Transcript:

Julie: Welcome everybody! So excited to meet all of you. This is a new group of people today, except for – our lovely Corina – who has been with us at least a couple of times now. Including one surprise visit, that was amazing. Anyway, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself, Corina?

Corina: Sure, I am Corina, and I live in Canada, in Edmonton. I am a school teacher. And I am I just looked it up. I am 364 days sober!

Steve: Yes! Almost a year! Happy almost one year!

Julie: We’re going to celebrate it with you anyway, even though it’s a day early. Super excited to get to celebrate that with you today. Thank you so much for being here and spending your evening with us. And next we will go to Eric.

Eric: My name is Eric S. I’m a grateful recovered addict, human dumpster fire. Most favorite human dumpster fire or signal fire, which ever you want depending on the day. I have 565 days clean, all consecutive. I live in San Diego, CA on the left hand coast of the United States, the southern part.

Julie: Fantastic.

Eric: So stoked to be here. And congratulations Corina, tell me how it feels tomorrow!

Corina: I will, I will for sure.

Julie: Cool, well it’s really nice to meet you. Steve sent me some of your Tiktok videos and I love that you introduce yourself as a grateful human dumpster fire. As soon as I saw that I was like, oh, he’s our people and he’s going to fit in here. So really good to meet you and last but not least is James.

James: Thank you. My name’s James Fox and my sober date is 12/6/2020. Not exactly the best year to get sober but I made it through and here I am. My drug of choice is alcohol and I’m here to get on social media platforms and help others recover is what I’m here for.

Steve: Right on. Thanks man.

Julie: Thank you, and to all of you for recovering out loud. It takes so much courage, and it’s so important, what you guys are doing on social media. So we really appreciate you guys and it’s really good to have you all here. It’s a really common phenomenon in recovery to feel like you’ve hit a plateau. Early on, there’s so much momentum that it keeps you going, keeps you excited about recovery, and inevitably everyone seems to hit a plateau. A time when they feel like their life has become stagnant. So, have you experienced that? We would love to hear your thoughts about how it felt and how you’ve gotten through it. Anybody is welcome to start and we will go from there.

Eric: I’ll go. Eric, recovering addict, recovered, in recovery… that, when we talked about that question, Steve and I talked on the phone today, the irony was that I’m coming out of a season like that right now in my life. Outside, when we get clean, I’ll use the term clean as all encompassing. When we recover, we take those baby steps, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day, to week to week. A lot of times what I saw in my own recovery is that my strides became so long that eventually I became comfortable in the long ones. You can only take a stride so far and then it’s like I’m running this race and there’s nothing happening. And what happened is, so, I learned this thing early on in recovery, the acronym HALT. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. And then B – Bored. Those things we can tap out also. We hit that wall, we plateau. We find that we become irritable, restless and discontented. So what I had to do was go back in my recovery, the hardest 18 and a half months of my entire life. I’m 46 years old, I have 3 children, I’m just finishing the tail end of a nasty divorce. So everything in my life fell apart. My identity fell apart, everything fell apart. As I slowly built it back up, I slowly got to this point where… now what do I do? It happened at like 16 months. Now what do I do? It’s almost like the joy and the elation of the newness of things… I started to get in a rut. You know they say you get in a rut – you know what a rut is? It’s a coffin with the ends blown out. (laughter) We either grow or we die. In recovery, we know that. In addiction we knew, it was insanity doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Same thing in our recovery – we do the same thing over and over again and we expect different results. And we plateau. One of the greatest benefits I have is an amazing sponsor, sits near station to Jesus Christ, the dude is so rad. Everybody jokes around and they call him Baby Jesus. The most loving, wise dude and that’s what he said to me. You can’t stay clean today on yesterday’s recovery. You’ve got to do something different. You need to continue to change it up. And one of the things I did was I started to implement a little bit more service in my life. If I’m lacking serenity, the way to get more serenity in my life is to be of service. So I had to change things up, if that makes sense, right?

