Let’s talk about how to build a house.
You may be asking yourself why I want to talk about building a house. Stick with me. Today and tomorrow I promise I will make sense of all this for you. I need to break this into two parts because I’m trying to keep these a bit shorter on a daily basis. Call it click bait if you will, but you’ll have to come back for edition 192 of The Anxious Morning to see how this all ends. ;-)
If you want to build yourself a house, you will design it and create a program - steps to follow - to get that house built. This program will inform what you do in any given month, week, or day. This month we’re getting a building permit. In two weeks we’re going to take delivery of all the lumber and building materials. Next Friday we’re going to frame the first floor. You follow a program. You know what you’re doing at that scale and working in a particular direction.
Within that program there are tasks. One of those tasks is driving nails into wood. If you are to build your house, you must drive some nails. What are the “steps” for driving a nail?
Get a nail. Get wood. Get a hammer. Hit the nail with the hammer.
That’s it. Those are the nail driving steps. In any given moment when executing the “frame the first floor” program, you are working at a small scale measured in seconds and minutes, and there are very few steps to follow at that scale. Once you’ve heard them, you do them. Maybe you stink at driving nails and have to keep trying and practicing so you can get better. Even if this is the case, there might be a few adjustments you can make but the steps, tips, and techniques at that level are still what they always are. Hit the nail with the hammer.
There is no program or special technique for driving a nail, but driving is a nail is certainly part of a program for building a house. It’s the scale. The scale that you’re working at matters.
How does this relate to anxiety and recovery? Well scale matters there too. Just like you might be frustrated when trying to drive a nail, you might be frustrated by the smallest moments in recovery and hoping for additional instruction that you can use in those moments.
I told you I would bring it back around and make sense of this. Let’s wrap it up tomorrow in edition 192 of The Anxious Morning where I’ll get specific with regard to why recovery is both a program and not a program. And now that I think about it, I might also expand on this in episode 230 of The Anxious Truth podcast that will be out on Wednesday October 26, 2022. If you’re reading this in the future, go listen to that episode. I haven’t recorded it yet, but I have a feeling it’ll be pretty decent.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Hey it’s Monday and that means that today at 2 PM Eastern I’ll do my “Recovery Monday” livestream on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Come join in!
191. Tips, Techniques, Steps, and Programs For Getting Better - Part 1 of 2