Marty: Welcome to another exciting episode of the Leadership Coaching Podcast. Thanks for being with us. We're learning and a lot out of this conversation. We hope you are too. Today's topic. Is recovery

Bill: Yeah, different.

Marty: and I, you know, and I would say that you have, um, more familiarity and, um, cred, so to speak in in this area than I do. I. I am in a recovery program, but I wouldn't say that I've recovered. I'm in, I'm still baking.

Bill: Hmm. Still, by that you mean still recovering. Do

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: you mind if I, if I ask you a little bit about that?

Marty: Of course not.

Bill: What do you mean when you say that you're recovering?

Marty: Well, see, this is why I wanted you to do the talking.

Bill: Well,

Marty: I don't know that that term has never quite ka ching for me. Um, I, I mean, I guess I can sort of understand, like I'm recovering from a family of origin dynamics. You know, they're not present anymore and yet we continue to live them. And so there's a recovering from that impression that this, you know, the way mom and dad are, the way all men and women are, or the way the world is. So there's that. Um, but I, the only reason I hesitate is because. My addiction is more to a thinking pattern, I think, you know, the thinking patterns that I created to survive as a child. And I don't know that, that they, you know, that you ever just completely Let them go. Well, maybe that's the same thing with an addiction. I'm not sure. Um, probably, but the, it still comes up and, but I can process it quicker. I can see what's really true sooner. And so I don't. Maybe I should, maybe I should call that recovery. I'm not sure, but it doesn't feel like recovery. It feels like I've still got the disease and I'm just, I know better how to deal with it.

Bill: Yeah.

Marty: So I don't know what you, as a more experienced one on this topic, what do you think of

Bill: Let's acknowledge why, why, why are you saying that I'm more experienced at this?

Marty: Well, because you've been in, um, recovery programs longer and have come, come a much longer way than I have.

Bill: Okay. I don't know. I really don't know. I'm not saying this out of any kind of a facade of humility. I really don't know that I am more, have more cred when it comes to recovery than you do or not. I know that I'm probably more interested in talking about it. Uh, because I'm working with a lot of clients that are, that are in recovery

Marty: Uh huh.

Bill: in fact, I would consider that the work that I'm doing with all of my clients is in, is in, is the work of recovery. Although they may not be aware that that's what we're covering. In other words, clients may not have come to me and said, Bill, I'm in recovery and I want you to support me in that. Many of my clients come to me with, with various reasons that they would not categorize as recovery. For example, I want to, I want to improve in my career. I want to have better relationships. I want to find a way to find work, work life balance. Just a few examples of what people bring to coaching. And ultimately, because I use the IFS model and they come to me because they know I use the IFS model and they, they like IFS. My clients have already learned a little bit about internal family systems. They, many of them have found me by Googling IFS coach. Or internal family systems practitioner and what what they find is that I'm a certified IFS practitioner and then I'm a results coach and so they reach out and we have a conversation and that conversation usually goes, if you know, along the way where I'll ask this question, if coaching helped, how would you know that's when they'll say, I would know because my career would improve or my relationship would improve or I'd have more life balance work life balance.

Marty: Well, well, in that sense, and maybe in a broadest sense of all, as soon as somebody's born, they're in recovery because we're recovering that that state of absolute divine perfection, where, you know, soon as we're born, we're working toward getting back to recovering ourself with a capital S. I mean, you could

Bill: that slightly differently, but very close to what you just said. I think that we are in that state of perfection when we're born. Yes.

Marty: I do, too. That's my point. And then life starts to happen. Yeah.

Bill: let me throw some definitions, or at least my understanding of what these words mean when I use them.

Marty: Mm hmm.

Bill: Let's start with the word shame. So I define shame, and I may have mentioned this recently in another episode, but I define shame as the idea that I'm anything less than perfect and whole. So if that's what shame is, and I am born now and then face something in my life that feels challenging. And maybe even traumatizing, but, but in any case, it's too much for me to process myself without the help of an attuned, loving, trusted caregiver, then I got to make stuff up just to survive it. The scary, challenging, traumatizing thing just happened to me. Even if I don't have language, I, I'm having the experience of it. I think we have, um, a built in, um, tendency to survive. Like just biologically, we're going to do what we need to do to survive. That, that includes physical reactions to situations as well as mental, emotional, psychic reactions to what's happening. And so if I haven't got someone around saying, Hey, no, it's okay. You're all, right. You're all right. This wasn't your fault. You didn't cause this. Yeah, that was painful. That was scary. And we're okay. If I don't have that, then I'm making up. I don't know if I'm okay. I don't know if we're all right. I don't know if it's going to be all right. Um, and so I, given I don't understand and this thing happened, I don't want it to happen again. Then I'm, or this thing is happening and I want to stop and get it to stop. I got to make up that somehow I'm responsible for it. I somehow have causes and the easiest thing to do is just to conclude in some way, shape or form. There's gotta be something wrong with me that is making this happen. The moment I have that thought. I have taken on a shame identity, and in my opinion, that is what there is to recover from as you said just now. What there is to recover. Is that divine as you said? How did you say it? Divine. I, I would, I'll just say, I'll combine the words I heard from you with what? The way I say it, the divine, authentic self capital.