Corina: I’ll speak to that, too because this is not my first kick at the cat. Sorry cats. To try to get into recovery. And sometimes it is, it’s that struggle of that boredom that comes in and it’s sometimes called a “rut-tine”. A routine, right? It sometimes becomes a “rut-tine.” Doing the same thing over and over again. And I also remember a moment around the 8 month mark where, because I’m doing all the steps and you just hit this realization that, this is my life now, this is what it is. So yes, in the same way that you want to change things up, there’s also that duality of accepting things as it is and being okay with being with the same people, we like novelty we like new things. I also think that it’s important. What I keep in my mind, it’s a Buddhist quote. “Before enlightenment, you chop wood and carry water. After enlightement, you chop wood and carry water.” So it is this sense of serenity and peace in maintaining. But you’re right Eric, shifting so that you’re doing more service or shifting so you are seeking more serenity. I get that too. For me, it’s also for me, been about embracing what it is because otherwise, yeah, I’m going to seek a thrill. I’m going to go out there… I don’t need anymore thrills, thank you very much! So that’s what’s working right now for me. And when I get to 18 months I’ll revisit some of the things as well, as I move through the different changes. But just embracing it as it is and not fighting it all the time. I don’t need novelty all the time.

Julie: There’s a balance there I think. I was actually talking to some people about this just the other day. I think so many of us are used to chaos. Right? Before we quit drinking our lives were absolutely chaotic. When we do quit drinking, it’s still chaos. It’s that emotional roller coaster, up, down, trying to do the work, everything changes in your life. So it’s still a state of chaos, it’s just chaos with a positive direction, I think, after you quit drinking. But there comes a point where you actually reach peace. And I think for a lot of us, just peace is very uncomfortable. It’s not something we’ve spent much time experiencing. So it feels like itchy and weird like you want to be doing something. (laughter) You’re looking, what is missing, what am I not doing? And at some point you realize, maybe this is just peace. Maybe this is okay. And I think there’s a balance there too because I think if you stay in… there’s a difference between peace and stagnation, right? You can go peacefully through each day, not looking for drama and not looking for chaos. But you can get to the point where it does become a danger zone. I think it takes a certain amount of wisdom and self awareness to recognize when you’ve gone from just a state of peaceful being to a state of dangerous stagnation.

Corina: Absolutely. That resonates.

Steve: I think one of the things for me is that I sit at that spot. I completely hear what you’re saying about peace, Julie, and the chaos. For me I used to call it the chaos of nothingness. And it was… there was all of this stuff and none of it mattered. And if you can sit in that in silence and let the world move around you and still exist, that’s where the peace is. When I get stuck, or bored or that plateau where I had that lightbulb moment where I was like, yes! You can feel that moment of growth and that momentum and then you ride that momentum and that wave starts dying off. And then you’re like, now what happened? I’ve made a life change, life has reacted to that change, I’m still changing in there, but those strides… now I’m back to baby steps but I’m not really seeing my forward movement anymore. I go back to, I need to reflect on where I once was. Because I keep going on that path, and taking those baby steps and I might be really enjoying those moments and I might be feeling that peace and I’m really taking it all in. In those baby steps, those are the moments where I’m traveling and I’m present. When I start feeling lost in that I need to look back and my journals, or talk to some people and say, hey, where was I two months ago? Where was I three months ago? Where was I last year? That moment of reflection. You talk about being grateful. You go back that far and pull that out and go, wow! Three months ago I talked about maybe working out a little bit. I never did anything with that. And two weeks ago, I started that and I’ve been doing that I’ve been really struggling. Look how far I’ve come. There’s so much in going back to see where you came from. And using that reflection as, damn, I’m doing pretty good here. Even though I was thinking that I wasn’t doing pretty good. And I’ve come a long damn way. I need to reevaluate here. Okay, I can find that peace again. I can understand that it’s okay to be where I am right now. But obviously if I’m feeling that itch and that itchiness, there’s something I’m missing. I’ve got to at least go take a look. I’ve got to start investigating.

Julie: Investigating is a great word for that.

