1: “I got sober the first time when I was around thirty,” the friend said. “After two years of sobriety I had a slip. I took a sip of white wine at a party.”
The man continued: “I could have gone to a meeting, confessed my slip, and recommitted, but instead I thought to myself, ‘Since I took one sip, I might as well just finish the glass—it would be a shame to waste it.’
“I finished the glass and then two bottles more, and there went the next eleven years of my life. I didn’t get sober again until I was forty-three.”
Gay Hendricks shares his friend’s story in his book The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity.
What lesson does Gay take from his friend’s journey? Committing is good. But recommitting is the essential skill for life success.
“When I first began my own journey of transformation, I had a view of commitment as a onetime event,” he reflects. “After a while, though, I realized it was really an ongoing process of encountering obstacles, getting thrown off track, then recommitting and getting back on the path again.”
As we pursue our goals, we will stumble. We will trip. We will wander off track.
“Recommitment,” Gay notes, “gets us out of all-or-nothing thinking that causes minor slips to turn into epic detours of self-sabotage.”
When we understand the power and importance of recommitting, we realize we don’t have to hold ourselves to a “perfect standard.” Our goals, he writes, “are like setting the destination on an airplane’s autopilot. By the time the plane gets from New York to Honolulu, it’s made thousands of tiny corrections to keep nudging the plane back on track after it’s slipped off. . .
“The secret is recommitting,” Gay writes. “Each time the plane goes slightly off track, the autopilot notices it and recommits to the goal. If only we humans were as good at receiving feedback as an autopilot!”
2: What’s one of the common traps we fall into when we get off track?
We beat ourselves up–with shame, blame, and criticism. “Blaming ourselves for wandering off the path just slows us down. All that’s required is a simple moment of awareness: ‘Oops, slipped off my chosen path. Time to recommit.’
“Awareness is important; criticism is absolutely unnecessary,” Gay writes.
This tendency is especially prevalent in those of us “who have a perfectionist streak in our personality,” he observes. We “may find it challenging to give up self-criticism and replace it with the friendlier process of self-awareness and recommitment.”
3: That was Gay’s story. “I was well into my third decade of life before I became aware of how much criticism and blame I aimed at myself. As I focused more on this issue, I came to realize that self-blame and criticism were actually addictions.”
He learned this by running an experiment. Gay took some initial steps toward “loving and appreciating myself instead of blaming and criticizing.”
Which felt good for about ten seconds. “I’d feel a moment of liberation, then my old habit of self-criticism would kick back in. That’s why I began to regard it as an addiction.”
So Gay asked himself: What was he really addicted to?
“The answer, when it finally revealed itself to me, set me back on my heels,” he recalls. “I realized I was addicted to suffering!
“Later, I came across a quotation from the teacher and philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff: ‘It is very difficult also to sacrifice one’s suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.'”
The realization that he was addicted to suffering changed his life. He committed himself to figuring out how to leave his addiction behind.
Which is why Gay is so focused on recommitting.
“If we suffer from the habit of punishing ourselves when we break commitments,” we can learn how to loosen our grip on this habit by learning how to recommit. We can embrace the “breakthrough opportunity to love ourselves for all our flaws, foibles, and failings.
“By loving them,” Gay writes, we “avoid the costly and time-consuming trap of self-blame. We free up more energy to recommit to our goals.”
The other big win? “When we learn how to recommit,” he observes, we “open up the possibility of enjoying the pleasures of the journey. . . Before I figured that out, I would often get so focused on arriving at the goal that I forgot to savor the journey along the way.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: When I slip up or get off track, do I respond with self-criticism, or do I practice the powerful skill of recommitting with self-compassion?
Action: Notice one area this week where I’ve wandered from my goals, and gently recommit—letting go of blame and embracing the journey forward.
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