The topic of step 12 at a Sponsorship through the 12 steps workshop in London, UK

To set the tone for the meeting, I will read an extra. I will read a couple of paragraphs from page 152 of the Big Book.

We have shown you. We have shown how we got out from under. You say, yes, I'm willing, but am I to be consigned to a life where I shall be stupid, boring and glum like some righteous people? I see, I know I must get along without liquor, but how can I have you a sufficient substitute? Yes, there is a substitute, and it is vastly more than that. It is a fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. There you will find release from care, boredom and worry. Your imagination will be fired. Life will mean something at last.

Satisfactory years of your existence lie ahead. Thus, we find the fellowship, and so will you.

Tonight's meeting is Part 2 of working a step 12 with a sponsee, and Tim will share anything between 30 and 45 minutes on the topic, after which the floor will be open for questions rather than the typical sharing. And with that, I will now hand over to Tim. Evening, kiddos. Tim, alcoholic. OK, it's really ironic. I'm doing some kind of workshop on sponsorship. I was just

super crabby with a Swansea. Probably a 7 out of 10,

like 10 is. You're definitely going to be sacked as a sponsor. I was a 7 and I apologized and the words crawled out there. I don't know what you're like when you're apologising and I'm apologising to Sponte. It's like the words are crawling out of my mouth like spiders. They don't want. It's not elegant,

but I think there was a useful lesson.

Whenever I find myself irritated with the Swansea, it's always because I haven't

set the boundary properly in the first place

or I haven't, I haven't, I have, I don't have like a, a standard response. So there's so many things no longer annoying me because I've got a standard response and one of the things that people do and heaven knows I probably did this for like 20 years. Have you ever gone to your sponsor because like something has happened

or a situation has arisen or you have had an emotion or an event has occurred in the last 15 seconds and you're like, I know I'll call my sponsor and you haven't thought about it, you haven't processed it, you haven't done anything. You just like you know that that you just dropping it on the carpet in front of them.

And if I'm caught off guard when someone, someone did that today, and you know, we all do it.

So it's not them in particular, but umm,

I just wasn't poised enough to respond appropriately, which would have been to simply send. I've got some auto text messages. It really helps. By the way, if you find yourself saying the same thing over and over and over again, just type the thing out, have it on like a note with all of the auto text and just send it through. Like something like this is probably a question you can investigate further. I'm available once you investigated it further and have formulated

suitable question. If you need any more input for now, let me know. Like something like that would have been, would have totally sufficed.

So the the annoyance with Swansea's is not coming from them, it's always coming from me because I'm not prepared. I haven't told them what is usual, what is customary for, for a house sponsorship works. So it's always on me. So I was investigate after something has gone down and I've got all crabby, I was investigating what could I've done differently not to have got crabby in the first place.

So the topic this evening we've done, I can't remember what we did last week. It was sponsorship, wasn't it? A sponsorship of sponsorship? There you go this week. So service,

I think the first thing to I have gone through the traditions and the concepts formally with people. I don't like doing it. Other people love it. They, they, they as fonsees, they love it. As sponsors they love it.

I'm very wary myself of academic exercises

for sponsees.

I think by the time you get to step 12, with any luck at all, you should have acquired a person should have acquired the skill to read the material themselves and figure out if they have any questions about how to apply it. So I've got a lot of material on the traditions and concepts which I pass people and resources and their recordings and their various people. And there are there are things lots of like Dennis FS written some great stuff on the traditions and concepts. The concept stuff is eccentric,

but it's very good. It's not kind of really on the concept, it's on his version of the concept. So there's lots of stuff you can give people, but the the reason why going through it academically I don't think is the right way of doing it is because you can't. You have to study the concepts a little bit, but frankly, it's only when you have practical situations that they come alive

in their application.

And

again with, it's just like with everything else. So one thing people are inclined to do with the traditions and the concepts because the traditions just, you know, to, to cover off some basics because people have got different levels of experience. And this even in this little group here, the traditions of the principles by which the group operates, the concepts are the principles by which the service structure operates, right. So they get to step 12. They're supposed to be sponsoring your sponsors are supposed to be sponsoring other people

this point and they're supposed to have some kind of group level service. And ideally also, especially if they've not done it before, to get involved in the service structure, whatever fellowship they're in now,

how do you know they're doing an off service? They have a gazillion questions. If they don't have a gazillion questions, they either don't have enough service or they're not paying attention. Because I had a gazillion questions at group level and in the service structure. And it's just like with everything else, people have the habit of playing look what the cat brought in. So they present you the raw situation and the standard approach. If someone's got a group situation,

of course the temptation is people present you with the raw set situation.

