Stefan Neff
The Courage To Be Sober Chapter 38
My Steps Towards Sobriety

Throughout this book, I have been writing all my thoughts, feelings and actions I took towards my sobriety. What was the key moment in my life whereby I truly stepped forward into the life that I wanted? I knew that my life had to change, my marriage was failing, and my jobs were affected tremendously when I was in my addiction state of mind.
My thought was that I wasn’t ready to change twenty years ago with all the pains in my life!! But truly that was an excuse to not change the way I was thinking? I didn’t want to change my life at that time. I thought to myself what were you doing wasting all that time and effort on your addictions? I was literally drinking and smoking myself to death.
Then this amazing thought came to me when I was down at the bottom of the barrel waiting for someone to pull me from what I call the deepest hell of a life of addictions. I had no direction, no purpose, and absolutely no passions in life. I would think in my conscious mind I was doing ok and in my subconscious mind, the same situations were happening over and over again because I never knew I was still in a victim mindset since I was a little kid.
No one told me I had victim stories run in my hard drive which means my brain. I was taught that life was the way it is and there is nothing you can do to change that fact. That is absolute bull shit!! There is so much we can change about our mindset that will change the way we think and live our life on a daily basis.
When we do something about our mindset we must and I say must practice mindset every moment of the day and continue for the rest of our entire life. If we stop creating new energy pathways towards happiness we go back to the same habits we had before.
We are always in the pursuit of happiness until we pass on to the next life of existence. If we stop practicing we must start again and again until it becomes a habit in our lives. I have been working on my inner happiness for the last seven years now and YES I have gone back and forth a few times to my old habits and then I am reminded that I have been not doing my daily habits to make myself happy.
I soon realized that this life I have is like a car I own. It needs maintenance every day. I would like you to ask yourself why I take my car in for its routine maintenance but why not do it for
myself for the feelings we may get from life.
So my suggestion is to maintain our inner happiness all the time. The more we work on our car the better and longer it will drive smoother than if we don’t. Well, that is the same for our inner souls. Take care of yourself the same way you take care of your car and you will never have to throw it away before it is time to go buy another new car. We can’t go to the car lot and buy a new life!!
Steps You Take To Maintain Your Happiness
1. Work on your happiness every day
2. Learn new ways to improve your inner life balance
3. Stop procrastinating your life away
4. Practice our daily habits toward success
5. Never stop becoming the person that you were meant to be
6. Live life like it is your last breath
7. Release old habits and beliefs about what you can’t do and replace them with
what you can do in life
