into a reality. This may take some doing, to get used to, but it is well worth it for our future happiness and productivity in recovery.

If we’re waiting for life to reveal itself to us, we’re engaging in a holding pattern. Like a plane that’s prevented from landing, we’re going to find ourselves circling until we run out of fuel. If that happens, the plane has to make an emergency landing, with an uncertain outcome. If we run out of fuel, we may just give up, sabotaging our sobriety and thwarting our dreams and goals.

A great deal of happiness in life comes about as a result of how we look at life. Our world view can be either positive or negative or even somewhere in-between. But getting the most out of life is better accomplished by looking at the glass as half-full, rather than half-empty. In other words, if we train ourselves to see the positive even in negative situations, we’re more likely to arrive at proactive solutions to impediments or obstacles that come our way.

Taking a bad or seemingly impossible situation and turning it around is called creating an opportunity where none existed. It’s a technique that each of us can practice, starting with something small and manageable. Suppose we are in a job that is more or less a dead-end in terms of our advancement, getting more money or growth in the company. We could sit on the sidelines and lament our fate, putting in less and less effort, and getting to the point where we dread coming in each day. Or, we could try to find new ways to make a difference on our job, impress our boss, do something that creates a savings or is a better way to do the same task that strikes the higher-ups as notable. We can help co-workers with a tough project, ask our supervisor for additional duties or to be included in a task force or submit suggestions for improvement.

While there is no guarantee that our efforts will pay off, it will do two things. First, it gives us motivation to create and grow and possibly result in a positive outcome. Second, it is action that we take to create an opportunity where none existed.

How many opportunities do we find lying along the wayside each day? If opportunities were like apples falling from the tree, then there’d be some merit in scouring the fields beneath the trees to scoop them up. And, there’s no denying that there will be opportunities that we find in much this same way.

But not all opportunities are so readily apparent. Or, they may be opportunities better suited to someone else.

So how can we best approach creating our own opportunities? Go back a few paragraphs to creating our own opportunities. Another benefit of working to create our own opportunities is that the act of creation itself is inspirational and self-perpetuating. The more we create the more adept we become at creating. The more confident we become in our abilities to create, the more ideas we have that are creative. This is the kind of cycle that should definitely be appealing to us, for it requires nothing more than our desire to see things in a different light and to strategize ways to achieve or create certain goals that are not now apparent.

Think of the creative act as a way to bolster our self-confidence, to add to our reservoir of accomplishments, and to prove to ourselves that we can do more than just walking in a straight line. We can learn to see around the curves, to imagine a different destination or create one on the map that didn’t exist previously. In any case, creating our own opportunities is a great way to improve on our quality of life in recovery.

And no one knows better than us that when we feel good about ourselves, we are spurred on to tackle even more challenging tasks – any one of which may be an opportunity that we create for ourselves.

Wouldn’t we all like to be cheerful each and every day? Does such a way of greeting the world seem like an impossibility, especially if we feel like there isn’t a whole lot to be cheerful about? Actually, the idea that we can create our own cheerfulness may seem like an alien concept, but it really isn’t.

There is, however, a bit of work involved in making the transition from grumpy sourpuss to smiling (even if only on the outside) being. And, no, it doesn’t require years of counseling, shelling out a lot of money, or being a phony.

How?

There is a kernel of light somewhere inside each of us. This has nothing to do with being religious or maintaining a façade. Search down inside and try to uncover that little something that makes us smile, that lifts our hearts and perhaps brings tears of joy to our eyes. It could be the loving touch of our mother, who may have been long dead but still resides in our hearts. Perhaps it was the smell of the Christmas tree, the sounds of carolers, the delightful bright colors of wrapped presents and the anticipation of what they held.

If we are nature lovers, the verdant display during a walk through the recreational area or witnessing creatures large and small in a pristine wilderness park, fishing on a calm lake or casting a line in a trout stream may reacquaint us with what it feels like to have an uplifted spirit, an openness and willingness to embrace the world and life.

For some of us, however, trying to find this kernel of light is a difficult task. It may be buried deep beneath years of misery and pain or we may not have allowed ourselves to experience such light and thus thought we didn’t have any.

Think about what we do like. What is it that we do, whether on an infrequent basis or even every day? Is it the smell and taste of our first cup of coffee in the morning? Is it going to the movies once a month or seeing an old friend for dinner on occasion? Is it playing basketball or touch football with one of our children? How about painting or some craft that we like to engage in to calm our nerves and bring about a feeling of peacefulness and serenity?

These are all possibilities, all things we like to do that result in our feeling a bit better about ourselves and our place in the world. It isn’t a momentous occasion, nor does it have to be. We can be cheerful over the tiniest and most insignificant things, a word, a look, a sound and even a thought.

The good news is that once we find ourselves feeling in a good mood, if you will, we can learn how to extend this happy moment and pay it forward. We can offer a kindness to others and help bring a little light into their world as well. There’s also the multiplier effect. The more we do this, the easier it gets and the more often we’re able to find ourselves feeling cheerful.

When we find that our outlook is dour or we don’t look forward to doing a particular thing, we can train ourselves to take a moment to count our blessings. Maybe we need a slight breather before undertaking a certain task or action item on our recovery list. Think how good we feel when we have accomplished what we set out for ourselves as a goal. Take time to savor our successes. Allow the sense of self-esteem to grow within us and spread serenity within and around us.

All of life is comprised of opposites. As the child’s saying goes, "A frown is a smile turned upside down." We all have cheerfulness lurking somewhere within. Let’s stand on our head (figuratively, not literally) and turn that frown into a smile. We might find that we even like it being cheerful.