The temptation is to get in there and just tell, well, this is what you do and this is how to look at this and this is what's gone wrong and blah, blah, blah. And it's, it's that people don't learn anything that way. What I've what I've learned to do. And this is a very good way of doing it. You say, have you read the 12 Steps and the 12 Traditions, specifically Bill WS Traditions essays? Yeah, Yeah, I've read those. And have you read Language of the Heart? The Traditions essays and Language of the Heart, slightly different. Yeah, I've read those. OK, great.

Have you got some worksheets and checklists that are like traditions checklists

published by GSO? Have you got those? Yeah, I've got those. Great. So what you can do? You can take your situation and then you can say to yourself in your meditation in the morning, how does tradition one apply to this? How does common welfare arise in this situation? Where does how does personal welfare relate to Commonwealth? How do they get balanced in this situation? And to run through all the principles of the traditions and you'll discover in almost

case people come up with the right answer and a better answer than you could have come up with if just because they know the situation, they know the group. For you to solve it. You'd have to extract a huge amount of information from them to perform the assessment yourself. So as with many other things, you're getting people to do the homework themselves. They'll hate that. They just want to be told

that you're going to do the homework themselves.

And then once they've finished the homework, you say to them, right, OK, well, I agree with all of that except, you know, this, that and the other. Maybe you add a couple of extra things on top or that's great in theory, but in practice, dot dot dot or

so you can you but but you've got they've got to, they've got to take the work to the furthest point they can get themselves. And then you come in

and there was a reading actually, which is so relevant to this, which I came across. I rather regretted teeth. I subscribed to some Buddhist Facebook things as a as a place to sort of mine. Lots of quotations for the morning meeting. And some of them I can't, I can't even begin with, but some of them are amazing. And there was one that I found today,

which is probably the most useful thing I've ever heard about sponsorship. And it's not about sponsorship,

just finding in our. I'll post it in the chat in just a moment. Before talking to the teacher, it is better to observe yourself a bit. In that way you might find the answer for yourself. It is best to be one's own teacher or master rather than assigning the job to someone else. That is why the teacher and above all so and so teacher. Some branch of Buddhism teaches us to observe ourselves and to discover our own condition and always

us all to become responsible for ourselves. Why do teachers ask these things? It is not because they are worried about being bothered, but because they know very well that always turning to ones teacher is not a solution. The solution of lies in observing ourselves and resolving our own problems by ourselves.

Then if we have, and this is the key point, if we have no way of finding a solution, the teacher can certainly help us. If everyone did this, it would be much easier. And I think one of the reasons why Buddhist,

um, books and, and, and, and

teachings generally can be so useful in a a. It's not so much the transcendental stuff about, you know, the states of being and consciousness, and those are all very fun, but it's because there's a big teaching tradition,

which is very similar to sponsorship. So what they learn about how the relationship between the person who's further ahead and the person who's just learning

is they've they've made all the mistakes that comes from like, I don't know how many thousand years of mistakes and Buddhist teachers getting exasperated and calling each other and saying, I can't believe this. That's where it comes from. It come. It all sounds like so peaceful, doesn't it? And so wise. Now it's just like us. It comes from states of extreme annoyance and I can't believe it.

So I highly recommend to go on to Facebook, put Buddhist quotations and get them onto your live stream. It's much better than anything about American politics,

apparently anyway. So,

so basically you get people to do a load of group level service and a group, A load of service structure service and they end up the process just runs itself as long as you push back at the right points. So the two, the two, this is a bit like Goldilocks. Remember Goldilocks, where the first porridge was too hot and the 2nd porridge was too cold and the third porridge was just right, and the first bed was too hard and the second bed was too soft and the third one was

to was just right. And it's like that response, particularly once they got to Step 12.

Some want to hang off your coattails and ask you absolutely everything, and others ask you nothing and go around causing havoc and then telling everyone you're their sponsor. That's fun,

especially the ones with borderline personality.