Eric: There’s this cool thing I do with my sponsees once we get through the third step. I have them write themselves a letter, and I give it to them when they take their year. And that’s exactly what I do. I give it to them and after the meeting or wherever we take their one year, I give them that letter and I say, I want you to sit and I want you to see how far you’ve come. Now I want you to consider where you want to be in the next year. And you know when we start out in recovery, we can be like, at least for me – I statements, I should make I statements, right? I couldn’t see where I was going to be in three months. When I came into – I went to a treatment center in San Clemente. Can I do a little plug real quick? Covenant Hills treatment center in San Clemente, California. I did 45 days inpatient, 45 days outpatient. I went into that place having – from the age of 12 to the age of 44 – I had daily suicidal ideations. I thought that was what everybody went through. So for me, I couldn’t tell you where I was going to be in three months, two months, I couldn’t tell you where I was going to be in a week because in the back of my mind, the first two weeks I was in treatment they wouldn’t let me up on the roof deck because I was a jump risk. I was looking for an exit. But we get out of that, like you said, that chaos. I grew up and chaos was my comfort. I wound up, my fight or flight switch got jammed into the on position for so long. My limbic system was freaking out mode, and any time there was peace, I was so uncomfortable and I would create chaos. I learned this new manner of living which demands honesty, right? But reassessing and then making daily goals for ourselves, I think is huge for not getting… it’s not so much stagnation, it would be like complacency, right? Complacency is next to resentment. It’s the number 2 offender, right?

Corina: For sure. Interesting.

James: This is perfect for me, because you know we were talking about plateauing right now and I just realized I’m in another one. My first plateau was not quite a year into recovery, but chaos presenting itself to me in the form of my wife and daughter getting T-boned by an F-250 at 55 miles an hour, sending them both to ICU pretty quick. That helped me get on my recovery and really focus on myself as I was taking care of them. But I’m sitting here, and I’m like, oh wait, I’m in a spot where everything seems like it’s going okay. It’s just peaceful and there’s nothing wrong, but it doesn’t feel quite right. I was an alcoholic for 20 years, meth user for about a year and a half, coke user for about three years. I dabbled here and there with everything. And talking to you guys today, and I realized, why am I getting on these social media platforms trying to help others recover? That’s my way of balancing out my system, just to help maintain. For me it’s helping others helps me. That’s the exact words I just told my wife right before I got on here. Me helping others really helps myself.

Julie: Absolutely. I think it’s important to note too, even if you feel like you’re in a state of peace, that doesn’t mean you ever stop working on your recovery. I do something related to my recovery every single day. Whether it’s journaling or whether it’s recording a podcast or on social media replying to people who are newly sober, whatever it might be. I think a lot of it at some point turns into service type things and helping others. But no matter how peaceful you feel, that complacency thing is really important. You can be at peace, but you still can’t let yourself get complacent.

Steve: If I stop doing what I was doing or what I’m doing to make sure that I maintain my recovery, I’m going to lose it. I used to be able to speak French fluently and I stopped speaking French. I can barely speak French now and that’s because I don’t use it anymore. If I don’t at least have some sort of maintenance, it’s part of my day it’s part of my way of living, then I think I’m going to lose it just like I lost my ability to speak French.

Julie: And you build that into your life. For me, journaling. Journaling is something I have done pretty much every single day since the first day I quit drinking. It’s just part of what I do. Five or ten minutes in the morning, it doesn’t have to take a huge amount of time. But yeah, the maintenance piece, and learning as you go through your recovery process what pieces need to happen regularly in order to keep you in recovery. I think it’s important to look around and see what those are and find ways to incorporate them. And in a way those things keep propelling you forward too, whether it’s service or journal or whatever it is, and those are things that I do. But they may be tiny baby steps forward, but maintaining still keeps you in some state of forward momentum I think, even if it’s very slow and very peaceful it’s not those huge giant leaps that we were making in the beginning.

Steve: Yeah, and I think when we talk about service. Service doesn’t have to be anything big or extravagant or anything like that. Service can just as well be part of your daily routine, asking someone how they are, giving that opportunity. Showing up to a meeting, if that’s one of the things that you do, just showing up is an act of service to yourself and to everyone that’s there. I think when we talk about the work and the stuff of recovery, it isn’t like lifting wheelbarrows of bricks or anything like that. The hardest part about all of that is just being honest and telling the truth. That is the bricks. That is putting that stuff down and giving it to someone else. That’s where we all learn. That’s where I’ve learned the most about myself, even in these plateaus when I say damn, something’s not right here. I’m not saying that to just myself, I’m saying that to someone else. Someone that’s close. Maybe someone that’s not close because I’ve just met two new people here and maybe I’m going to learn something from them. I think everyone has something to teach us because we are all different.

