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Good morning, Path to Warren podcast. This is Matt Warren. It is July 30, 2020 and this is episode 23. In this episode that we’re going to be talking about and trying to make clear our top line behaviors. Yesterday I heard a gentleman speaking at a meeting and he was talking about how if he just stays focused on his top line behaviors and top line activities, then his mind stays clear and he stays away from those bottom line activities. So what I thought I would do is just kind of check in with you guys and share about what my Top Line behaviors are, what the Top Line behavior even means, and just start a conversation and hopefully this will help somebody when they’re trying to establish their top line behaviors. So here we go. When you step back and look at all of the different type of lines we have, goal lines and goal lines are where you want to go. My goal is to become a private pilot, to get my private pilot’s license. That’s a goal line, right? A goal line is to get my daughter off to school and be able to afford her wedding one day. Those are goal lines, but you also have top lines and bottom lines. So the definition of top lines are top lines are healthy behaviors and activities that we replace for our old unhealthy patterns. We can’t get sober and simply stop our destructive behavior in a vacuum. We could take creative actions and prove we are capable of making healthy choices. It can start with small additions to our daily routine. So as of July 30th, 2020… today, I listed my top line behaviors in order to try to capture the little habits and little daily routines that I have added into my schedule. Most of these are done first thing in the morning. So number one writing in NYTBS, NYTBS is short for New York Times bestseller. And this is basically my never ending for now, what seems like never ending book. So I started off early on in recovery typing in a password protected Word document. I started typing my resentments and my daily journaling of my thoughts and feelings. So all of this is in one word document. Right now it’s about 200 pages. Just jokingly call this NYTBS because who knows, maybe one day it’ll be a New York Times bestseller. But the point is, working inside of this document where I am journaling my thoughts, my feelings, what’s going on… This is definitely a top line behavior. Anytime I’m working on the twelve steps of recovery, it’s definitely obviously top line behaviors and I need to do more of it. I have written down here numbers. So doing my numbers. In debtors anonymous I’ve shared and I believe that God is in the numbers. My higher power talks to me and calms me down. And there’s this sense of ease that goes over me whenever I am up to date on my numbers and I’ll go into a little bit more of that here shortly. Eating on my program. So I really enjoy eating and following the guidelines of this Whole30 program. It basically is eating wholesale nutritious maximum nutricious foods, like basically protein, fruits and vegetables, cutting out all of the grains and dairies and sugar and alcohol and really focusing on the most nutritious, wholesome foods, not a lot of additives, not a lot of processed crap, really just focusing on the best of the best foods. So definitely eating on my program is a top line behavior. Going to the gym, walking around the neighborhood, or going to my body pump class. I really enjoy the Les Mill’s 6:00 a.m. Body Pump class. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdays Saturdays they have a Body Attack class, but I feel a part of the group when I’m going to those classes. Definitely walking around the neighborhood. Obviously the top line behavior going to bed by 09:00 p.m. My goal is to go to bed by eight. So if I go to bed at 08:00 and I can get up at 04:00 a.m. And still get 8 hours of sleep, if I can’t make it at eight, I really need to be in bed by 09:00 in order to get up at four. If I get up at four, I’ll have 7 hours of sleep. If I get up at five in the morning, then I’ll have 8 hours of sleep. That’s not always possible. Like for example, it’s not possible. This week we are in the Florida Keys on vacation with my in laws and my daughter and my wife. And a lot of times we don’t even eat until last night. We didn’t eat until 8:45. So I’m struggling to get to bed. But I’m also being conscious of spending time with my family right now. And if I can slip away and get a nap in the afternoon or something to make up for that, that’s always preferred. But if your family doesn’t eat dinner until 8:30 – 9 o’clock, you can’t get to bed at 08:00. So I have to kind of be conscious of that. I’m up by 04:00 a.m. 05:00 a.m. At the latest. So what’s amazing about this top line behavior is every morning, I mean, every single morning the alarm clock goes off and I want to get up, hit it, turn it off and get back in bed. Every single morning and I have to tell myself I can always go back to bed. Let me just get up and do my prayer meditation part, maybe do a little bit of reading and I can go back to bed. I’ll get back to bed before Maddie gets up and I’ll be able to get a little bit more sleep. Surprisingly, every day I have that thought. I have to tell myself just get up and do my prayer meditation. This is my time with my Higher Power. Just do this and then you can go back to sleep. You would think that by doing this for a year and a half now, straight, every day, you would think that my body I don’t have to tell myself this every day. But at any rate, I get up and before you know it, the second, 