We shall continually need many of these same attributes, insofar as they can be had, among our leaders of AA services at all levels. The principles of leadership will be just about the same, no matter what the size of the operation.
This discussion on leadership may look, at first glance, like an attempt to stake out a specially privileged and superior type of AA member. But this is not really so. We are simply recognizing that our talents vary greatly. The conductor of an orchestra is not necessarily good at finance or foresight. And it is even less likely that a fine banker could be much of a musical success. When, therefore, we talk about AA leadership, we declare only that we ought to select that leadership on the basis of obtaining the best talent we can find, making sure that we land that talent, whatever it is, in the spot where it will do us the most good.
While this article was first thought of in connection with our world-service leadership, it is quite possible that many of its suggestions can be useful to everyone who takes an active part in our Society.
Nowhere could this be more true than in the area of Twelfth Step work itself—something at which nearly all of us most eagerly work. Every sponsor is necessarily a leader. The stakes are huge. A human life and usually the happiness of a whole family hang in the balance. What the sponsor does and says, how well he estimates the reactions of his prospect, how well he times and makes his presentation, how well he handles criticisms, and how well he leads his prospect on by personal spiritual example—well, these attributes of leadership can make all the difference, often the difference between life and death.
Thank God that Alcoholics Anonymous is blessed with so much leadership in each and all of its great affairs!
It’s What Happened to Me
April 1967
The sign “THINK” is often seen on the walls of our AA meeting places. Although I seldom hear speakers hold forth specifically on the importance of thinking as an aid to recovery, I have noticed that during the first stage of sobriety there is likely to be a period lasting for some months (or, with some people, forever) when the neophyte is bursting with thoughts upon which he will talk endlessly. He has ideas, theories, speculations about the nature and causes of alcoholism, about the reasons why and the ways in which the program of Alcoholics Anonymous works, about Life and Society and the Meaning-of-It-All.
In a veritable explosion of thought set off by recognition of previous stupidity, old philosophical concepts are revived or new ones acquired. Often a note of preaching, of advice-giving creeps into the talk of those so affected.
I first became aware of this phenomenon when I found myself inexplicably impatient with certain speakers. Slowly I began to detect what it was that produced a deadening effect, and what, on the contrary, held my attention and lifted my spirits. The speakers who left me feeling stronger and calmer were those who simply and earnestly told their own personal experiences, either of drinking, or of how they happened to come to AA, or of the problems they had since encountered in daily living. The more the speaker seemed simply to be reporting the facts about himself as best he could see them, without embellishing them with general conclusions and moral judgments that the rest of us had better profit by if we knew what was good for us, the better was the effect on me.
It was the simplest little things people told that lightened and cleared the air inside me. For instance, a fellow named John happened to remark one evening in his talk that he had been upset about the previous day’s events and hadn’t been able to get to sleep that night. He said, “In the old days, I’d have been drinking and stamping around the house all night, telling my troubles to my wife.”
This made me smile with an inward glow that comes even now from remembering. I used to stamp, too; and my husband’s chief complaint about my drinking was that it interfered with his sleep. John is a big man, and I felt a light moment of envy at the thought that, although I stamped as hard as I could, he must have been able to do so much more resoundingly.
Slowly it dawned on me that in speaking I, too, was inclined to share great thoughts, about Life and Love and Humility and responsibility and—you name it. In short, I had a tendency to Talk Big.
I also began to notice that I constantly used the word “you”—not meaning a definite other person as when one asks, “Are you ready to go?” but as one would say (meaning “any of us”), “You have to quit drinking if you want to live.” I was always saying things like, “You feel just terrible when you realize how you behaved when you were drunk,” instead of, “I felt terrible. I was drunk.”
I talked about myself enough, God knows; I dodged the “I,” hiding among “we” or this catch-all “you.”
Lifelong social conditioning accounts for some of this. In social gatherings, it is not considered good form to talk exclusively about oneself. The worst bores are people who never get off the personal and on to general concepts and objective consideration of facts or ideas.
It took me a while to realize that AA is different. This is not a tea party or an intellectual discussion group (which are excellent and enjoyable and have their place). An AA meeting is something else again.
Egotistical as it seems, and distasteful as such conduct would be at a dinner party, when I speak in AA I must learn to tell what I did, what I was like as far as I can see it, what happened to me, and what I think I am like now, without even unconsciously implying, “You’d just better learn something from my experience and do likewise.” I must try to forget about “we” and “you” and “them,” not even being concerned about whether what I say is going to help “You.” If I speak about what I think, my opinions, my philosophical views, I should do so as one reporting events of a particular nature that pertain only to me, not to you, just as some people will report, “I was in jail thirty-six times” or “I spent six months in a mental hospital.”
Contradictory as it seems, and whether I fully understand it or not, I escape my own egocentricity by the inevitable identification that takes place with someone else when he talks about himself. So when I get up and talk about myself, others are finding release from their own self-centeredness in observing mine, with the result that all of us will go out feeling better, and therefore perhaps with less need to drink in order to escape the intolerable tyranny of our own egos.
Anonymous, Calif.
Tradition Two
For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience. Our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
December 1969
Shortly after I returned to the office from lunch, the phone on my desk rang. It was a late autumn day during my first sober AA year.
“Did you know J.B. got drunk?” asked the AA acquaintance on the line.
Such momentous news overwhelmed me. J. was the chairman of our group. I had considered him Mr. AA. Now I felt that the whole movement would soon totter under this disastrous blow, unless someone rushed to the rescue. A brilliant new leader would have to be found, quickly.
Well, how about me? I had been a club president a couple of times in school. Surely, my ability would be a great boon to the Fellowship.
“But he’s so young!” I could hear someone exclaim. (I was chronologically twenty-seven, emotionally minus one.)
“Yes, but he’s really brilliant,” a wiser voice would reply.
By this time, I had tidied up my desk, made some excuse to the boss, grabbed my briefcase, hat, and coat, dashed to the subway, and ridden halfway to the old church building we used as a clubhouse for AAs in Manhattan in 1945. I carried with me about as much sense as a flea plotting to run a kennel.
Surprisingly, everything seemed calm when I arrived. No doubt