As a friend of mine says, only happy whenever an arts is in complete chaos. So

one thing, if someone wants me to continue sponsoring them at step 12, we have a very awkward conversation sometimes. If I smell trouble, most people are fine. But if I smell trouble, I have this conversation. And I have this conversation as well about the installation of service sponsorship. If your sponsor like literally doesn't do service structure stuff,

you want a separate service sponsor. But if your sponsor does,

why do you want a different sponsor? That's interesting, isn't it? You know, it's the divide and rule thing. Left hand doesn't see what the right hand is doing. I had a Swansea once who was an Alanon Sponsee, but there were also an AA and they were also doing service and they were doing service in my kind of vicinity. And there was.

The service conduct did not blend with the setting. Let's just put it like that. There were things that they were doing which might be valid in their own right, but we're not working super well in the context. How's that for DCI? Can be tactful if I, if I want to be

and we had to have the, the tricky conversation is this,

if I'm going to be sponsoring you at all, how about we get to look at everything

because all the psychological stuff going on in your personal life is going to manifest in your service stuff. The service behaviour is a mirror of what is going on in the your private life, which is what is one of the reasons why it's super helpful to have sponsees, at least for a while, come to your Home group.

I I had someone that had terrible trouble with work colleagues. Not an uncommon problem

and they felt very sort of victimized and and disliked by people in the workplace. Again, not a, not a, not a

not an uncommon situation and business very nice, right? You know, work very hard at the programme. But we all have blind spots. I have blind spots. And this person's blind spot was about social interaction. And I saw them at the meeting and they were sitting on their own

about 70 feet away from everyone else. There are 40 or 50 people there, all chatting, buzzing around, having eating sugar. So they were chatty,

cakes, biscuits, tea, coffee, what having a lovely time. They were sitting on their own, just not even just looking down like a sort of race.

And I got a text from a friend saying or so. And so is that the meeting says they're feeling completely alone.

And I thought, well, this isn't a hard one to diagnose. Now if I everyone's ignoring me, well, they work and I could. I was literally there. They were because this person has separated themselves from the group. They could have gone and joined the throng with all the other crate, all us other crazy people, but they separated themselves

and a couple of people went say hello to them. But this person just could have brushed them off. And because I could see that going on, we could have a conversation about is it possible you're doing that in the work environment too? You're creating the situation where you're rejected because it reinforces the existential position that you've developed as a child that everyone rejects you. So you're recreating it because it's comfortable and we could have a useful conversation. So it is useful to have

aunties, if they're doing step 12, to be in I shot in terms of group level service or service structure service. Not always. It's not obligatory, but it's helpful. If you can't do that, maybe they do need a separate service sponsor who can actually see him in action.

Umm, so, and with the service structure, I think that's pretty much, that's pretty much it. You throw them in, they do they, they try and do as much as possible. Oh, oh, the Goldilocks thing, I didn't really finish that off properly. So some people come to you with nothing. Some people come to you with everything and you want something in between. So you want people to be genuinely considering the option of checking stuff out

if people don't know how to,

how to calibrate that, People don't always know how to calibrate that. So you have to help them say, if ever you don't know what to do and you run it through your little algorithm, Tradition 1, tradition 2, tradition 3 and you're still stuck, then we'll

we'll talk about that. But also, if you discover other people reacting to you,

so even though you didn't 'cause their reactions, you didn't. You can't control them, you can't cure them. You did elicit them.

And this is something I've learned when I'm eliciting a reaction, yes, it's true in Allen. I didn't 'cause it, but there's a reason why they're reacting like that to me and not to someone else. So there's always something for me to look at when someone reacts badly. It's very common. And this is so the Al Anon's amongst you are not going to name names because I know how embarrassing it is

the Alanon's amongst you with Al Anon sponses because what we learn, you know, I mean, even in a we learn that, you know, page 67 other people are sick, blah, blah, blah. And Al Anon we boy, do we learn that the danger is thinking that when other people are reacting badly towards you, well, it's obviously them, you know, you, you so learn not to take things personally that you actually stop examining your own conduct. And that's a danger with people who are a A and Al Anon. I say the

to be much more sensitive about that, funnily enough. And there's the Al Anon's have often applied a manual override to block their awareness of their impact on other people in situations where there are other Alcoholics or addicts around. It's I've seen that so often. I'm pretty sure it's a pattern.

