The 30-Day Sobriety Solution: How to Cut Back or Quit Drinking in the Privacy of Your Own Home - Softcover

Canfield, Jack

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476792968 ISBN 13: 9781476792965

Verlag: Atria, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Jack Canfield, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® franchise and coauthor of The Success Principles, and Dave Andrews, a recovery expert, join forces to present a “sensitively written yet no-nonsense guide” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) to help you cut back or quit drinking entirely—in the privacy of your own home.

The 30-Day Sobriety Solution grew out of Jack Canfield’s decades-long work in self-esteem and success training. Its principles were carefully developed into a program by Dave Andrews and tested by thousands whose inspiring stories of recovery are shared throughout the book. Organized into five phases that span 30-day periods, this book guides you through each day with practical exercises that, over time, allow you to more easily make positive choices again and again.

Integrating neuroscience, cognitive therapy, proven tools, and teachings, The 30-Day Sobriety Solution’s daily program will help you achieve your goals—whether that’s getting sober or just cutting back—and create positive, permanent change in your life.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jack Canfield is co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, which includes forty New York Times bestsellers, and coauthor of The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. He is a leader in the field of personal transformation and peak performance and is currently CEO of the Canfield Training Group and Founder and Chairman of the Board of The Foundation for Self-Esteem. An internationally renowned corporate trainer and keynote speaker, he lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Dave Andrews has been a featured “sobriety expert” on more than fifty national and international talk shows. As “America’s #1 Sobriety Coach,” he is the leading expert in helping others recover, reclaim, and reinvent their lives without alcohol, and serves on the Board of Directors of the nonprofit organizations Young People in Recovery and Advocates for Recovery. CEO of The 30-Day Solution, LLC, he resides outside Denver, Colorado, with his family, and has been sober for over eight years.

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The 30-Day Sobriety Solution

Day 1

The 100% Solution

Building Your Foundation for Thriving in Sobriety

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just the first step.1

—DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. (1929–1968)

Clergyman and civil rights leader

As the above quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. says, all you have to do is take the first step. And congratulations—you have already taken the first step by picking up this book and starting to read it. Don’t worry about how far you have to go or what you have to do. You have just opened the door to a life full of unlimited potential and possibility, and we invite you to walk through that door with us now.

The Golden Buddha

We would like to start by having you read this story by Jack that appeared in the first Chicken Soup for the Soul2 book:

In the fall of 1988, my wife and I were invited to give a presentation on self-esteem and peak performance at a conference in Hong Kong. Since we had never been to Asia, we decided to extend our trip and visit Thailand.

When we arrived in Bangkok, we decided to take a tour of the city’s most famous Buddhist temples. Along with our interpreter and driver, my wife and I visited numerous Buddhist temples that day, but after a while, they began to blur in our memory.

However, one temple left an indelible impression in our hearts and minds. It is called the Temple of the Golden Buddha. The temple itself is very small, probably no larger than thirty feet by thirty feet. However, as we entered, we were stunned by the presence of a ten-and-a-half-foot-tall solid gold Buddha. The statue weighs more than two and a half tons and is valued at approximately $196 million. It was an awesome sight—the kindly and gentle yet imposing solid gold Buddha smiling down at us.

As we immersed ourselves in normal sightseeing tasks (taking pictures while oohing and ahhing over the statue), I walked over to a glass case that contained a large piece of clay about eight inches thick and twelve inches wide. Next to the glass case was a typewritten page describing the history of this magnificent piece of art.

Back in 1957, a group of monks from a monastery had to relocate a large clay Buddha from their temple to a new location. The monastery was to be relocated to make room for the development of a highway through Bangkok. When the crane began to lift the giant statue, the weight of it was so tremendous that it began to crack. Rain also began to fall. The head monk, who was concerned about possible damage to the sacred Buddha, decided to lower the statue back to the ground and cover it with a large canvas tarp to protect it from the rain.

Later that evening, the head monk went to check on the Buddha. He shined his flashlight under the tarp to see if the Buddha was staying dry. As the light reached the crack, he noticed a little gleam of light shining back and found that strange. As he took a closer look at this gleam of light, he wondered if something was underneath the clay. He fetched a chisel and hammer from the monastery and began to chip away at the clay. As he knocked off shards of clay, the little gleam grew brighter and bigger. After many hours of labor, the monk stood face-to-face with the extraordinary solid gold Buddha.

Historians believe that several hundred years before the head monk’s discovery, the Burmese army was about to invade Thailand (then called Siam). The Siamese monks realized that their country was about to be attacked and covered their precious golden Buddha with an outer layer of clay to keep their treasure from being looted by the Burmese. Unfortunately, the Burmese apparently slaughtered all of the Siamese monks, and the well-kept secret of the golden Buddha remained intact until that day in 1957.

As we flew back to Los Angeles on Cathay Pacific Airways, I began to think to myself, Just like the clay Buddha, we are all covered with a shell of hardness created out of fear, anger, resignation, and self-doubt, and yet underneath that outer layer, each of us is really a “golden Buddha,” a “golden Christ,” or a “golden essence,” which is our real self. Somewhere along the way, between the ages of two and nine, we begin to cover up our “golden essence”—our natural self. Much like the monk with the hammer and the chisel, our task now is to discover our true essence once again.

What about you? What have you been using drinking to cover up or hide from? What “golden” parts of yourself have you let alcohol conceal? Today we will start to uncover the answers to these two important questions and help you get back in touch with the parts of you that may have become lost due to your problem drinking.

The 30/60/90 Day Plan

In the early eighties, Maine’s legislature enacted a returnablebottle-and-can law. Instead of going into the trash, my sixteen-ounce cans of Miller Lite started going into a plastic container in the garage. One Thursday night, I went out there to toss in a few dead soldiers and saw that this container, which had been empty on Monday night, was now almost full. And since I was the only one in the house who drank Miller Lite—Holy shit, I’m an alcoholic, I thought, and there was no dissenting opinion from inside my head—I was, after all, the guy who had written The Shining without even realizing (at least until that night) that I was writing about myself. My reaction to this idea wasn’t denial or disagreement; it was what I’d call frightened determination.

—STEPHEN KING

Author of over fifty novels selling more than 350 million copies3

As we mentioned in “Getting Started,” this book was designed for you to read and implement over 30 days. We have repeatedly found that people who are serious about cutting back or quitting drinking will experience the greatest likelihood of success by completing one solution a day for 30 consecutive days.

Mike, a graduate of The 30-Day Sobriety Solution, discovered how effective it was for him to have a solution a day to turn to. He would come home every day from work and have the urge to drink, but instead of giving in to that urge, he would dive into that day’s solution. So instead of going to happy hour, he replaced that with doing the program.

We have also found that a couple of alternatives can work just as well, including completing a solution every two or three days. The key to being successful is to decide the frequency that works best for you, and then hold yourself accountable for following through with that discipline. In fact, research has shown that you are more likely to follow through with something if you have set up a structured plan of action.4

For example, if you plan to complete this program in 30 days, you need to set aside approximately forty-five minutes to an hour each day, which at first might sound like a lot of time. However, put it into perspective by thinking about the amount of time that you used to spend drinking every week. Often, the time you spent thinking about drinking, planning the next drinking event, doing the actual drinking, and then recovering from your drinking adds up to far more than an hour a day. Some of our graduates have shared that simply cutting out or cutting down their time spent on social media websites was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476792968
• ISBN 13: 9781476792965
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 592
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande