Mindset chapters 5-6

[Teresa Rodden]

#2667

RECAP:
What is your mindset around alcohol?
I chose this book because it’s essential to understand the difference between fixed and growth mindsets. Carol Dweck has done extensive research, and although it’s not specific around alcohol, that’s how I learned my way to sober freedom. I didn’t follow the traditional path. It wasn’t a good fit for me, and I would have ended up drunk. I couldn’t adapt to the belief system that I was told to accept. I felt like I was not in charge of myself.
How many people do you think delay the process of living in sober freedom, finding a new way of experiencing life without alcohol, or learning to experience alcohol differently because they believe it’s all or nothing?
How many believe there is only one way to think about alcohol or see themselves with alcohol?
Mindset Chapter 5 – 6 Summary and how and what I apply to the topic of drinking habit.
Chapter 5 Business: Mindset and Leadership
Chapter 6 Relationships: Mindsets in Love (or not)

Awareness
“We know from our studies that people with the fixed mindset do not admit and correct their deficiencies.”
In my last months of living through hell with Prince Harming I felt trapped. My mindset was fixed. There was nothing I could do so I drank to accept my fate. I know it sounds dramatic, but my life was dramatic. I couldn’t think of the possibilities of a future that I would want. I was stuck…fixed.
When I finally accepted, I had responsibility in how my life WAS (past and present) and how it could be (future) even without seeing the whole staircase, as if by magic my life course was correcting.
So, maybe it’s hard to relate because I have been alcohol free for more than eighteen years. Maybe you think I think it’s easy. I don’t. But I know it doesn’t have to be hard and a lifetime of labels, language and limiting beliefs.
This was incredibly difficult. I don’t want it to seem I just made a decision and poof I was sober. I was tormented with accepting my life circumstances for months before I took the first step, and then another and another, and so on.
Can you relate to this in any area of your life? Is there something in your life that you are not addressing because you feel like it’s “fixed?”

Who You Wish to Be
What resources can you have on deck to support you when you need to dig deep for peace, calm and sanity?
Do you need to perfect sobriety to experience sober freedom? No. And because of that someday you just might!

Questions, ideas, and statements that jumped out as I was reading these chapters:
It’s important to experience good clean pain. If try to avoid the pain it will settle in our bodies and psyche and we will need to treat that pain with food, alcohol, screen time, gambling, sex or a myriad of other outlets.
Fixed mindsets don’t have to be permanent. You can retrain your brain and develop a growth mindset.
Fixed mindsets tend to hold hard and fast to beliefs. A belief is only a thought we think over and and over and look for evidence to prove to be true. How many beliefs have been disproven when originally thought as fact? The earth is flat is an obvious one. Another is the brain is permanently changed with addiction. Neuroplasticity proves the brain changes and can change with time, intention, and practice.
Fixed mindsets assign blame and believes character flaws are to blame for mistakes or less than stellar performance. A growth mindset will learn from the mistakes and keep moving forward.
Choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems. No partner is perfect. I thought this was an interesting take on relationships. What are your thoughts?

RECAP
CONCLUSION
The books that I chose for the final quarter of 2021 were on purpose. They contributed to who I was becoming on my journey to alcohol autonomy. It’s exciting to revisit these books at THIS stage in my life. It’s like, oh yeah, I forgot about that, and I am interpreting the content much deeper and broader than before.
And taking notes and recording thoughts for your benefit is taking it to the next level. Thank you for being a part of my journey too.

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