There are 2 cornerstones to the introverted recovery program:
Personal growth, and
Holistic health just means that there are a variety of categories that make up your overall health, such as physical health, emotional, mental, spiritual, and so on.
Personal growth, on the other hand, has to do with self improvement–mostly in the way of setting and then reaching your desired goals.
Basically, you want to both become a healthier person while also improving yourself in a number of different ways.
Taken together, these two things become a complete defense against relapse, while also improving your life in numerous different ways.
It gets really exciting later on, because as you continue to reach your goals, some of the gains that you make begin to overlap and compound, which create even bigger leaps forward for you. Peace, joy, and contentment abound in long term recovery if you lay a solid foundation of personal growth at the beginnings. “It gets greater, later.” But, if you focus on personal growth right now, things will start changing for you immediately.
Let’s dive in.
Personal growth starts from “hope threads” in your brain
Every person, whether they are an addict, a person in recovery, or “normal,” are technically hoping for something.
They may be hoping to do well in school, or to get a promotion at their job, or to please their parents or spouse.
They may have smaller “hope threads” spinning through their minds at times, such as a hope for someone in a show they watch on Netflix, or a hope to excel in a video game they play.
Or they may have a minute to minute hope thread in their brain to get to the next fix from their drug of choice.
Now that you know about this weird concept of “hope threads that are always running through everyone’s brains,” you can take advantage of it.
You can start hoping for personal growth.
You can start hoping for this system of progression, of setting goals one at a time, of knocking them down, of building yourself into a powerhouse and reaping the rewards of a life well lived.
Now that you know that your brain has to be hoping for something, you may as well be hoping for something good.
Something really good.
And that something should be personal growth. Becoming healthier, setting and meeting your goals, achieving your ambitions, and satisfying your desires in life.
Why settle for stagnation or complacency? Why settle for slipping back into the misery of addiction?
If you are going to hope for something, hope for…..better.
Discovering high impact goals for yourself
There are a few ways to go about choosing some goals for yourself.
Anyone who is on this path is going to want to achieve some degree of happiness in addition to personal growth. That much should be obvious.
But it is important to realize that since no one can sustain being deliriously happy all of the time, one part of this goal should be contentment and peace.
Therefore, in order to achieve contentment in your life, you need to first remove the chaos and misery.
This involves identifying and then removing the “pain points”–the things in your life that are dragging you down, holding you back, and contributing the most to your pain, suffering, and discontentment. Or, instead of diagnosing yourself with these pain points, you may seek advice from others in your life–friends, family members, or a therapist/coach. Sometimes we get so close to our own problems or pain that it becomes part of our identity. We may need someone else to point out to us that we have this stumbling block that is creating problems or misery for us.
These could be things such as a dead end job that you can’t stand, a failing relationship that is going nowhere, or simply getting no exercise while continuing to smoke.
Fixing these pain points–rather than pursuing more positive, exciting goals–is going to give you a much bigger bang for your buck–at least at first.
Achieving a goal of excitement, passion, or pleasure isn’t going to matter as much if you are still miserable from having some of these major pain points still dragging you down. The pain and misery will drown out any positive impact you try to make in other areas.
You have to fix the problem areas before you focus on adding in the “fun stuff.”
At any rate, we start with the pain points.
Prioritize one goal at a time
In my experience, it is beneficial to focus on one goal at a time.
This is especially true in the beginning of your journey, when you have prioritized the biggest and most impactful goal on your list.
Always do this: decide which goal that, if achieved, would reduce the most stress, anxiety, or misery for you–and then pursue that goal with all of your efforts.
Ignore the other goals on the list for now, until you can achieve and master that first, most impactful goal.
For people in early recovery from addiction, you’ve already started this process, and your first goal was to become clean and sober. That was the most impactful decision. Maintaining it is of the utmost importance.
For me, my next most impactful goal was to find a job that I didn’t hate. Once I established that, I set a goal to return to college. Then, to start exercising regularly. And so on.
Again, I think it is important to just take on one goal at a time. If I had tried to get the job, go to school, and start jogging all at the same time, or even within the same 6 month period, I think I might have failed.
Focus all of your energy on the one, most impactful goal in your life–until you reach it successfully.
Lock in the benefits by establishing habits
With each new goal I met, I didn’t just reach the goal–I locked in the gains. I established a firm habit. I am still jogging to this day–24 years later.
Any time you reach a goal, you want to see if there are corresponding habits that you might develop in your life that can help you to maintain the benefits of that goal.
For example:
1) Set a goal to one day attend a silent weekend meditation retreat, start a meditation program to prepare for this, decide it has great benefit for you, establish it as a habit.
Or:
2) Set a goal to explore journal writing as a means to improve your emotional health. See the benefits, establish it as a daily habit. Start writing daily and reap the rewards.
Establishing these habits is a next level upgrade for your life, because then you lock in those benefits on an ongoing basis.
Success breeds more success and builds confidence and momentum
After I started jogging, I got ambitious and decided to run a race. I’m not fast, mind you–I wanted to push myself to greater distances.
Eventually, I reached the goal of finishing a marathon, a full 26.2 miles.
At that point, I had already achieved a few other goals as well. And I realized, this was momentum. I felt confident that I could keep going, that I could set more ambitious goals, that I could set my laser focus on another significant, impactful goal–and that I could, and would, eventually achieve it.
Success was breeding more success.
Combining holistic health and personal growth – the 2 cornerstones
Personal growth is self improvement.
Holistic health views several different aspects of your life.
Personal growth is your gas pedal–your accelerator.
Holistic health is the direction your car is pointed–it’s where you want to go.
Combining these 2 concepts is where the magic happens.
We know that in order for our recovery to be resilient, we need to create personal growth in all areas of our life–not just in spirituality.
So we slice up the pie–spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, social–and then we create a checklist to address these areas on a day to day basis.
Then, in a broader sense, we set larger goals that may take weeks, months, or even years to achieve.
Running a marathon or attending a weekend meditation retreat doesn’t happen overnight–but these are the sorts of long term goals that can pay big dividends, because they fall under the realm of holistic health and personal growth.
The synergy between your achieved goals
I know, I know….the word “synergy” is loaded with hype, it’s a total buzzword.
But in this case it’s real, I promise. It just means that the sum of the parts is actually more than what it should be, that when you add up the result of all your goals you are working on, the end result is way, way more than you expected.
And this is because the benefits of those goals will enhance each other.
For example, I started jogging. I learned discipline from this. I ran a marathon eventually. Grit, discipline, you name it. Jogging gave it to me.
As you can imagine, these benefits carried over into other areas of growth. I later built a business that I worked on almost every single day. I worked a regular day job. I continued to exercise. I built new relationships in life. I finished a bachelor’s degree. And so on.
So the benefit from one goal carried into other goals.
These synergies cannot always be predicted, and often you won’t even recognize they are happening. But the positive effect is still there, as long as you continue to:
1) Prioritize your most impactful goal.
2) Put all of your energy into that one goal until it is achieved.
3) Lock in those benefits and gains through daily habits.
4) Move on to the next most impactful goal on your list.
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