Also the the a as generally and this is this isn't a hard and fast rule. The a a sponsees. The risk is they'll try and get away with doing the service.

By doing the absolute minimum to get by and that's going to cause a completely different set of problems to the Al Anon personality types. And I've got a little bit of both. I can be very, very sloppy at times and then overly controlling at other times. The Allen on types are much more likely to, you know, you turn your back and then now chair of the region.

No one asked them. You know, there was a hostile takeover.

People have stuck, you know? Yeah, you come back two weeks later and a second region has been established because everyone is so angry at what happened in the first region. So you've really got to watch. You've really got to watch the the ones with the Allen on strike down their back.

And the longer they've been in, the more you have to watch them. I told you this story maybe a few weeks ago. I was with Tom in San Francisco. I'd had a run in with someone that was 22 years sober and I was in the car with Tom and he said 22 years. That's when you think you know everything. So sometimes the sponsees who are in service have been doing service for a long time are really difficult to sponsor

because there's there's just a baked in way of doing things.

Often people are unsponsorable in service after a certain point unless unless they start to experience real problems.

But I think that's pretty much it on the service sponsorships side of things.

I was just one little tip, 1 little tip. When people have got a situation,

and this is true for service sponsorship,

it'll be true for other areas we're going to discuss in Step 12, but it's also true in Steps 8:00 and 9:00. And also actually, I'll tell you a little story about the 4th column in in Step 4. Sometimes people have enormous trouble connecting with what they did wrong in a situation, which totally makes sense because if you'd known what was right and wrong, you probably wouldn't have made all the mistakes in the 1st place. So actually the default position when you get to the 4th

column and you say to someone, So what did you do wrong? Well, I don't know, but of course not. If you'd known, you wouldn't have done it. So that's actually we shouldn't be surprised when they say that. I tried an experiment this week. I've done it before, but this was a spectacular, well, I think it was a spectacular successful. Time will tell. Someone couldn't see what was going on in the fourth column, so I told

spend spend an hour or so,

write down who's involved, names and what their role was in a situation, and then tell me the facts in the order that the facts happened without commentary or explanation accepted as far as necessary to understand the actual acts themselves. Forget motivations, just this happened, this happened, this happened. And they, they did a bloody good job. I have to say it was remarkable

and it was immediately. I think they're probably worth 30 or 40 things which had gone wrong

in this situation which they hadn't spotted. Now in step four, that's the trick is getting to tell the story and then you can walk them through, OK, this is this would have been a red flag. This would have been a red flag, another red flag, a further red flag. Now this is the point. You should have exited the situation. You stayed. OK, That was that was the mistake.

And you can talk and through it. Steps 8 and 9, exactly the same thing, particularly in romantic situations,

is you get them to do a kind of walk through exactly what happened in the order that things happened, and you can spot immediately what's what's gone wrong. And you do the same thing in service situations. Who's involved, what are the roles and then the facts and the order that they happened. And if they're a bit more advanced, you can say to them, right, tell me how the traditions apply to this. Tradition 1, Tradition 2, Tradition 3, Tradition 4. And then if it's service structure concepts, concept one, concept 2,

concept 3, concept four, and then you've got something to come in on. And this gives people a format which actually I find works pretty well. So I think that's all I've got on the service structure. I've got material on practice principles and all RFS, but maybe we should cover off the service structure questions if there are any. First, what do you,

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, Tim. So, yeah, if anyone has any questions for Tim on the on the service structure that he's spoken about.

James,

thanks Alastair. Thanks. Sorry. Thanks Tim. Thanks for that presentation. My question is when a Swansea is

looking at being of service, do you think there is anything to be gained by suggesting the person maybe starts

at the group level before deciding to say, oh, there's a

a GSR position? Or do you think just allow the person's own journey of recovery to sort of dictate where they take service as the positions arise in their local meetings or in the in their local intergroup? Yeah, that's a good question. I think one should proceed

systematically through the service structure so you can get

service.

One shouldn't be a GSR unless one's been the secretary or chair of a group first of all, so one shouldn't launch into that. You should have had to sit at the front for a year and just have to run the group

you shouldn't take on. I think it is a good idea to spend maybe a year, six months to a year, maybe probably a year. Actually intergroup as AGSR. So you come into intergroup as AGSR.