3rd cup of coffee, second or third is kicked in and I’m ready to go. And I finish all of my readings. Meditation goal is 20 minutes per day with a minimum of five minutes. So I have been meditating every day for a long time. And I started out though like this morning, I did it for about 25 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, I don’t know exactly, but I’ve been able to move past just five minutes. But there were so many times and I actually read a book recently called “Just Sit” and it talks about just sit, close your eyes and meditate. What I found was there are five minute guided meditations. I found an app that’s got 365 5-minutes meditations. So every day I could have a different guided meditation. And the guided meditation just means that they walk you through okay, close your eyes. Breathe in, breathe out. Think about this. Think about that. It just guides you through the meditation as opposed. And I found this was a lot easier in the beginning than just sitting there closing my eyes because my mind will wander and I’m trying to keep it in a neutral space instead of wandering all over the place. Daily 10th Step: So the 10th step in Recovery says that we continue to take a daily inventory. And when we were wrong, we promptly admit it. So daily inventory for me, the big book talks about doing a daily inventory. At the end of the day, I choose to do my because at the end of the day, I’m trying everything I can. It’s all I can do to get in bed at 09:00, sometimes 08:00, but all I can do to get in bed at that time. So I choose to do my first thing in the morning. It’s not the first thing, but it’s definitely done early in the morning. And what I do is on my Journal. And I’ve written a blog about this. You can find it at Path to Warren.com. There’s a Journal, a photo of what my Journal template looks like. And on the left page of my Journal, I write down three good things I did yesterday and three bad things I did yesterday. And they’re not necessarily bad, bad things. They’re just things that I need to work on. Things that are not as nice or as perfect. They’re as good as I wanted them to be. Maybe I snapped at my daughter when I shouldn’t have. Maybe I went to bed early without telling my wife good night. Maybe I didn’t go to the gym the day before. It doesn’t matter what it is. I’m conscious and it takes about five minutes. Slow down my mind, think about okay, what were three great things I did yesterday, and it’s fun to look back and see, oh, man, I forgot about that. But what it tells me is even if I had, like a bad day yesterday, I still can find three things that I did well, listing three good things, three bad things. That is a daily 10th step, as we call it. And I really enjoy that. That’s definitely a top line behavior. Tracking my net worth daily. So this is a part of the numbers. You might have just heard that that was a parrot walking down here in Islamorada. Beautiful morning, Thursday morning. Tracking the net worth daily. So you’ve heard the line. I’m sure that what gets tracked gets improved. Something like that. The main number when it comes to finances, that matters to me, the main number is my net worth. And when I say me my net worth, I mean our net worth as a family, my wife and my net worth. I have a tab on my finance spreadsheet where every day I track the net worth. And you might say, well, how in the world do you know your net worth? And it’s because on another tab, I’ve got a personal financial statement, a PFS personal financial statement. The personal financial statement is a snapshot of right now, what are your assets and your liabilities? Your assets minus your liabilities equals your net worth. So if you have a lot of debt, a lot of house payments, car payments, loans, you have a lot of debt and your liabilities are larger than your assets, then you have a negative net worth. On the flip side, if you’ve got more assets and you have liabilities, it’s just like with a business. But I try to do this daily on a personal level, and it actually helps me a lot. I’ve created a chart where I am actually charting on X and Y axis. I’m charting every day the number, and I can see if it goes up $50 or it goes down by a thousand. Being able to chart this has been very helpful. And in my Serenity, there’s nothing like wondering how you’re doing financially and being able to look at a chart and compare over time and say, oh, man, six months ago, we were $10,000 less in our net worth than we are today. I think we’re on the right track. It’s also important to do this. Don’t track the amount of money in your bank account. That’s not really important because today I might have $2,000 less in my bank account because I made a house payment. But because I made a house payment, I can go on this part of my asset and decrease the loan amount that I owe to the house by $2,000. So my net worth is the same. The value of the house. I just gained more equity just by paying off the house. But if you were to just look at the bank account, for example, it would show that I’m less $2,000. But that’s just not accurate. So what I’ve found is top line behavior for me is becoming very clear on where I am on a daily basis with all of my cash accounts. As soon as my statements come in from IRAs or any kind of retirement account or any kind of statement about my daughter’s 529 plan, as soon as that comes in, it normally comes once a quarter. Soon as that comes in, I go into that P and L. I mean, not P and L statement. This is basically a profit and loss statement for the family. But I go into that