Eric: There’s a crucial part, I think, also in that understanding when we reach that plateau, there’s 3 things. You guys got me, you made me think about this all day. When Eric thinks about stuff all day, watch out. There’s a lot to talk about here. These 3 things I think about. One is the culture. I can get stuck in the culture. I can become my own worst enemy in recovery, or in society outside of recovery. And I think in my own life, I find that stagnation plateau when I’m only focused on recovery. Like that’s everything about me. I forget how to be a human being and all I’m identifying by is a meeting, another alcoholic or addict, or whatever campout. I forgot to do things outside. Like what subconsciously I didn’t mean to do that. Subconsciously I was like, I have to stay focused on my recovery. But not wanting to learn… how do I live again? We kind of have to learn how to be people, right? Those of us in recovery. I believe what the big book says. We can recover. We can recover from a seemingly hopeless state of mind and body. Suffered from a disease for which there is no known cure, however it can be arrested, right? What I have today is a daily reprieve that is contingent upon the maintenance of my spiritual condition. Right? Sorry to big book you there, but that’s what I believe, that’s what I’ve found true in my life. So outside of that, the culture, in AA, or the culture in recovery can keep me stuck and stagnant, and keep me plateaued. When someone says hey, it’s your disease doing pushups in the background. My disease doesn’t do pushups in the background. I have to get out and do the work. If I’m working, like you said, saying hello to somebody, being of service, holding the door open for a newcomer. I got to the store with my kids and they laugh at me because I ask everybody, what are you grateful for? The cashier. And the look on people’s faces, they’re like, what? Who are you? Oh, I’m your favorite human dumpster fire. The other one is I can do it through my own negative self talk. Our ears are so close to our mouths because our ears listen to ourselves twice as much as they listen to anybody else. Throughout the day, through negative self talk, a lot of times we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We keep ourselves stuck and we keep this plateau. Or the other part is isolation. Am I in isolation in recovery? I will feel plateaued if I’m not helping another person. In the literally of Aa, it talks about this miner who ate his last morsel of food, tightened up his belt, and took his last strike with his pick, and he tapped into an unsuspected resource. But what he found was he can’t keep it unless he gives it away. So if I’m not doing the work, if I’m not giving myself. Like James was talking about, helping others helps me. If I’m not doing that I will plateau very quickly, because I will reach the plateau of what my recovery can give me. And it starts dwindling, dwindling. If I keep it to myself, I will have a cap on it.

Corina: I was just thinking about it, I mean I don’t do AA, I use an app called I Am Sober, so my journey looks a little different. But a lot of it has parallels of course. One of the things on the app, because I pay for a subscription, is you can change the wording of your pledge. So that’s… some people journal. I pledge every day. I pledge every day but I don’t say, “I am going to stay sober today.” And it touches on what you were talking about Julie, I choose peace. Every day, I choose peace. And I’ve chosen peace for 364 days. Tomorrow it’s going to be 365. And I just will always try to remember that I am choosing peace. And that keeps me from veering off the path into chaos or choosing to go back to where I came from, which I came from, which I can’t. I don’t have it in me anymore. I just don’t have that in me.

James: Like you were saying Corina, we all do recover differently. I recover differently from everyone else too. My first step was making a post on social media, telling everybody that I’m going to go into rehab and that I’m going to go into recovery and that I’m going to quit drinking and better my life. I went to one AA meeting and then I found a 12 week outpatient program here in town. I did that 12 week program and I haven’t been to a meeting or a program since. Almost over 2 years later, I wake up every morning and just raw dog sobriety. That’s what I do. I wake up and I just know that I want to be the sober, better person. Better husband, better father, better friend to everyone around me, you know? But we all do recover differently and that’s why, where I came to social media is to help me help others. That’s my plateau breaker.

Steve: I think we all have different experiences. You have a lot of different recoveries. The beauty about sharing an environment like this and sharing our recoveries is there is no one way to do this. Everyone’s recovery is as unique as they are.

Corina: 100%

Steve: And at the same time, we’re all a reflection of each other in one way or another. This is where we get to learn and find the similarities from each other’s recoveries. Not everything is going to resonate and it doesn’t have to. That’s the open mind and that’s just having an open heart about all of this. In the plateau, what is next? I’m going to go back to the chaos for a second. I think there always has to be a next at some point. Even if that’s trying something new. New in just life. Eric talked about how you have to relearn how to do life. I feel like in recovery it’s like a complete and utter life gut job. I get to reevaluate all the things that I’m doing right now and figure out what is mine, what isn’t mine. What is authentic to me, what isn’t, what’s in alignment with me because for the longest time, my values were what everyone else thought they were. Which was only a reflection of their values. And now here I am sitting now, what does Steve like? What is value to me? And I need to know that because then I can figure that out and I can figure out what is in alignment with that. And I think the plateau is, where else am I misaligned? Because when I’m in alignment, I feel peace. I feel that serenity. I feel all those good things if I’m in alignment. But if I get out of alignment, then that itchy feeling comes or I need to do something or I need to change something. Or I need to just accept if for now because it might be too freaking hard for me to do. And there is a lot of life that is too hard to do. And eventually I’m going to have to squeeze that square peg through that round hole and round off those edges because it’s going to fit through one way or another. It’s just about how painful am I going to want it to be when I get there?