Ideally spend a year

just figuring out what's going on. I made a complete, if your pardon my French, arse of myself in the first intergroup that I belong to in 1990,

49495. I went as a kind of very, I'd like a year and a half sober or something. And I had no idea of the dynamics. I had no idea what it was about. And boy did I, boy did I launch in everything I said that went down really badly. And then they got crabby with me and then I got crabby with them.

So you really want to test the waters for a while and enter group. It is possible to take on like one of the officerships of the intergroup, but only if there's no competition and

serious important work is not getting done like the detox is. There's no meeting in the detox because they haven't got a liaison officer, then someone needs to do it and no one else is going forward. So ideally one should wait a little bit before doing the officerships, but

the needs of the alcoholic who's suffering at the end of the line come first, and you can learn it quickly on the job if necessary. A lot of it depends on the person's external experience. There's this myth in a A that everyone is equally qualified for all jobs and one shouldn't sort of discriminate against people for lack of relevant experience. And it's just untrue. If you got someone that can't type, can't use a computer, can't produce documents,

terrible at using e-mail, can't organize themselves, do not make them the secretary of intergroup. Got that? If someone is terrible with money, is broke, is massively in debt, and has a tiny gambling problem, maybe you don't want them to be the treasurer of the intergroup. If someone still is experiencing very severe personality disorder manifestations, again, you don't want them in an outward facing

role where they're communicating AH to the public because they the the risk

is I'll create like the people who are well can create a badmouth impression as things are. You really don't want to go in there with a, you know, a poison chalice. So I think it depends very much on where the person is in their life, what kind of jobs are suitable for and to ease into it the in now that the jobs are intergroup or or whatever the equivalent area district blah, blah, blah.

Those jobs that are inward, there are internal jobs and then there are outward facing jobs.

One should only take on the outward facing liaison officer roles if one is very confident that one's got the least the basic principles of how integral operates. Because the fellowships

reputations on the line, you can muck up electronic liaison, Electronic communications liaison, which is an internal role with no outward facing at all. If you mess that up, doesn't really matter if the micro site is not as usable as it could be if you know you can fix those things because they're just temporary internal glitches.

But also the other thing what you can do, and I think this is a super thing to get people to do is to go to the intergroup anyway. And the, the liaison officers are usually

looking for volunteers to do schools talks to, to, to go on walkabouts, like public information walkabouts. There's, there's often grunt work that needs to be done so people can get that, that people can observe how the role is done by someone competent before they actually launch into it. Then it's much less scary.

And if you go and say I'm not available to be an officer, but I'm available to volunteer to help out, like whatever officer needs someone to help out with stuff. You can do that. And a year sober, I was

a year and yeah, yeah, my second year of sobriety. So between one and two years I was the sort of Santa's little helper of the London region South and London Region N employment liaison officers. So I worked for a big city firm which had databases and I mined. It's perfectly legal. I mean, I wasn't like mining confidential information, but like public access databases of companies and corporate registrations and so on.

And I would mind those for lists of employers to go to, you know, with details of HR departments and things like that to help them out. So I was, I did a lot of work in my second year putting together packs for HR packs for human resources department a a packs for the human resources departments in all city banks. This was in 199419951996. So you can get super involved in service without having a formal

officership,

so you can get the experience that way. So there's nothing, even if someone isn't temperamentally suited,

it's AI. The one thing I would say about getting into the service structure, there's a limit to the amount of damage you can do at group level, but there's a lot of damage that can be done at intergroup if someone with an emotional screw loose starts to get involved. I've seen the most you, you see intergroups collapsing because one person

and it's difficult to kind of get them out of the machinery. Once they're in the machinery, it's difficult to get them out. So to, to do a, a serious role at interview, one must, I, I personally believe, have completed all of the amends and not have any emotional handicaps cropping up and hamstring EU at every available opportunity

because it's just the, the, the risk of affecting other people is just too great.

So that one must exercise caution with this encouraging people to, I've over encouraged people to do service when they, when they weren't mentally or psychologically ready for it. And funnily enough, the people that don't think they're ready are usually the ones that are ready and the ones that think they're super ready. You might want to have a, you know, listen very carefully to what's going on because there can be anyone that's super keen to do super keen to do service. I'm a little bit suspicious,

suspicious of because my own motivations were not entirely clean. It was, oh, great, here's something I can take charge of which is not really a great motivation. So does that answer your question, James?