Marty: Mm hmm. All right.

Bill: So now life goes along and it might have started with just a little tiny morsel of shame, but shame seems, seems to kind of. And build on itself, given that this is wrong with me. Apparently, this is wrong with me too, and maybe that's what's wrong with me too. And now life becomes a series.

Marty: Also, if I could interrupt briefly, I was because it just came from a conversation where this came up. I do. When I act out of shame, I create more distance or difference and problems. And so then I can also feel ashamed about that.

Bill: Well, not, yes, and not only that, but when you are feeling shame and act from that shame, and create problems out of that, it's just more evidence that what you've decided, your theory about what, There's something wrong with me. It's now it feels more true. And that's what a belief is. So a belief is an idea that maybe is our favorite, most current idea. That, that serves to explain something that needs to be explained. And when that belief is tested, and it's tested every single time we begin to feel that pain again or that discomfort, or the fear of, of, of, the fear of experiencing it again, the belief is actually reinforced. We create the evidence that proves to us that our theory is accurate. Now it lives in us like it's the truth. It's not a belief anymore. It's not a theory. It's the truth. There is something wrong with me. Now it lives in me like it's the truth. And my flavor of, there's something wrong with me, it might be different than yours or somebody else's, it might even be different than what it's going to be next month for me. But it's still, there's something wrong with me. And, and that shame identity has to be managed. So that's the next layer of this too. This is the, here's the next layer of what there needs to be recovered. Or the, of what we need to recover from. And that would be the facade that we take on to make sure that the world doesn't figure out that there's something wrong with us.

Marty: Uh huh.

Bill: I believe, and it feels like the truth now, that there's something wrong with me. So given that truth. I'd better do something about it to improve so that that's not wrong with me anymore. Maybe I can fix myself, hide, make sure that while I'm fixing myself, nobody figures out that there's something wrong with me. And then that's going to lead to feeling like a fraud or an imposter.

Marty: So, so we have this initial shame, this idea that we're less than whole and complete, that we get from interacting with the world. Mm hmm. And then on top of that, we've been managing ourselves in some way, like to, to compensate for that, um, less than wholeness. And so then there's that to recover from as well, not only from the initial shame, but from this pattern of managing

Bill: Yes. And why we need to recover from that is because over time, just as the shame based belief becomes, feels like it's true to us, the strategies and behaviors that we engage in, Nora referred to these as survival mechanisms. A few weeks ago when we were talking to her, um, those behaviors and strategies that we employ to make sure that we hide from the world what we are afraid is true about us, begin to feel like that's who we are. I am either, in one, in any given moment, I, if you asked me who I was and I answered honestly, I might have to say, well, I am, Someone who has a lot wrong with me. And here, here's what I think is wrong with me. But I'm not gonna honestly answer. I can't. I can't afford to. As long as I'm stuck in this shame identity and false identity, my whole imperative is to keep this a secret. So I think of myself either as what I'm ashamed of, or I think of myself as who it is I think I have to be in order that you not find out what is wrong with me. In either

Marty: And just a footnote for those of us who Our listeners who might be reading my books, I refer to this phenomenon as the secret identity, precisely because we try and keep it secret. It's our identity. We identify with it. That's me. That's what I do all the time. And I keep it a secret. So that's why I in, in my, in my coaching that is referred to as your secret identity,

Bill: while all of this misunderstanding and confusion is going on and running our lives for us and running who we think we are for us, we experience great loss. Every single day, we find ourselves operating in life, in life, having lost access to innate resources that we can only access when we Come from who we actually, truly, when we

Marty: which is to say when we're recovered,

Bill: say it again,

Marty: that is that to say when we're recovered,

Bill: we could say it that way. I, I, I think recovery is an ongoing process and in moments there's, there's manifestations. There's evidence that I have recovered some of these resources. And I would also say that gradually, now this, I've seen this in my own life and I've seen it in the life of my clients and many other people that I know. This gradual. Increasing access to these innate resources builds, becomes more predominant, and it's on a gradient where the old survival mechanism The identification with shame and the identification with who it is I think I have to be what I refer to as my false identity. That begins to recede into the background while who I actually am, my true authentic self, begins to become more predominant. And as that happens, I have greater and greater access to the resources that innately are built right into me. And as that happens, a big, a beautiful momentum begins to take over. And those parts that still, those parts of me that still identify with the shame, or with the job of hiding or managing the shame, now begin to recognize, oh, there's something different that can be happening here. This isn't just about survival.