Corina: I think if you’re patient enough, you do get through it. I don’t think anybody’s ever… can die of boredom? Sometimes you just have to sit with it. And just investigate, and also get used to the fact as you said Julie, it isn’t necessarily boredom, it could just be getting used to the new normal. And I think is great, this discussion because it’s touching off on so many different ideas about what it means to plateau. In the same way that I had to white knuckle through those first days of sobriety, you’ve got to white knuckle your way through boredom sometimes, too. And then you will be inspired. I’ve started writing again. The clarity of sobriety has reignited my creativity and my thought process, it’s not longer muddied. I can actually speak better than I ever have had before. My brain’s not fried. Yeah, there’s all these other little tiny things that you can focus on. Gratitude kind of also helps to steel through those tough icky spots.

Steve: You’re coming up on the famous one year and there’s the whole one year let down afterwards. I think it’s a phenomenon all on its own. For me it didn’t happen right after one year, it was about the 14 month mark and it lasted probably about two months. Everything is just… someone poked the hole in the balloon and I woke up one day and realized. I think it’s almost like I spent one year focusing on how to stay sober. I spent one year focusing on all of that. I know how to do that, you know how to do that. And then okay, you have all of this leftover energy that you’ve got nowhere to put it anymore! There’s the writing, there’s what am I going to do? And then for me there was the evaluation of where else in my life do I need to put that effort in? I learned what effort looked like in that one year. I learned what determination looked like in that one year. Take that energy, even inside of that lull, and accept that it’s going to be itchy and there’s going to be cravings and it’s going to feel freaking weird. It’ll end. It ended, and then I woke up and I had more energy again for figuring out what to do next and where to go. There’s so much. But that plateau right after the one year for me. It wasn’t the one year, it was about 14 months.

Julie: I like the way you talk about energy. Even when you’re stuck in a plateau, there’s still that energy there, right? I want to say that it was Alex from Creating Ripples who was on the podcast one time. She said recovery is becoming your favorite version of yourself. And that to me was such a cool way to put that. If anything else, even if everything else feels stagnant, you can still ask yourself, “What can I do today to become my favorite version of myself?” Or to be my favorite version of myself. And if that’s the only intention you set for that day, it’s still going to be a successful day, it’s still going to be a productive day. You’re going to be a better person at the end of that day. Even if it’s just little tiny things. There’s something really beautiful too about setting an intention for each day. I know Eric you were talking about you kind of do that, you have your way of doing that. And if that’s all that it is, to be your favorite version of yourself, there’s a lot of beauty in that. There’s a lot of growth in that, too.

Eric: There’s this thing.. Correct me if I’m wrong. Or identify with me if you can agree. We as addicts or alcoholics or however you want to identify. We’re really good at starting things. We’re horrible at finishing things. So what happens is we get clean and sober and we’re still assholes. I’m good at starting. I’m really good at being an asshole. I don’t know how to stop being an asshole. I’m really good at procrastinating. What I have to do is if I’m good at starting things, I have to start being kind. I’m learning to look at things through… have you guys ever read A New Set Of Glasses? That book, for recovery. Or New Pair Of Glasses. Literally, in recovery, we clean the debris off the lenses of our glasses and we start looking at the world and think, it’s in freaking technicolor. Right? Like a miracle happened. As if I never saw color in my entire life! I’m trying to do that with every part of my life when I sense this plateau, or something’s going to top out, right? It happens in business. I’m my own boss. I have to look and go, I reassess and adjust to it, or I tumble. And that’s like what you were saying, in recovery, be the best version of ourselves, just for today. Before I got into recovery I was crippled by my past, I was paralyzed by fear of the future, and I was wasting my time in the present. I never learned how to invest my time. All I did was spend time. So for me in recovery, I try to look at where am I going to invest my time in recovery. I speak of it in business terms, but we do it every day. Like I was saying the 3 G’s, or whether you’re journaling. I like the idea of an app, what did you say? You said…

Steve: She makes a pledge.

