I can hear the howls now – I’m so tired of hearing about patience! There’s a reason you hear it; other people have gone through the same thing. It isn’t an exaggeration to say many of us wreaked havoc for years, even decades. To expect the wreckage to be cleared way in a month, a year, or even two years is unrealistic. It’s important to remember that time goes by whether you are changing or not, so may as well change so you can look back in a few years and say, "Wow. I am a different person."

Patience is called a virtue for a reason. Without it, we can rarely accomplish anything substantial in our lives. The big things take work, dedication, and time.  No one becomes an accomplished musician by practicing a few times; they practice every day for years. Some of you may have heard about the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book talks about how some people have become exceptional in their field, and what led them there. One element was present for all of them: 10,000 hours.

10,000 hours? That’s a lot of hours!  But that is what his research found – most people who become very accomplished and successful got there by dedicating 10,000 hours to the skill or talent, whether it be Bill Gates with computers or The Beatles playing in the basements of pubs.

Now there are some people who seem to exceed with a lot less effort, but they are exceptions. Some people might become accomplished in a lot less than 10,000 hours because of some sort of innate talent, but the number is based on looking at super achievers.  I’ve seen some bloggers say things like, the Doors didn’t do 10,000 hours of practice, but can you really compare the success of the Doors to the success of the Beatles? Not very many bands achieved the Beatles success and longevity. There are only a handful of Bill Gates out there.

So, you don’t have to practice 10,000 hours necessarily, but you do have to practice to get good at something, even if that something is living life with balance and joy.  It takes patience to practice something for years before it pays off, but isn’t it worth the effort?

Being passive-aggressive is a common way for people who don’t like confrontation to try to manipulate the outcome of a situation. They don’t want to deal with the conflict head on, so they do something “passive” to change or sabotage the situation.  Some great examples:

Say an employee agrees to do a certain job, but “messes up” and acts as if they just didn’t know how to do it right. You know they did – they just didn’t want to do it in the first place, so by messing it up they make you look bad so you won’t ask them again.

You tell your husband he needs to do his share of the laundry. He takes all your  hand-washable sweaters he’s seen you hand wash for years and pops them in the washing machine turned to super hot water. When he sees all the shrunk sweaters he tells you he had no idea and sheepishly apologizes:  I’m so sorry – I guess I’m just not cut out for doing laundry.

You change lanes to speed up and pass a slower driver. He speeds up when you change lanes. When you slow down because you want to get back in that lane, he slows down too.

You see a person getting into their car and you want that parking spot. You pull into position. They see you and get in their car and proceed to take eons to check their rearview mirror, situate themselves, fasten their seatbelt, find their favorite radio station, check the air conditioner vent angles, while a line piles up behind you.

Your wife is upset with you because you forgot to do something she asked you to do three times, nicely.  You come home to watch Monday Night Football (as you do every Monday during football season) on your widescreen high-definition television to find her and 10 of her friends watching a movie on that same TV.  She smiles and says, “Hi Honey! Isn’t this great! We decided to make Monday night girls’ movie night and look how many were able to make it!   Don’t worry – I’m taping your game so you can watch it later.”

I’m sure everyone has their stories of passive-aggressive ploys by loved ones, kids, spouses, friends, or family members.  I remember reading a study once that people actually take longer to get off a pay phone or leave a parking spot IF THEY KNOW SOMEONE IS WAITING FOR THEM.  Geez Louise! It’s a passive-aggressive world!

Needless to say, this method of dealing with life’s issues is hardly the recipe for quality relationships.  Most people get a sick feeling in their gut when they realize they are being “punished” – which is essentially the goal of passive-aggressive behavior.  Being direct is pretty hard for some people, but life lived honestly and with integrity just feels a lot better than life lived like a perpetual game of gotcha.

Confidence can be an admirable quality. We tend to trust people who seem confident in their ability to do their job. If our doctor seemed nervous right before he started a surgical procedure, we would be very nervous about his ability to do it right. There is a line between confidence and cockiness. When you are cocky you take unnecessary risks. Cockiness is about strutting about proving your value. Confidence is a more quiet character, something we grow toward when we work hard to gain knowledge about a subject or skill. Cocky people tend to be off-putting, but quietly confident people seem to draw the trust of others.

Self-confidence is often the last thing we exude in early recovery.  Many of us were pretty cocky when we were out there drinking.  We took a lot of chances. We acted indignant if anyone challenged us.  We blamed a lot of other people when work, relationships, or just life wasn’t working out the way we thought it should.