Marty: Right. It's about being liberated in this body,

Bill: But part.

Marty: liberated, liberated from those, from not only from the idea that you're anything less than whole and complete, but also from the job of managing all of that.

Bill: Yes,

Marty: I mean, that's, that's the Eastern tradition, the, in Hinduism, this is called moksha, liberation.

Bill: beautiful. Now, there's two things I'm noticing. I've got kind of tethered. I got myself tethered to because I want to make sure we stay connected to these ideas before, you know, before the end of this episode. One is what the hell does this have to do with leadership? And two is what the hell does this have to do with what we typically think of as recovery? So I want to make sure we talk about both those things.

Marty: Great. I mean, um, and this came up, uh, maybe one way, just suggesting you had something going on in your own life that had you say, you know, I've been thinking about recovery. And if you want to relate those two things through that experience, that would be maybe, um, illustrative.

Bill: Yeah, well, before I begin, let me just say that this feels, now feels, the conversation feels a little more dangerous now.

Marty: Ooh.

Bill: And so let me explain. I hope that I can explain in a way that you'll understand why would the conversation now feel more dangerous. So that's going to require that I'm going to tell a little bit of my story and I've written a lot about this so that people that follow me have maybe already, already read about this. Um, I, and I'm post these to medium and to Reddit and to my blog, but let me just talk about it and maybe in a, in a condensed way that's efficient. Let's just say it this way. When I was 27 years old, I was afraid that I was going to lose my wife. We at that time. Had been, um, together for, uh, eight years. We'd been married for five, beautiful woman, mother of my two children, who were two and three years old when I was 27. seemed to be dropping signals that she thought I had a drinking problem. Some of the friends that she met, because she had started going to Al Anon, a 12 step program for people that live with alcoholics. Now why would she go to a meet? I was the only adult she was living with. Why would she go to Al Anon? So there's the clues, right? Uh, she started hanging out with people from Al Anon and from Alcoholics Anonymous and she would have them over and one day one of them asked me, would I like to go to a meeting with him? He apparently thought I had a problem with alcohol as well. Which to me was just bizarre. Insane. I do not have a problem. I, I can point to a lot of people that have problems with alcohol. It certainly isn't me. because I was concerned about losing my wife, I went with him to the meeting, and shockingly, I liked it. I liked what happened in the meeting. What I liked was that there were people talking about things. In a way that felt completely transparent, open, and honest to me. Now, since then I've realized that even in these 12 step meetings, people bullshit. But for me, it was such a deeper, so much deeper, so much more transparent, and I was really attracted to it. And kind of shocked. Like, wow, are you saying that out loud? Are you really saying that for all of us to hear, including me at the first time I've ever been to one of these meetings? You've never seen me before. And you're going to tell me that about yourself. Oh, my God. I love this. And and so I kept going back. And I start marking X's on my calendar, because I'm going for the chips, man. I want the 30 day chips. One of the things that happens in these meetings is the chairperson saying, Hey, has anybody got 30 days of sobriety? And they make a big deal out of it. So I think, I want some of that big deal. So I make it all the way to 30 days and I get my chip. And then I realize, I still feel completely crazy inside. I've been sober 30 days. I'm kind of hoping that if I'm sober long enough, I won't feel crazy inside anymore. But not only did it not make me feel less crazy, in a way, I felt even more crazy. Because I didn't have the alcohol to numb. I hadn't had any alcohol in my system or any other mood altering drugs in my system for 30 days, and I'm kind of crazy and my new addiction now has to be meetings. I got to go somewhere to feel better. And so I got to do something to feel better and nothing works. Like a pack of cigarettes over the course of an hour at an AA meeting and 13 cups of coffee. All right, maybe half a pack, but I mean in those days and we would smoke in public places and This was gonna be a condensed version and now it's turning into a long story. Let me let me condense it a little bit So I kind of repeat rinse and repeat rinse and repeat for 20 years Lots of meetings, do all the things that I'm supposed to do. I'm really a 12 stepper, man. And in those 20 years, I've also got two years of exposure to adult children of alcoholics. And, um, and then I discover Byron Katie and the discovery of Byron Katie helped me to take the focus from the outside comparing my, my insights to everybody else's outsides to only looking at my insights. Um, and that began what I considered to be my true recovery. I was sober for 20 years, but true recovery began for me at that point. Now, I didn't understand what you and I just talked about to open up this episode today. At that time, I didn't get that, that I, that who I really was, was perfect and whole. I didn't get that I had a shame identity. I didn't get that I had a false identity and I didn't know that I had a true self. All I knew was that who I thought I was didn't quite measure up and and that life was producing even as a 20 year sober man who attended a lot of AA meetings and did all the things that I thought I was supposed to be doing in AA. Had a lot of anxiety, a lot of depression, a lot of fear, worry.

