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I was at a good meeting the other day where people were talking about being a sober person in the workplace, and it was helpful. I didn’t really learn anything new, but man, it helps just to feel like you are one of many dealing with certain things.
The workplace is a big part of sobriety for so many people. In theory, I want to carry my spiritual principles into all of my affairs, and that includes the workplace. However, I have run into some issues with that part of my life because businesses are businesses, which means they can be impersonal sometimes. The goal of the company that I work for is to be financially successful, and that goes for pretty much every capitalistic endeavor that you might be a part of. Capitalism and spirituality don’t always go hand in hand, and that was a tough lesson for me to learn.
I’ll give you one specific example from my life. Right around the time I started to find my footing in sobriety, I began to have a lot of professional success, too. Shocking how that works, huh?
That meant that at about the same time I started getting asked to sponsor people in recovery, I was asked to manage people in the workplace. Most of the time, I was trying to do similar basic things—help others succeed, give guidance when possible, call people out on stuff when necessary.
But I ultimately realized after a few years that sponsoring someone and managing someone else is a totally different thing, and that I couldn’t duplicate some of my beliefs. For instance, I learned that you can’t make somebody stay sober… but sometimes you can make a coworker start showing up on time at the office. I learned that forcing suggestions onto newcomers in sobriety is usually pretty fruitless… but forcing suggestions to coworkers is often times why they pay you the money every day. I learned that if somebody relapses in sobriety, it usually doesn’t have much to do with me and that if my side of the street is clean as a sponsor, there’s not much else I can do… but in the workplace, if a colleague butchers something, I am often responsible in some way, too.
That may sound like some daunting distinctions, and sometimes they can be. But for the most part, I have found that many of the spiritual principles that matter the most to me are possible in all walks of life. I try to be kind, optimistic, calm, fair but firm, nonjudgmental, not gossipy and find the humor in most things. I can do that both in sobriety and also in the workplace.
Of course, I have caught myself crossing the streams a few times (that’s a Ghostbusters reference, for all the young people out there). Be careful of that. You don’t want to be in a conference room at the office and blurt out, “Let go and let God,” and you certainly don’t want to pester sponsees about getting their expense reports done on time.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS: “You know what they say, ‘In AA there’s a wrench for every nut.’”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 2001, Anonymous)
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