Choose a New Direction in Sobriety
How you can balance and prioritize your best life in recovery
The holidays are a challenging time of year.
You may be feeling vulnerable and prone to triggers or experiencing financial distress and family drama on top of holiday stress, which may challenge your emotional sobriety.
Life can become truly unbalanced because:
- You are having trouble navigating the ‘party’ atmosphere of the holiday season.
- The demands of work, family, and friends are overwhelming you.
- You’ve lost your ability to make sobriety the most important priority.
While giving and receiving material gifts is a part of most people’s holidays, none of these things are in any way as important as you managing and caring about your sobriety.
Since you’ve shown an interest in working on your recovery, I would like to make you an offer that, while is a stand-alone opportunity for your growth, it also will give you a peek into the Good Life Recovery membership program.
This tool I want to share with you is called Your Recovery Wheel.
I’ve decided to share with you what is lesson #1 in my membership program so you can assess and calculate where you are putting most of your time and energy in the nine important areas of life. By completing this exercise, you will get a crystal-clear view of your starting point, by mapping out the levels of input you give to your body, mind, heart and soul.
While most of us have a felt sense of the lack of balance and purpose in our lives, it’s only when we are willing to take an honest look at the “data”, that we can make decisions for positive change.
By doing this, you will learn how to better support yourself this holiday season with simple tweaks.
This could mean the difference between your decisions to support your recovery and those that you don’t realize set you up for emotional or physical relapse.
I found The Balance Wheel to be a helpful tool that offered a surprising depiction of how I was spending my time. After completing it and having an actual visual ‘graph’ in front of me I made the observation that I had been operating automatically, on a monotonous treadmill that was far too centered on work, followed closely by education and self-development (aka work).
Overall, I found the Balance Wheel to be a valuable tool to enable me to recognize and begin to recalibrate what is actually important in my life. I noted that I had not taken time to do a total self-evaluation, maybe ever. I wonder what will have shifted when I go back to it in a few months? I now have some more balanced goals and dreams to develop and grow into.
-T.H.
I really enjoyed doing this recovery wheel exercise. This is the second time I’ve done it actually and it’s nice to see the changes in my recovery, work, and life balance. The first time I did it I was really aware that too much of my heart and soul was going into work and not enough into other areas like self-care, and creating more fun in my life. This time I am proud that I have made some changes that reflect other priorities and that feels great. I’m working less and proud of myself for that! My recovery life is going well and I feel like when I get emotionally off-balance I can think of this wheel and see how I might help myself feel better. It’s a really useful tool.
-D.Z.
The recovery wheel delineates nine essential parts of a satisfying and healthy life. In the exercise of defining where I prioritized and where I was weak, I was not surprised to see that work-life takes up a major portion of my time and psychic energy. I have been working the last five years to get more balance in my life, bringing in more play/fun time and more exercise and nature time. I felt both excited to see my progress in creating more balance in my life and chagrined about how challenging it is to change a lifelong pattern of working hard at the expense of better life balance. I am now working on setting aside in a planned manner more time to spend connecting with old friends as well as developing my newer friendships and more time in my spiritual communities. The recovery wheel gave me a great visual assessment of where I was out of balance and what those areas were.
-H.S.
So here is what I want to offer you.
It’s an opportunity to examine your life and decide whether what you are currently doing is jeopardizing or supporting your best life in recovery.
In this offer, you’ll have access to the recovery wheel, with instructions how to map your life on it, along with explanations and exercises to complete. This will guide you to point your life in the right direction – towards quality emotional sobriety. And it only costs $47.
There is no better time than now, when addiction rates are rising, when individuals and families are under increasing stress and strain, and when the holiday season brings with it added pressures.
You will benefit:
- By bringing awareness to the greatest imbalances in your life.
- By understanding how that shifts your attention away from quality recovery.
- By claiming what matters to you.
- By making decisions that serve your best life.
- By learning how to shift your priorities to create more balance.