Yes, Thank you, Tim.

Thanks Tim. Did anyone else have a question for Tim on that topic?

What I can do? I've got I've got a set of topics of other areas. So there's practicing these principles and all our affairs.

I've got a set of 12345679 topics

which I'm actually going to copy into the chat box. If any anyone can suggest further topics that will be great. And these are topics which people come to you with, and there are kind of standard ways of helping people

approach these. But sorry if you're a question.

Yeah, hi, thank you. I do have a question, but I'm not, I'm not sure if the question is appropriate for the topic, but I'll just ask it. And if it's not, you can ignore me or ignore it. So the question is

the top the subject was raised.

Is it normal? Say there's an intergroup and the intergroup has to decide on some issue coming up.

So is it normal for people on the intergroup to speak to each other privately and sort of lobby the way that the way that a political body would? You know, I'm from the USI think of Congress and Senate.

There's a lot of lobbying going on and before a bill is passed there, it's pretty much decided what's going to happen. It's just a question of they have the vote.

So

so that question came up. Is that OK to do it for the normal thing to do? Should one go to an intergroup meeting and hear about a topic for the first time and then everybody discusses it? Or is it OK for people to call each other and say, listen, here's my opinion and I was thinking we should really vote this way or that way?

I'm trying to answer that an amazingly good question. So you you said you weren't sure if it was appropriate for this topic. I'm not sure I'm appropriate to be talking about any of this stuff, but I am. So let's just deal with what is.

So that's a great question and it's one arises very, very commonly. I think probably the number one difficulty that I encounter amongst sponsees in service in the in groups and in the service structure is back channels. So the the traditions and the concepts are very clear. You have a group conscience and at the group conscience meeting you have this is concept 12, discussion

vote and substantial unanimity. That's where the decision gets made. It does not get made. I mean, administrative, small administrative things can be done in other ways. And if it's not a group or an intergroup, then it can be done in other ways.

But if it's a formal part of the structure, you've got to be absolutely squeaky clean about how these things are done. So lots of groups now have either Facebook groups or WhatsApp groups or whatever, and lots of decision gets made. Decisions get made on there

and it's, it's a disaster because people say things they would not say to each other face to face. Occasionally if you, you, you can have things decided on WhatsApp if things are relatively uncontentious, if people are super mature and if you got mechanisms for a stab, say you go straight to polling straight away, like anonymous polling on, on, you know, polling websites. So the 1st 164 is not a group. So it's not, it doesn't abide by the traditions, but we try and

follow the principles in as far as the setup allows. And so if anything starts to get remotely contagious, boom, let's have a poll rather than the acrimony being

starting to come out in the discussions themselves. So you, you sound out what is going on with a poll 1st and then everyone quiet and sound. Oh, so everyone does want XY and Z, It's complete. So it's a way of if you're going to use WhatsApp groups, that's a super way of doing it. You go straight into polling to sound out people's general views.

But anyway, the point is that that works very, very rarely. You've got to have if there, if there was any trouble on 1st 163 got contentious, I'd switch and start having organising Zoom calls with everyone there. But I don't think that level of organization is necessary. I might be wrong. If anyone's on here that really wants those, let me know. You know, we'll talk about that. We'll have a poll about that.

But what you're talking about there is

it's the whole notion of back channels. And the back channels can be the WhatsApp group, which becomes the alternative to the business meeting or the group conscience people twittering in, in corridors. And you, you always have, you've always had this. It's just electronic communications have made it easier for people to misbehave in this way. Now, the, the reason this is not super straightforward is because

you've got to strike a balance here and the balance, you're very right. You got you. You got a note of caution in what you said. Do people turn up

cold to the topic? No, No, no, no, no.

You need an informed group conscience. So the way this is how it works, I think healthily, if someone proposes something, there is a formal method for proposal. So let's say for the March business meeting, by the February business meeting, someone needs to send the secretary a written proposal. And that gets circulated in writing so that everyone's got a month to think about it, to talk to their sponsor, to talk to their friends.

But under no circumstances I've done this and it's poison. It's poison to the individual, It's poison to me. When I've done it, I've lobbied other people and it and I other people have done it with me

and I, I just don't think it's right. I think you have your view and you've discussed the view, but the answer is not try to. It's this old. It's this old

pattern which is so useful. I'm there to offer an idea and explain the idea, but not convince anyone or persuade anyone. It's up to the other person whether they buy it or not.