Corina: It’s called I Am Sober. It has thousands of users on it. It’s actually how I met Steve and Julie, informally through this app. It is anonymous, my name on the app is not the name I got by in real life. But you can post and you can count the days and there’s all sorts of quotes and inspiration to help you get through. There’s resources. It’s been for me, in this, and I’ve been on this app for way too long. But it has been very beneficial. Not just in terms of pledging every day, but we talked about this, the connections. I think I swear, anybody that I’ve spoken with who has not stayed the course on sobriety. I’m coming up to a year, I’m not a pro yet at sobriety. But I’ve talked to people who have relapsed after seven years, fourteen years, twenty years. And they lost connection. They got complacent and they lost the connection. So I know those are things that I’m anticipating that I’m going to have to focus on and maintain in order to maintain my sobriety. It’s tempting, I think it’s always tempting. I’ve just accepted the fact that the temptation is always going to be there. I mean, even for my first year, “What are you going to do? Buy a case of tequila.” (laughs) Go get wasted! It’s just like… that’s just part of our culture, right? So staying connected, being honest with the people you’re connected with. And when you are stuck, wave your white flag. Hey guys, help. I’m stuck again. And that’s my strategy going forward. It’s going to work!

Julie: It’s worth mentioning too, we met Eric and James on Tiktok, and they’re part of the Tiktok sober community, which is massive. And we are also really involved on Instagram, which also has an incredible sober community. I do most of our Instagramming but people post when they’re having a hard time. Everybody gets each other through it. And I will say the beauty of the I Am Sober app is like what Corina was saying. Some people aren’t ready to put their face and their name on social media where it’s public to talk about sobriety. So apps like I Am Sober – and I know there are other apps, that’s the one that we’ve all used – but you do have the ability to connect with people and really share what’s on your heart and do it completely anonymously and still feel that sense of community. So I think community is the most important thing. I never knew there was an app or anything like that the first time I quite drinking. I quit drinking for 14 months the first time around and I did it without any kind of connection or community because I was so ashamed. I wasn’t going to show my face at a meeting, I wasn’t going to post on social media. I didn’t realize there were other options. I think connection is absolutely the most important part of recovery. Whether it’s early recovery or it’s celebrating with other people because you hit a year, or because you’re stagnant and you need some oomph to help you get going again. Or somebody just to listen and help you get going again. Or help you see things from a different perspective. I think that everybody who is in recovery needs some form of community.

Corina: Amen. A women.

Eric: For me, I couldn’t stop. I served the drug of no choice. I’m an alcoholic. I drank to oblivion, that was it. Controlling my drinking was never any fun. Trying to hide it was never any fun. 2, 3, 4 just fast enough. One more was almost there, just about right, would almost get me tightened up and then you would add meth and it was like…. Jerry McGuire, you complete me! Indestructible. That turned into oblivion. My life was so unmanageable. I couldn’t stop. I was beyond human aid. I couldn’t stop. And I love the idea of the app. I was on an app that just ended. Two months ago, I don’t now if you guys had it in Canada, it was world wide. Sober Together. It was free, it was on Instagram. And they had no funding and it was free and I met some really cool people, made some connections which carried over into.. I think they went to Marco Polo or Facebook or something like that. In community there’s no only camaraderie, there’s also accountability. Corina, you’re saying you raise your red, or white flag right?

Corina: No, red flag sometimes.

Eric: Community is really… if you think about it, if we lean in to our community in recovery, it’s almost impossible to plateau. You’re going to have people around you who are going to encourage you. And encouragement goes such a long way. We just talked about that earlier, right? You either get 1 like or you get 600 likes.

Steve: We talked about a lot of really awesome things here. Corina I really like your Buddhist saying there. Before enlightenment we chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, we chop wood and carry water. So when we plateau, what do we keep doing? The same thing we were doing already. The community, the service, talking to friends, reflecting on how far we’ve come. I think a lot of growth actually happens inside of the plateau because we become aware of where we’re at, where we came from, and we get to look at where we want to go. I want to thank you Eric, thank you James – both you guys on last minute, thank you so much. Corina, thank you. You guys were great.