Marty: I just want to, I don't want to interrupt, but I just want to underline, sober is not recovery.

Bill: That's right. That's right.

Marty: You can not be drinking, but not have shed the idea that you're anything less than whole and complete.

Bill: And we used to joke about that in, in AA. In that first 20 years, we, we, the equation, the math for us was because we're not working a good enough program. I'm still miserable. I have anxiety. I have fear. I have depression. I'm making stupid mistakes and, and decisions because I'm a dry drunk. I'm not working a good enough program. We would joke about it and say, and I'm so dry, I'm a fire hazard. And then we would, you know, go get some more help and go to more meetings and ask for more sponsorship and work more steps and go back and work the previous step again.

Marty: No more service.

Bill: Yes, just work and work and work and work. By the way, let me just say, I am so grateful to Alcoholics Anonymous. Without AA, without going to that first meeting, I wouldn't have realized that I had a problem with alcohol. There is no way. And without that fellowship, there is no way that I would have gotten and stayed sober, even though I only did it for the first 30 days to get the chip. To get the, to get the 30 day chip and get the hug and be congratulated, just be acknowledged. I didn't have a lot of that in my life, you know. Uh, so, I went there for the wrong reasons. I went to AA to save my marriage, not to get sober. And I stayed in AA, not, not because I wanted to improve my life, but because I wanted to get that 30 day chip and the, and the acknowledgement. And that theme kind of continued to rotate through. I just, I turned my new addiction into going to meetings. And I stayed sober, but at 20 years I still had anxiety and depression, um, and finally found a method, and it wasn't within the 12 steps that helped me to go inside and actually begin to recover. As you say, recovery began. I began to recover my true self because I learned a way to question what I was accepting as the truth. That being those thoughts that I had that caused suffering for me

Marty: Right.

Bill: year that was for me to discover that I could change, I could have a say in how much I suffered. Seriously, it felt like it was at the mercy of the world and circumstances and conditions. And I'm 45 years old, Marty, and for the first time, I realized there's something I can do. I got my hands on the lever of my own suffering for the first time in my life.

Marty: yeah, well, that's, um, it's, this is a very fundamental piece of being human, you know, this recognition that suffering is optional, really. I don't think most people have that. There aren't really working with the understanding, you know, the, and where it comes from, just, just to summarize. And then I don't want to, I want to. Not keep you from going on it From thinking that the way things are is wrong that it things shouldn't be that the way they are That now you're in a suffering relationship to reality.

Bill: Beautifully said. Very similar to what Byron Katie, who was my new mentor at that time, at 20 years of sobriety, she became my new mentor, would say, anytime I have a thought that argues with reality, I suffer, but only 100 percent of the time. Exactly what she would say.

