12 Steps to Flourishing

Your ultimate job in life is not to be smart or creative or even sober.  It is to be effective.

“Effectiveness is not inborn.  It can be learned.  In fact, it has to be learned.”

Peter F. Drucker, in his 1967 book “The Effective Executive,” shows that effectiveness is a practice.  You learn it, like most other things, by making it a habit.  Let me repeat that thought.  If you want to get good at anything — playing the guitar, parenting, skiing, sobriety — you have to practice it.  Do it daily.  Make it a habit. Make it muscle memory — something you don’t have to think about.  You just do it!

Getting back to effectiveness.  Drucker says that there are five essential practices that make one effective.

1. Effective men and women “know where their time goes.  They work systematically at managing the little bit of time that can be brought under their control.”  After sleeping, eating, work and mandatory chores you have very little discretionary time: make it count!  Track your time.  Manage your time.  And, consolidate it into meaningful productive periods.  Plan your day on a calendar and then work your plan.
2. Effective men and women “focus on outward contribution.  They gear their efforts to results rather than to work….”  How many times have we spent a day or a week working relentlessly on a project but accomplishing nothing?  Very frustrating. But, more than that, that time is gone.  You can’t replace it.  Don’t waste a moment in mindless work that accomplishes nothing!
3. Effective men and women “build on their strengths….  They do not build on weakness….”   If you get lost in stamping out all of your defects you will accomplish very little in life.  Take care of the major defects that negatively impact your life.  Then focus on your strengths and the strengths of those around you and use those strengths to climb the heights of your possibilities:  most of the rest of your defects will take care of themselves.
4. They “concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.  They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions.  They know that they have no choice but to do first things first — and second things not at all…”  Maintain a prioritized “To Do” list and do “first things first” no matter how daunting they might be or as Brian Tracy say:  “Eat the frog!”
5. They, finally, “make effective decisions.  They know that this is, above all, a matter of system–of the right steps in the right sequence.  They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on ‘dissenting opinions’ rather than on ‘consensus of the facts.’  And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions.  What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions.  What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.”  A lot of us in recovery rely on “gut decisions” or the quiet voice within to guide us but, in fact, they should only be a small part of your decision making procedure.  We learn, in the program, to rely on a sponsor and/or a spiritual advisor for input on our decisions:  make sure you have good ones!  But also make sure to investigate the facts not as you want them to be but as they are.

Take a little bit of time and reflect on this.

Do you want to be effective or do you just want to wander aimlessly through life in a hit or miss fashion?

Your life is what you make it.