personal financial statement and I update the number. Out beside it I’ll put the date of the statement. It’s really fascinating because when the Coronavirus hit, I saw overnight it felt like but it was over the course of a quarter, over three or four months, that our IRAs, which we don’t have much right now. And the value of my daughter’s 529 College fund, those went down by 4000, $5,000 because of the value of the stock market went down due to Corona. And so where do you chart that? Well, you chart it exactly on that personal financial statement. That is the place that it shows your assets. And under the assets you’ve got bank accounts, retirement accounts, College fund, and all those go to offset any kind of liabilities. So, like, on the liability section, I’ve got where I owe my dad some money that I loaned from the when I had a solar business that went under, I still owe him. So I’ve got that number there. And then luckily, we’ve been able to pay off what’s not luckily, it’s not luck. We worked hard at it. But we’ve paid off all of our credit cards. We don’t have any more debt Besides what I owe my dad. And then we have our house, our cars are paid for. We have a Tahoe and a Volkswagen Bug. Both of those are paid for. So those are only listed on the asset column. Moral of the story is, how do you know you’re doing well, financially? In my opinion, it is to know where you are, what’s your net worth? And I’m so excited. One of the reasons why I’m not scared to say that our net worth today is around $153,000 is because I’m so excited about and it’s motivation for me to look back and be able to look back six years from now, I don’t know ten years from now and say, oh, man, our net worth was 153,000 when I was 36 years old. Today I’m 43, 45, 46 years old, and our net worth is 1.5 million. That’s exciting to me. And it’s going to be so fun to be able to track that on a daily basis. I think that’s enough on that. So list goals in bookend form, three per day minimum. So what does that mean? With my accountability partner, we have the system down that I love to talk about because it’s so amazing. I’m so grateful to have it. We have a system down for sending a gratitude list in text form. So I’ve got this little template in a text that I go and I’ve texted it to myself. So it’s easy to find. But every day I go to this text message of myself that I sent to myself and I copy it and I go to JB’s contact and I hit paste and it basically says gratitude list today. It’ll say 7/30/20. So I’ve got gratitude list in today’s date. And then I’ve got #1. I am grateful for #2. I am grateful for… #3) I am grateful for all the way down to #10. So this is a gratitude list, a daily gratitude list of just ten things I need to be able to write every day. This is another top line behavior. I need to be able to write every day at least ten things that I’m grateful for. What’s amazing is once I write ten, a lot of times I’ve come up with one or two more I need to put on that list, make sure I’m verbalizing my gratitude. And these are things that I’m grateful to my Higher Power for, and I’m sharing it with another human. So once I text out on this template, I’ll add in the words at the end, it might be I’m grateful for my family, I’m grateful for this wonderful dinner. I’m grateful for my paycheck I got today. Whatever it is, I write down ten things every day. The first thing that I tell my Higher Power that I’m thankful for is my sobriety. And because I’m also in debtors anonymous and working that program or trying to at least I always start out with #1. I am grateful for my sobriety and solvency. So being able to pay my bills on time, not be late, not overdraft bank accounts and things like that, that’s my solvency. And I’ll have to go into that a little bit later on. But this goal list that I mentioned here where it says list goals in bookend form. What I mean by bookend form means under these gratitude items, I’ve got ten things I’m grateful for. Under that I do action items. The template says action items, 1. enter 2., 3., period. So it’s got three things there. These are action items. So I’ll list every day just at least three things that I’m going to do today for my sobriety, for my sanity, for working on my step work. Or it might be something has to do with work that I have to do today. In the old priority management time management system, these are the A items. These have to be done today or they really need to be tried to get done today. Sometimes they don’t always happen. But just three items, that’s my minimum, and that’s a top line behavior. What we do is after I prepare this gratitude list, it’s got ten items I’m grateful for, and it’s got three bookend items that are action items. What I’m doing is, I’ll send that to my accountability partner. What happens is we call it bookending. So this is a term I learned in Debtors Anonymous. Bookending is when you tell somebody you’re going to do something before you do it, and then they acknowledge it. And then after you do it, you check in with them and say, hey, I finished that bookend item. It’s done. And then they acknowledge it then. So what happens is you have this, you have this Attaboy this good job you finished it or a good job, you put it on the list. That sounds like a plan. And then once you finish it, for example, I’ll send that list to JB, preferably in the morning. Most days it’s before, like 10am or 10:30am. When I finish booking number two, for example, I will simply text him. It’s just a simple text. All it says is “Bookend 2” the number two with a checkmark. And