Marty: He's hilarious Mm

Bill: After I'd been using the Byron Katie method for a while, I realized that the math actually can be turned around too. That if I'm suffering, it's because I'm believing a thought that argues with reality. So, Let me go sniff out what is the thought and let me explore that thought using the Byron Katie method and see if I can get to what's actually true. And that's where the liberation, as you said, the freedom would come from. Now, I didn't have an intellectual understanding of what was happening and why it was happening and why it was working. All I knew is that it was working. So I kept doing it. And I didn't just keep doing it. I did it like an alcoholic would do it. I did it full bore. Pedal to the metal. No brakes. I mean, I was doing Byron Katie every day with anybody that would do it with me. For 15 years. And my life kept getting better, and better, and better, and better. Now I was still going to AA, and when someone would come to me after a meeting and say, Hey Bill, man. You're not talking the same way everybody else is around here. I'm, I really like what you had to say. I'm talking from Byron Katie. I'm not using the language of Byron Katie. I'm trying to honor and respect what's happening in the AA meeting, but I'm really not talking about the steps. I'm not talking about the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 steps. I'm talking about the realizations that I'm getting because I'm doing my inner work. People recognize that and they're coming up to me and they're saying, Hey, will you sponsor me? And, and finally I'm saying, and I used to sponsor a lot of guys, finally I'm saying, no, I won't. And here's why, because what, what you're hearing from me isn't coming from working these steps. It's coming from a different method that I'm using. If you'd like to talk to me about that, I'm happy to talk to you about it, but just know it. What I'm going to be talking to you about is not working the 12 step program. It's, it's something else that I found outside of the program. And I'm very happy with, as you can tell. So many, many of these guys would say, yeah, tell me, show, show me, what are you doing? And as soon as they'd see it, they'd think, no way. No, I'm not. Are you calling me a liar? Like when I would help them to challenge their thinking, I'd say, is it true that, you know,

Marty: Oh Oh,

Bill: and they would perceive that as like an assault or a threat or whatever.

Marty: Yeah, I

Bill: They just weren't open to it. And, and that was always baffling to me because I felt like I had found the magic potion, man. This is, this is the stuff. This is the elixir of life. This is, I get to have a say about my suffering. So then I'm introduced to IFS in 2016. because I was suffering again and, and unable to really wrap my arms around what to do with this deep, deep suffering that I finally had found myself ready to encounter and IFS blew me away again, almost as much as Byron Katie had. Like, Oh my God, it's as great as Byron Katie was, it now suddenly felt two dimensional compared to the three dimensional IFS. All right, so that's enough probably sharing about that to stay. So I wrote an article yesterday and I posted it on Medium about basically what I'm sharing with you right now. And I posted it on my Facebook page and I got, uh, a real negative critical, uh, feedback. Response from, um, me, a previous friend who I knew from 12 step programs, um, he felt like I was dispar disparaging 12 step and, uh, um, I had to really stop. I didn't have to, but I, I, I, I just stopped and I asked is, is there any truth to what he's saying? Am I disparaging 12 step? And, and if I am his.

Marty: What a Byron Katie thing to do

Bill: Yeah, right, right. And I thought, well, okay, I don't like what the things that he said to me. I don't like the digs. I don't like that he was intentionally hurtful with the things that he said to me. But clearly he was upset. And he was upset because I was threatening what meant so much to him. and, and, um, and discounting what was probably the most important thing that ever happened in his life. So I don't want to do that. That's what I've been exploring. I don't want to do that. Um, so I've been writing a lot. Writing for me helps me sort things out. And, and, and so let me just finish this part by telling you what what I just am pretty clear that I want to say to anybody that asks me about Alcoholics Anonymous. Number one, give it a try. Number two, trust yourself. Not everything that you hear in an AA meeting is going to be the truth. Not everything's going to resonate with you. Not everything's going to be fit for you right now, but give AA a try. Do what they say to do if you can. See how that works for you. It may work for you. It may work well, very well for you. Maybe enough for you. But trust yourself before you trust anybody else. Here's something that I heard in AA. It's not in the big book. So I can say, this is not part of the program, but it's said over and over and over again, your best thinking got you here. I hate that. I hate that. Potentially what it's saying is. Don't trust yourself. Trust me.

Marty: So it's ironic. Your best thinking.

Bill: It's a dig. Right, right. So yes, our thinking is messed up. There's no doubt about it. And that best thinking actually is going to get us in trouble over and over and over again. But, but if we don't learn to trust ourselves, and that's a big piece of what had been missing for me for years and years and years is that I didn't trust myself. And there was a good reason I didn't trust myself. I thought that there was something wrong with me and that there was something I needed to do about it to hide it and fix it. Of course, of course I wasn't trusting myself, but the reason I didn't trust myself is because I didn't know who I was.

Marty: That's the point. We, you know, um, I think it's a very important point. The reason, you know, we, we popped into existence. And then we gained self consciousness and then something was out of sync. And so we got this idea that we're less than whole. We blamed it on ourselves, felt ashamed of it, started spending our whole life managing all of that. There's no place in there, in that scenario, where Anybody said, here's who you really are, or we recognize who we really are. Like you, you're just a drift. And so that's why I think that the way we're having this conversation, putting recovery in, in the most general sense and, and showing that this is what all coaching is trying to do is get you back to your true self, all, you know, of the great. Religious traditions are trying to bring us back to ourselves. I know there's problems with organized religion. That's not what I'm talking about. And then, you know, like Byron Katie is one method of getting you back in the moment to your true self. There's so many, all of these are. Uh, and so I think it's important to see it in that light,

Bill: Yes. Mm hmm.