If you are confident that you are doing the right things to stay sober today, that’s a good sign. If you are cocky about it, not so good.

But how do you move from cocky to confident?

For me, cockiness is a direct result of insecurity.  When I was terrified of being shown up, exposed as a fraud, or in any way shown not to be perfect, I reacted with fear.  The over-reaction is to be cocky and pretend you know more than you do.

So for me the first step to confidence was being okay with mistakes.  It was okay to be wrong, but more important, it was okay for other people to know I was wrong.  My self-esteem had to stop being based on an unattainable perfection and instead based on the fact that I worked hard and I diligently focused on being a better person, friend, employee each day.

OK this is a BIRTH birthday (grin).  There was a time I would get really depressed on my birthday, usually because I would do what I like to call a Sledgehammer Inventory.  This is quite different from a 12-step inventory.  It is, in fact, exactly what it sounds like – a sort of beating down of everything I did so that I felt like a complete failure.  It meant skipping all the good stuff and making the bad stuff even worse than it actually was.  It was like a day of reckoning where I was in front of the angry townspeople (all me) who were ready to tar and feather me for my failings.

I still get a little contemplative this time of year – it’s more about a taking of temperature than a beat-down these days.  I try to honestly look at what I’m doing with my life and figure out what is going well, what isn’t going so well, and what might be better given up in the coming year (really, really not going well).

I’m not usually an advocate of special days being resolution days – I think it’s better to make resolutions when you recognize you need to change something, rather than pile them on Jan 1, birthdays, anniversaries etc.  It’s a lot more likely that you will change something if you aren’t arbitrarily setting a date to start a usually insurmountable list of dos and don’ts.

During those days, I used to avoid birthdays. I didn’t want people to celebrate my birthday because I didn’t think I deserved even recognition of my birth.  Pretty low feeling.  I think I first began to realize how silly this was when I recognized how much I liked recognizing people on their birthdays. I loved doing something special or surprising them with a really unique present.  And those people seemed to genuinely appreciate the recognition.  They, I realized, were normal. (haha – normal – that’s a concept!)

So today I’m not overly obsessed with my birthday, but I’m comfortable with someone doing something nice for me. I don’t cringe and try to avoid it.  As small as that might seem to some, for me, it was a big step forward because I no longer saw myself as my own personal, perennial whipping boy.

So I say it again: Happy birthday to me.

Ever had an overwhelming feeling that you just thought you couldn’t stand another minute, only to have it disappear soon after?  Most of us have. In the moment something feels intolerable and just too much to take, then an hour, a day, a week later, we can’t figure out why we thought it was so awful.

Sometimes you just have to wait out feelings.  You have to trust that the feeling will pass.

Cravings are like this too – cravings typically pass within 20 minutes. It’s unfortunate that some people don’t wait out that 20 minutes and act on the impulse.  However, experience shows that they indeed do pass if you wait them out.  That’s why some people find it helpful to focus on 1 minute at a time rather than 1 day at a time.

Feelings pass too. Even feelings that make you feel like you are going to die. First of all, you aren’t going to die from feelings;  second, feelings are not facts. They are feelings.

One thing many of us have in common is that we tend to really believe our feelings.  It’s all well and good to be in touch with how you feel. It’s quite another to base all your actions on feelings, because frankly, sometimes your feelings are false.

Sometimes it’s good to do a “feeling read” to get perspective on how feelings do change over time.  Try this. This about a time in the past when you had an overwhelming feeling that you just thought was so painful you didn’t know if you could take it.  Maybe it was the end of a relationship or some betrayal you experienced.  Try to find one that you experienced really dramatically but now have little or no reaction to it.

Kind of amazing. Back when you first had that feeling you likely thought you would never feel okay again.  Now you can think about that exact same event and the feelings are gone or pretty well muted.  You might have a little reaction, but no doubt it is far less than you had at the time the painful experience happened.

What are the consequences if you don’t recognize in the moment that you can wait out feelings?  If you hold on to the irrational belief that you will never get over something – will always feel it this intensely – you put yourself at risk for drinking again.  For some people, this belief that they will never feel better leads to suicide.  It’s absolutely critical to mental health that we fully accept that bad things happen, we are going to feel really bad sometimes, but those feelings will fade with time and we will survive them.