Amber Hollingsworth walks through why self-awareness matters in recovery: knowing your triggers, strengths, and values helps you build a life you actually want. She recommends three concrete tools: an emotional triggers checklist, the Gallup StrengthsFinder, and a Life Values Inventory.
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For me, the key to recovery is all about building a life that you love. Because when you do that, you really have less need for that substance or addictive behavior because you're happy with who you are and the life you've built. Now, I know you're thinking, okay, Amber, that's easier said than done. Don't worry. I'm going to elaborate a little bit more on how to do that now. It's always my goal to give you practical, concrete advice and strategies, not just a whole lot of philosophy and stories and fluff. I always want you to walk away from my videos with some actual action steps. And today's action step is all about self awareness. The first step to building a life that you love is to really understand yourself very well. In fact, in recovery, it is very, very necessary to have more self awareness than the average Joe. And the reason is, is because sobriety and recovery requires honesty, self honesty on that most people just don't have to worry with. But when you're trying to stay sober and you're trying to be in recovery, you have to constantly be aware of what your own motives are, of what your triggers are, of the people that you put yourself around and the situations that you find yourself in. Now let's dive in a little bit further into this idea of self awareness. What kind of things do you mean? Well, what I think is important for you to know is what kind of situations bring out the best version of you? What kind of situations bring out the worst version of you? And why do you think that is? Why is it that certain situations bring out the good and certain situations bring out the bad? What's the key formula or ingredients there? Of course you need to learn what your triggers are. Yes. I mean, triggers that would make you maybe want to relapse, but also just emotional triggers. What's going to make you upset or sad or angry? I'm willing to bet that if you take a little bit of a deep look inside that there are some patterns here, and once you can put your finger, finger on those patterns, then you can actually control them much better. You're not at the whim of your emotions anymore. When you realize what's happening to you, you can gain control of it. Now, if you're not sure what your emotional triggers are, I'm going to put a link to a video at the end of this video that will explain that a little further. And I'm also going to put a link in the description for you to download a checklist of emotional triggers. And it actually Includes a lot of the really common ones and some that you might not have ever thought about before, but, but somehow just the process of naming it and identifying it goes a long way to helping you get control of it. Other areas of self awareness that you want to explore is what are your strengths? What are you good at? What are your natural gifts and talents? What are your weaknesses? What are you not good at? What are your values? What's really important to you? Knowing these things will help you structure your life in such a way that you can maximize your strengths, gifts and talents and minimize your weaknesses to the best that you possibly can. It's also going to help you structure your life in a way to help you live according to what's important to you, according to your values. When you do that, you like yourself so much better, you like your life so much better. And bonus, other people like you better too, because it's going to be your best self. Now, if you're a fan of the 12 steps, or you're working a 12 step program, or you have a sponsor, there are some natural steps built in that are designed specifically, specifically to help you become more self aware. You know, like starting with step number four. But don't worry if you are not a big 12 step fan. There are other ways to go about this. You can get a counselor and do some counseling to take a look at wanting to understand yourself better, learn more things about yourself. Another thing that I recommend pretty frequently to my clients is I recommend that they take the Gallups Strength Finder Inventory. Now you may have heard of Gallup, if you've worked in any kind of business setting, they're the people that put out all of the like employment surveys that you have to take at the end of the year and stuff like that. Well, Gallup actually from all those surveys they really developed a list of 30, 30 something, I can't remember exact number, like 36. I want to say strengths. These are core things that are natural to people, that they sort of bring to the table. Now I'm not talking about like English, math and science. I'm talking about other things that are more natural to you. Like are you a connector of people? Are you really good at connecting people together? Are you a natural leader? Are you a natural visionary? Are you naturally very analytical? You get what I mean? It's these more like innate kind of traits that we all have. Now one of the things I like about the strength finder test is it will tell you your top five. It's going to ask you a bunch of questions. Now, I've taken this test and when I was answering these questions, I thought to myself, this isn't really going to give me like this isn't going to be accurate. But then when it spit out my answers, I was like, dang, they kind of got me. This is pretty good. They nailed me. Now, one easy and actually fairly inexpensive way to do it is just to go on Amazon and buy the strength finder book. It's a little book, it's a red book. But what's good about it is when you buy the book, it actually gives you a code to be able to take the online test for free because you purchased the book. So I'll put a link to that in the description. Now when you do that, when you take the test from that link that's in the book, it'll actually give you your top five strengths, which I think is super helpful. But another thing you can do is you can sort of opt in to get your whole list. So that takes all the 35 and it ranks them in order from your top all the way down to what are your not so strengths? And I personally feel like that's probably just as important to know what are the things that you're not good at? Because that really helps you steer your life away from those things. You don't want to get a job that requires skills that, that are things that are in your bottom five because if you do, you're gonna be miserable. You're not gonna be, your talents and gifts aren't gonna be utilized and you're just gonna be unhappy. So take the time and check out the strengths finder. Another thing you can do, another thing that we do in our office pretty commonly is we encourage people to do something called the Life values inventory. Again, this is another one of those, like little self assessment questions. It's like multiple choice and it has you rank what are the things most important to you and man does it clarity on the things that are important to you. Because I know when I say what are your values? You're probably just going to say like the really common, like family, security, stuff like that. And I'm not saying that those aren't your values. I'm just saying that it can be a little bit more complicated than that and you may want to delve a little deeper to really take a look at what are the things that drive you, what's important to you. Because again, knowing these things is going to help you create a life that works for you. I always tell my clients, hey, work within your operating system and all the things I'm telling you about today, it's all about understanding what operating system you're using. Now, you might already know some of this stuff. Are you already aware of what kind of situations bring out the worst version of you or bring out the best version of you? If so, let me know that in the comments below. Because when other people read that, they're gonna be like, oh yeah, man, me too. And you're gonna be not only helping yourself, but helping to identify those things that bring out the best and worst in them.
