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Hey guys, My name is Matt and I’m an alcoholic. I thought I would lead the talk tonight about Tools of the Program. And I’d love to get some feedback on what kind of tools, tools you guys are using and which tools have worked for you. Which tools do you use on a daily basis? And brought a couple of shows and tales here. My sponsor got me on these when I was working the steps. This is the step guide for number eight. But you can get one of these little step booklets at the Inner Group store off of Divine Street. It’s like $3 a piece. And when we started working the steps, I was broke as could be. I had a bunch of debt and I didn’t have a lot of money. So my sponsor loaned me step number one and got me started. But the cool part about this is when I work these with sponsees or when I was working on myself, there’s like ten or twelve questions that are pretty deep. That really gets me thinking. So I was able to use these step guides. I started like a Word document and password protected it so nobody could find it, particularly my wife or my boss or anybody that might get into my computer. And I wanted to just be able to get it all out. So what I did, a little technique that works for me was I would write the question and then write a couple of paragraphs or whatever. And when it came time to once I got them all answered, I would call my sponsor and say, hey, I got all the step one questions answered and I’m ready to go. And so we would meet up or do it over the phone and go through my answers on those questions and then move on to the next one. Those little booklets were great because it’s kind of like the Cliff Notes for the Big Book. The big book is quite deep, and it was a lot to understand. But along those same lines, another tool that worked for me, somebody got me on my first retreat. I saw Scott. He used to come around this meeting a lot. He had this little big book cover. It says Survival Guide on it. So somebody picks it up. It doesn’t say AA on it, but it says Survival Guide. It’s got some mountains on it. And it’s pretty cool because you could put like the twelve and twelve in this part and then the Big Book in this back part. I really like this little cover. That’s a cool tool. I know that’s not normally what you think of when you think of tools of the program, but these are kind of practical tools that really helped me because I couldn’t just sit through and read the Big Book from cover to cover. It was just too much. It’s like so deep. So what I did was I would read a page in twelve and twelve, and I’d dog ear it. And then I’d read a page in the big book and just kind of close it for the day. The next day I’d get up and I’d read a page in the big book and a page in the twelve and twelve. And that was kind of my method to try to tackle the big book, and it works. It’s like, I think, 350 pages or something like that. So if you read a page a day that’ll keep you sober for a year and throughout the day, there’s plenty on one page to think about. A lot of times there’s a nugget or two in that one page that I would think about during the day. And then another tool that I use a lot every day is a Journal. And this is the one I use is what I’m using today. But it’s a hardback Journal. This is made by Moleskin. I don’t get paid to endorse it or anything, but it’s really awesome. It’s got a little thing here. But this is where I put my gratitude list. And I write ten gratitudes every day. I’ve done that for years, meaning that, well, not too many years. March 1 will be four years sober, so I’ve been doing it that long, at least. But I don’t do it perfectly every day. There’s been a couple of days that I’ve missed, but ten gratitude. And the first one is always the same. It helps remind me that I’m an alcoholic. The first one is I am grateful for my sobriety and solvency yesterday. The solvency part has to do with the money program Debtors Anonymous, but it’s all about being solvent at one day at a time. But this is a sobriety program, but just writing that step one, to me, that’s kind of a step one, admitting that I’m powerless over alcohol, telling my higher power I’m grateful that I was sober yesterday is a pretty good step one for me. Some other tools of the program in that same Journal, I do my 10th step inventory in the morning. I don’t do it at night. It’s too hard with trying to get my daughter in bed and clean up after dinner and all that kind of stuff. And I’m tired. But normally the next morning I’ll think about the last 24 hours and I’ll put three good things, three bad things as part of my tenth step. That’s a tool of the program that’s worked for me. And that part about making an amends quickly often comes up in that 10th step. Another tool of the program. When I was working my step four, that same password protected Word document really came in handy. Somebody got me onto a speaker tape. Joe and Charlie, I think it is. And they do a lot of AA speaker tapes, conferences and things. And they said one time to write your four step, like your characters in life, the title of the podcast or whatever it was called Characters in Life, and it talks about making a list of all the characters that you’ve been in your life and writing your resentment out at the age that you were when the resentment happened. So if something happened when you were eight years old, don’t write about it when you’re 35 in 35 year old terms. Write about it like it happened when you were eight and getting that mindset of what it was like, how it hurts you when you were eight, not how it hurts you today at 30. So writing out all those resentments, it helped me to write them out first in the narrative format. Like kind of like I’m talking to a friend explaining what happened. And it could be a little paragraph or it could be a page describing the scene about what happened, laying it all out there. But then when I met with my sponsor, though, I didn’t just give him 200 pages that I Typed up, I kind of narrowed all that down and just transposed it onto this column format thing. The big book talks about a column format, and a buddy of mine sent me this PDF that’s got these columns. I’m happy to send it to anybody that wants it, but it’s a PDF. It’s got Fear Inventory, Sexual Inventory, and Fear, Sex and Resentments. So it’s like three pages and it’s got all these columns and you fill out the columns. But that’s a tool of the program. But I couldn’t do that PDF format with the columns, nice and neat and simplified until in my mind I got it out on paper and something happens with this whole process of like getting it out of my head, getting it out of my heart, getting it on paper. And then there were a couple of things throughout my resentments which took a couple of times of going over it with my sponsor because there were so many of them. I think we met twice, 3 hours or so apiece, maybe a little more to go over all the resentments and the Fear inventory and stuff. But there were a few of those that were so big in my life that I actually had to just read. So he understood the whole situation. And so it was helpful for me to have all those actually written out in that kind of format. But that’s a great tool of the program. And then when I got to step eight, making the list of people I had harmed, you could do however you want. But my technique that I really found to be helpful was this Excel spreadsheet. And I talked about it. People made fun of it. I don’t really care. But it’s over. I’ve worked through and I don’t look at it anymore, but I don’t know how to do it practically and actually work them without having a way that I can work them and cross them off. So I just listed them all out after making my PDF column format thing. A sponsor held onto that until it was time to work on my 8th step. When it’s time to work on that, I pulled out those resentments and made my list and I could prioritize them. Once I finished it, though, I could hide that row and it was gone and I didn’t have to deal with it again. But those are just some tools that work for me. Obviously having a sponsor talking to them in the early part of the program every day I called him the first 30 days at 07:00 a.m. Every day he told me to do that. That really helped the time. But I’d love to hear what kind of tools worked for you. What didn’t work for you and thank you for letting me share. Thanks Matt! The meeting is now open for shares.