Marty: That, that, that if, if you're just choosing between reactions to have to There's no central self. That's navigating the way, right? When you, a lot of times, you know, when you first, when I've gotten into coaching with somebody for the first time, I said, well, what is your, what is your true, what do you truly feel about it? Cause I can tell that there being some contrived self that they've made up to survive life. They don't know that yet. They don't know the difference between that and that real simple. I just told you what I really feel, you know, and it's not, they, they there's. So I think one of the recovery. In the sense of getting back to self presupposes that there's some orientation that we can, you know, what is that thing that self, you know, if you've never been able to distinguish between. You know, a, a persona or, you know, in a personality or something like that. And you're, and who you really are. Then that, then to say, you know, just checking with your true self is not going to make

Bill: No, there won't be any way to access that. They won't know. So, you know, we're, I'm ripping this off my desk here. It's taped to it. Cause I, I refer to it all the time because I want to share with you. Well, how would I know if I'm in my true self? So here's some hints, here's some clues. It is when you're actually having the authentic experience of, in other words, you're not fabricating, you're not creating or generating what it might look like to have, to be judged as having this experience. You're actually having the experience of compassion. You're actually having an increased capacity to be with whatever is going on for yourself emotionally or mentally. You have more capacity to be with anything that comes your way. That, that's an indication that you're recovering. You have,

Marty: What's the, give an example of that, the terminology might be a little

Bill: let me give you like two or three different examples. Um, I'm driving down the highway. Somebody cuts me off and makes me slam on my brakes. They scare the shit out of me. And I find my finger up in the air with one, my hand up in the air with one finger pointed at them. And it's the wrong one. And I'm mad and I'm raging. My, my face is beet red. And now I slam on the gas because I want to scare them because they've scared me. And now I chase them for the next two miles down the road. What happened just now is that I became overwhelmed by my fear. I didn't have the capacity to hold that sudden rush of fear that came up. And so my parts took over. Now, if I'm in more self energy, if I've healed enough, if I have recovered enough of my true self, that same thing happens. It's going to scare me, of course it is, because I could get killed. But, pretty darn quickly, because I have enough capacity to hold whatever comes up, there'll be room for that to run through me, kind of bounce around, and then, and just, then just be released. And I might swear at him, but then I'm, I'm not going to chase him down the road. I'm not going to be out of my mind. I'm going to be,

Marty: And you're not going to hang on to it the

Bill: no, five minutes later, I might be able to tell the story, but I'm not in it anymore. Yeah, so that's an example.

Marty: Great.

Bill: Another example is when my wife says, hey, uh, I sure think it would work better if you put that cup in the dishwasher in a different way. And instead of me going to thinking that she thinks that I don't know how to do anything right, I consider her suggestion and decide whether or not to put the cup in the dishwasher in a different way. Simple things like that. So when I say you have an increased capacity to be with whatever shows up, It looks that way. I can stay in, let's just say, love, connection with someone else, even when they say something that maybe in the past, if I hadn't been recovered, my parts would have said, made it mean something. Oh no, she too thinks there's something wrong with me, because I don't know where to put a cup and a dish on.

Marty: Not only made it mean something, but insisted that that meaning was the

Bill: Insisted on it. Yes, that is the truth. If I believe everything that I think, I'm in big, big trouble, and I did. Before I was introduced to Byron Katie, I believed everything I thought, and I was in big trouble all the time. I was at the mercy of my own thinking. Uh, few more words. If you're, these are hints of how do you know that you've restored, you've restored your true authentic self. You've recovered your true authentic self. I find myself courageous. Not, not puffing myself up brave, but actually having like courageous conversations. Thank you very much. Having fear, having enough room for the fear, and still having access to wisdom, to my adult self,

Marty: I love it.

Bill: clarity, rather than a state of confusion where I have three or four or five or ten different parts of me arguing in my head all the time about what's the right thing to do and what I should have done and what I shouldn't have done. I have clarity. I just move. I execute. I go through life. I create. I, I

Marty: I see what's going on here. Right. As opposed to just being bought in.