In completing this assignment, I realized where I needed to focus more time & energy to get the wheel to roll forward in my Recovery. A lot of my time was focused on education/self-development & time alone. Social time was lacking as well with family & friends. I saw my tendency to isolate myself at times. It’s one thing to think I have addiction all figured out by reading all the books & listening to every podcast, but without the connection to other humans to share this information with I cannot learn to grow in my Recovery.
I also realized I was not physically active to feel good in my body & mind naturally instead of using substances. I have found a spiritual connection through meditation, music & yoga. All of which are very important to me. My recovery is a priority as I have weekly appointments with my therapist & attend as many AA meetings in the rooms as possible. I feel that honesty & trust to be my greatest asset for my commitment to staying sober. With that said, it was my therapist who encouraged me to seek out GoodLife Recovery. Thank God I did! It has been a game-changer for me in my Recovery.
-M.B.
I knew that my life was out of wack, but I didn’t realize how much, or exactly where. I had a general idea that I worked too much and my personal time suffered, but that was about it. By doing this, I can totally see why I’m emotionally “off” and it makes so much sense now! I realized that I wasn’t getting enough social interaction, which I thought I wanted, but realized that wasn’t healthy. As expected, I don’t put enough time into personal hobbies or pleasure, I just had no idea that to be balanced, I was off that much! I give give give all day long but when it comes to me, I could really SEE how I go flat instead of just thinking it. The Recovery Wheel and this lesson as a whole are not difficult, but it does take some self-reflection and honesty within yourself. I’ve been able to put a plan into place for how I want to rearrange my priorities, and it has been working. Since it’s what I’ve deep down wanted for quite a while, I feel like everything is just falling into place, and I am so excited to see where this continues to take me! I think somehow I just needed a reason to do it, and this has been an excellent reason.
-L.M.
MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
If you find this lesson helpful and it piques your interest in what more you can learn about living your best life in recovery, I am going to make you a second amazing offer.
If, in the next 30 days, you want to sign up for my exclusive, one-of-a-kind membership program – Good Life Recovery, I’ll take the cost of this lesson off of your membership price. That’s right – this lesson will end up costing you nothing. Here is what one member said about the Good Life Recovery Program.
I have thoroughly enjoyed being a member of the Good Life Recovery membership group. The stress that I was feeling in the business environment, made some of my personal challenges feel larger and more overwhelming. My experience with Sue was that of a supportive, yet no nonsense approach (which I appreciate), getting to the core of my issues and starting to break them down into more manageable pieces. What is significant in the process is bringing subconscious patterns to the forefront and examining them more closely. In my case, an addiction to success and achievement was an important insight which opened a bigger picture around addiction that Sue helped me work on and it has made a real difference in my wellbeing.
This recovery group has been a great addition to my personal work. It has given me some great insights and tools around the subject of addiction and has provided access to a great group of people who I have enjoyed getting to know and am learning a lot from their shared experiences. Having the biweekly calls provides a great discipline around the process and Sue’s monthly workshop has provided some excellent teachings on the subject of self and how we show up in the world.
In summary, I am a fan of Sue Diamond! I appreciate her style, insights and relatability. She has helped me significantly on the road to a more fulfilling and happy life.
-L.N.
About Sue
Hi, I’m Sue Diamond. I am the Founder and Clinical Director of the Good Life Therapy Centre and the Founder and CEO of Good Life Recovery. I have spent the past 30+ years, both personally and professionally, working in the field of addiction therapy.
I have put the best of what I have learned together to create a pathway to the life that I hope for you to have. I have ‘walked the walk’, struggling to meet the demands of ever-busier career with the demands of quality recovery. During some parts of my sobriety, I have struggled desperately to get it right. It is through this struggle – and coming out the other side – that I have learned first-hand, what truly works and what doesn’t.
I want to share these strategies and practices that made it possible for me to be a successful and busy entrepreneur and maintain quality, rewarding, recovery.
After helping hundreds of clients like you create a life of purpose and passion, I know I can help you too.
I am committed to helping anyone who is interested and willing to do the work, to find the true gift that sobriety promises – a life filled with joy, friendship, prosperity and purpose.
Wishing you the best life has to offer,
Sue