I send that text to him, and then he hits like and he likes it. And we keep going on. We don’t talk much more about it unless we need to. It’s just a way of, for me, the sensitive person I am. It’s a way for me to let somebody know what I’m doing. But it’s also a way to get recognition for something I’m doing that you’re not going to get recognition for normally on a day to day basis for these things you’re doing in recovery. So I also list my expenses daily in my Journal, a top line behavior that I think is important. This is a part of “doing the numbers”. And I’ve shared about this before, but in my Journal, on the right hand side, I list all my expenses that I had that day. What normally happens is, like today is Thursday, I will have to go. When I check my bank account, I will go on yesterday’s Journal entry, flip the Journal back one page, and I’ll write down whatever expenses happen that went through the bank account that kind of cleared the bank account. I’ll write down that expense on the Journal page. And then once I get them all listed down, I’ll put them into my spreadsheet. I’ve got an Excel spreadsheet. I’ll put those this is the same spreadsheet that I’ve got, my personal financial statement. I’ve got several tabs here, and they all feed off each other and work together. But I’ve got tab number one, the personal financial statement, which I call the net worth calculator. That’s my word for the personal financial statement. Net worth calculator, because there’s formulas in there that after I update my bank accounts and update my liabilities and my assets. There’s a number in green that’s in the middle. It’s in the middle of the spreadsheet that’s in bold, and then green. That is the net worth. I do all these numbers to get that number. That’s tab number one. Tab number two is the 2020 Daily Expenses. Each day gets a column in this spreadsheet, and that’s where I’m tracking which category the expense goes into. If we go to the restaurant yesterday and spend $30, well, that obviously goes into the category of eating out. But I mark that on the spreadsheet. Then once I get all of the expenses for that day or the day before logged into the spreadsheet, I then will go on this app. It’s called the Every Dollar app, and this is a Dave Ramsey tool here. Again, it’s not a complete program. It’s just a tool, like a tool in the toolbox. I do think this app is very helpful, and it’s the best one that I’ve seen for being able to keep track of expenses and look at percentages of meals and eating out as they relate to housing and debt and all that kind of stuff. But I’ll put these daily expenses inside this Every Dollar app every day as part of doing the numbers. It’s a lot easier when you’re just putting in three to five expenses from the day before. It becomes so much easier to do it on a daily basis than it is to try to sit down and do 20 or 40 of them at a time. It doesn’t take less than five minutes to finish it. And then time tracking. So time tracking on the daily spreadsheet. There’s a blog about this as well on the Path to Warren website. If you have these daily expenses that are each day gets a column. Like I said above, the expenses, there’s about ten lines. There the ten rows where I will track time. And every day has to add up to 24 hours because there’s 24 hours in a day. But to give you a ballpark drive time, work. How many hours was I at work or working on work? I could be at home. But if I’m checking emails for an hour at home, that is working. So I’ll track it there, make sure I’m not overworking or under working. That’s definitely a top line behavior for me that I need to do every day. Track my time that I work so that I don’t overwork. I’m not worried about me under working. I’m worried about me overworking. And then I’ve got family. How much time am I spending with family? If I’m checking emails at night for an hour, I can’t spend it. I can’t check emails and play with my daughter the same time. But if I’m playing with my daughter, I want to get credit for playing with my daughter. And that’s where it happens. It’s right there on the time tracking tool. Then I’ve got self care am I going to the gym? Am I going to meetings recovery meetings? Am I walking around the block? Those are self care items and then I’ve got for fun. So is it cooking? Is it gardening? Is it working on my Ancestry.com? Whatever I’m doing for fun I need to get credit for that too because if I’m doing all these things I’m not having any fun for myself it’s going to get miserable and I’m going to get burned out. Time tracking is a huge part of my recovery and definitely a top line behavior what’s so surprising about all this is that I find that I’m doing most of these every day and if I focus my energy on these top line behaviors it’s going to keep me out of trouble and out of my head. I can find serenity in doing each and every one of these things individually and I find my Higher Power in doing these activities. I definitely find my Higher Power when I’m working on each of these activities early in the morning or whenever I can get to them during the day. So I hope to help somebody. If you heard something that you like or you heard something you can relate to and you want to hear more about this, please hit subscribe I’m going to be sharing more about each one of these individually in the future and feel free to share it with somebody that you think is in need of hearing this. Hopefully it will help some more people. I hope you have a wonderful day. I love you and remember to make your contribution. Thank you.