Bill: I recognize my mistakes. I can go into learning something brand new without the fear that someone might find out that I'm broken. That I'm, that I'm stupid, that there's something wrong with me, and that makes it so much easier to actually learn. Carol Dweck talks about this in her book, Mindset. What she maybe doesn't talk about, I don't remember whether she does or not, is how do you get there? How do you move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset? And I think that IFS has shown me the way. I moved from a fixed mindset when the part of me that has to just rigidly stay, Oh, no, I can't take on learning Spanish because what if somebody thinks I'm stupid? I need to deal with the parts of me that think that I'm stupid and help them to recognize that the decision that they made years ago about me being stupid was necessary for that circumstance that no longer exists. Get past that. So I could keep going on that. Um,

Marty: I think that those, this is very, very helpful to have these. clues, markers, so we can know how to distinguish the true self, our own true self, from many ideas that present themselves and can be very convincing at

Bill: yes. So again, this is not about pretending to be connected and confident and calm. It's actually authentically having the experience of openness, purpose, possibility, peace, presence, perspective, patience, persistence, playfulness, collaboration, choice. Yeah, so that's what we're working for. That is how I know I'm recovered is that I'm having more and more and more of those experiences. And by the way, when I have those kinds of experiences, sometimes it surprises me like, wow, I just went through that situation that I know would have been challenging in the past. And it didn't even occur to me that it would be and it wasn't.

Marty: Right.

Bill: How about that?

Marty: Yeah. That's great.

Bill: We got about 10 minutes left here, Marty. And I'm wondering if now we can begin to summarize and, and talk about now what the hell does this have to do with leadership?

Marty: Uh, okay, good.

Bill: So I want to just start that out by saying in the internal family system model in IFS, the goal of the model is to help people get from being led by their burdened parts that are still tethered to an incomplete past to move from that place to self leadership. To having this capital S self be the leader of the internal world so that what manifests in the external world. Reflects my true authentic self.

Marty: That distinguished it for me. That's leadership, right? It's because instead of being led by

Bill: My

Marty: thoughts, you know, exactly thoughts and emotions from the past, it, I am that I'm liberated from those. I am now leading in my book. I say, you know, if you've done that work, I forget the exact words, then you are leading. Just, oh, I know how I say it because I, I refer to that as your natural or true self in my book, if you're living from there, then you are leading, you are leading,

Bill: Yes. Say more about that. I mean, I've got some thoughts about that as well, but I want to really get what you mean by that.

Marty: well, as opposed to all of the psychology and, or other people's ideas and everything you are by, by simply being who you were born to be, the self, then you are, you're leading. Not from anything, but from the moment, from nothing in a way. And so that, that's the, that's the liberated leading as opposed to, you know, some sort of, you know, shackled version of leading.

Bill: Yes. Yes. You're leading your own life and there's some, there's something about the quality of authenticity.

Marty: Oh, I see what I'm, yeah. Well, I think it's that the truth, I'm guess I'm making an assertion there that, that the, that the truth. Is where it's going. So by, by being the truth, you're leading in the direction that things are, things are going like being, being aligned with the Dow, as opposed to some other worldly concern or agenda, in a sense. you're being the self that is, that is realizing the truth. There's no, you, you're, you're both leading and following in the same motion, right? Because you're not being led by something else. You are doing the leading and it's imperfect harmony with the way things are meant to go. Mm-Hmm.

Bill: One more thing I'll throw on, on top of that is, uh, or set it alongside is the idea that when I'm around someone, I know whether, I know. Not just because I'm a coach, but because I'm a human being. I know, I sense when they are being their true authentic self. And I also sense when they are protecting themselves, guarding themselves, promoting themselves. And I'm really attracted to people that are showing up as their true authentic self. There's just this internal, like, leaning forward that, that, that is attached to this, these words. Tell me more. I want to, I want to hang out with you. So in that way, I'm a leader. If I show up as my authentic self, because self is contagious. We each have self because that's who we are. We each have access to the potential. We have, let me say it this way. We have the potential to access the qualities and resources of self because who we really are is who we really are. It's just that we've gotten confused about it. Once we're no longer confused about it to the degree that we're not confused. Once we have more clarity about who we really are, we now begin to access those resources and others may notice it even before we do. And

Marty: Mm-Hmm. .

Bill: those others are going to be attracted to that unless they aren't. The reason they wouldn't be attracted to that is because it can be really intimidating for people that are still hiding behind a shame identity and a false identity, which is what most people are doing.