And so lobbying is where it tips over in trying to convince or persuade you, trying to stack business meetings or group consciences, making sure certain people show up. Now, the reason this isn't the other reason this isn't straightforward.

There are times where,

for the good of unity and smooth functioning, a little bit of discussion needs to take place between the officers of group about how to handle a particularly contentious question. But that's not about. That's not about

achieving a particular result, it's about establishing an orderly process which maintains a cordial atmosphere in the group.

That's completely different. You could, I think, I think you can consult very heavily and politically as it were on process, but in order that the group conscience then be expressed, however it wants to be expressed without trying to swing it one way or another. So it's the nature of the discussions in between the meetings that matters. It's not it's, it's, it's not whether or not they happen. They, I think they have to happen first of all so that people can sound out the ideas. It's only

you discuss them, you realize you're crazy. When you hear someone else's perspective, you realize you're crazy, so you have to discuss them. You've certainly got to discuss the logistical side of things

and word can be, you know, I've often taught as a secretary who is in charge of the written communications of group I've, I've consulted very judiciously about exactly how to word things about how to structure group conscience meetings.

But again, it's not about the result, it's about the process. So this is, it's not as that this isn't a straightforward topic at all, but the aim is to have an informed group, maximally informed group conscience. One way, by the way, to put the kibosh on any of that lobbying which goes on. And this is a great technique. You send something to all group members saying we'd love to have your comments in writing,

take them, will anonymize them, and will circulate them so that everyone knows what everyone thinks.

And it takes the wind out of the sails of little secret plans. And also what's very interesting is that when one is voting in a group conscience meeting, this is not well understood. When one is voting, one should be voting for the good of all. So I will often vote, and my conscience is what my conscience tells me is for the good of all. It's not what I think. So I often vote for proposals that I personally disagree with because I feel that that's what the group wants. So I want to

go with what the group wants. And if you adopt that approach, there's nothing to lobby for,

not to have a personal angle, only to be looking to maximize. Jim Willis says your job is to help the rest of God's kids get their hearts desire and as long as it doesn't harm them, help them get it. So if the group wants to make a decision you don't personally agree with, but you know it's so clearly what they want, I go with it.

And if with that approach, you're removing the problem at source, which is having a personal objective, that's where the lobbying is coming from. It's having a personal, personal investment of some sort. Does that make sense?

Good Alastair, shall I go on to the I've got 123456789 topics, so we've got more than tonight's worth. And if other people have got topics then you know, please tell me and I'll add them to list money.

Most sponsees at some point come to you with money problems. I am not a money advisor. However,

when people have got money problems, I get them to look at a couple of things. In step four, it suggests that we take a business, takes inventory and my finances are like a business. And this single exercise, if it's followed, I, I, I has always worked with people with money problems,

is for one year

to write down every single penny that is spent by whatever means, cash, cards, whatever else. And to analyze those in a spreadsheet or by some other with an Abacus. You know, whatever means you want so that you can look at what you're actually earning, what you're actually spending, and then to apply the line throughout the year.

From page 6064, the big book. We cannot fool ourselves about values.

So when someone gets the end of the month and they've spent 647 lbs having coffees in cafes, have you got 647 lbs of value out of that? And it completely

you, they don't have to do anything. They're just, it's so often with, and this is true with all of these problems. If you look at the facts, the facts actually tell you the answer. Most Alcoholics in my experience, and I'm like this, I deny the facts, I suppress the facts. I tell a story in the moment and that's where all the behaviour is coming from. It's coming from old narratives like I need to spend this money because otherwise I'll feel so deprived and what's the point

working all these hours and having a job I hate with people I hate. If I can't spend, it's my money. I can spend it. And then, you know, as Bob B says, oh, the other thing, listen to Bob Bessance on money. He's very good on money.

Now, what's so interesting, Anthony Demello is very naughty. Anthony D'mello talks about how people don't want to get out of kindergarten. Everyone says they want to get out of the kindergarten, but what they really want is they want to get their relationship back. They want to get their job back. They want this from the world. They want that from the world. I've given the money exercise to maybe, I know probably hundreds of people.