Marty: Yeah, I remember there was a short clip I saw of Eckhart Tolle, um, coaching somebody on stage. Um, and it was a woman who was just completely distraught about losing her husband. And, um, and she just, she said, I just can't get over this. You know, why did this happen to me? And this is so terrible. And, and, you know, in his inimitable way, he stayed right with her. And he delivered some quote unquote bad news. He said, look, you know, what's really going on here. The reason you can't let this go is because you're, it's, you're making it about you, you're having to go on and live without your husband. You're not really sad about his dying. He's great. He's in heaven. He's perfect. He doesn't need a thing. You're crying about yourself, but he, but he didn't say it with this sort of egotistical emphasis that I'm doing right now. He just said it coolly and calmly, like, directly into her soul. And she got it. If I had, if I had said it the way I just said it, she would have taken offense and been all like, what? You don't understand me. But he had that Self direction

Bill: She sensed it.

Marty: that just bore right into her. Yeah. And she knew it and she knew he was right. And, and,

Bill: That's another thing. People trust when you're showing up as your true authentic self, no matter what, what's going on. People trust you. And they also don't trust you if you're not.

Marty: and they trust themselves around you when you're being your

Bill: Because self is contagious and invites more of their self too. Yes. Thanks for letting me talk about this today in this episode. I'm really glad that when we, before we hit record, I said, you know what I'd really like to talk about is recovery. And you said, well, let's, let's talk about that then. And to me, it feels almost indulgent because I just, I've been swimming in recovery since I was 27 years old, I'm 69 years old now, and I feel more excited today than I've ever felt. About the potential and the prospect and the benefits of actual recovery.

Marty: It's beautiful. I, you know, I think it's, it's, um, it's really good for our listeners to hear that, you know, it just gets better. It just gets better.

Bill: Well, and thank God it does, because if it didn't, we wouldn't keep at it. This is not, it's not always easy. The benefits, enjoying the benefits, the payday doesn't come for a while. One of the things I used to say when I was still going to AA meetings was, uh, and this was at about 30 years sobriety that I started saying this. I'm one of those old timers that kept saying the same old bullshit so that the people that came to meetings all the time were tired of hearing it from me. But when a newcomer came, and they were saying, Gosh, I got 30 days of sobriety, and man, it's hard. It's hard to stay sober 30 days. And when it was my turn to talk, I would say it is easier to stay sober 30 years than it is to stay sober 30 days. And that's the truth.

Marty: Oh,

Bill: 30, 30 years is easy once you get there. 30 days is hard to get to. It's hard work and I really, part of my message needs to be it's worth it. By the way, there's a third piece of advice.

Marty: it's also a good, a good sort of self hack when you have something that's going to take a long, it's a big project, you know, it's a, it's going to take a marathon effort, then think of it in terms of how, You know, the goal and how easy it is come from the future rather than, oh, my God, this is so hard. I got 30 years left to do this. You know, 30 years is going to be

Bill: Well, it, it can be. And by the time I'd got to 30 years, it was a whole lot easier because I'd been around Byron Katie for a while and I'd been doing that work. Um. It can be miserable too. Here's a, here's a really, I think an important point is that how long you've been sober doesn't make one iota of difference in the quality of your life. One day sober is equal to 30 years of sober in terms of the quality of your life. If I'm not poisoning myself with alcohol, within a week or two weeks, I'm pretty much flushed out of the alcohol poison in my system. After about 30 to 60 days somewhere in there, my mind is starting to work right. Certainly after a year, it's working as well as it's going to work, other than the handicap of my confusion about who I am.

Marty: Right.

Bill: So,

Marty: Well, I was just, I was just saying, suggesting that perspective because then you're, you're liberated of the idea that it's going to be hard, right? You're living in the idea that this is, you know, Like you say, it's immediately, uh, shows itself. It's a better, better life.

Bill: So, earlier I started three pieces of advice for anybody that would ask me about AA. And I got to two of them. I want to include the

Marty: wonder if you were going to say what The third one was?

Bill: one was, you want to guess? Is that what you're saying? Oh, okay. The first one is give AA a try. If you're thinking, will AA work for me? Give it a try. Nobody can tell you whether it's going to work for you or not. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for a lot of people, but for the people that it works for, they love it. Number two, trust yourself no matter what you hear in the meetings or from other AA members or from people outside of Alcoholics Anonymous, including me, ultimately, trust yourself. And number three, take AA's advice. Alcoholics Anonymous will tell you, we aren't everything. You seek advice from others as well. Go to professionals, do whatever you can to improve the quality of your life. But when, when it comes to being sober and getting sober, AA says, here's how we did it. Do it, try it, give it, give it a try. See if it works for you. That's what I got.

Marty: Very good. Awesome. Well, let's leave it there. And I appreciate that you brought this. It's a great topic. Awesome.

Bill: next week. Marnie.