The Process

21 July 2021

Today we look at a simple concept that is difficult to use well.  I first learned of it in The Daily Stoic (Holiday & Hanselman, 2016, 8 June).  We had one SMART Recovery meeting based on The Process and it seemed worth putting on record.  So here goes.

In the 12-step culture, there’s an expression valued for its simplicity and impact: Do the next right thing.  And what invariably follows, is the assertion that we all know the next right thing.  And mostly, we do.  We know when we should be exercising more, eating less, saving more...knowing these things is easy.  Doing them is hard.

The cited founder of The Process is an American college football coach named Nick Saban who rarely if ever uses that title.  His core idea is “to ignore the big picture...and focus instead on doing the absolutely smallest things well” (Ibid).  If we take swimming the front crawl as an example, the idea becomes clear.

Saban would not advise his swimmers to dive in thinking about the opponent from another college.  He would advise his swimmer to think about the precise placement of her feet on the starting ledge, the balance of her weight, the position of her arms, hands, torso...and every detail needed to get a great start.  Once in, do not focus on the people in the adjacent lanes, focus instead on the maximum extension of your reaching arm, while touching the edge of your hip as your pulling arm leaves the water...

When that swimmer is out of the water, and done her races, the focus becomes her headspace.  Is she ruminating on what she did wrong, well...or the next right thing for her to do in a values-led life?  The Daily Stoic calls this working brick by boring brick.  And if you look at the multi-aged wall in the illustration, you can see the complex beauty brick by brick creates.  And here’s the thing: those bricks and stones—each and every one of them—was prepared, mortared, set, and tooled, one masonry unit at a time.  Based on the compressive strength of drying mortar, masons can only lay up a specified number of courses per day.  The next day begins where they left off, again, one brick at a time.

What this means for your life is that, if you’re leaving addiction, and heading into recovery, you don’t focus on the life ahead without your DoC (drug of choice).  Instead, when your feet hit the floor, you think about dressing as well as you can for that day’s activities, making your bed carefully and well, and eating as healthy a breakfast as you can make.  And during each of these actions, you pay attention to doing them well.  Instead of thinking about the fact that you’d usually be about to fire up your first joint by now, you think about combing your hair slowly and well, brushing your teeth with attention to each tooth...that’s the boring brick by brick approach to living life.

But here’s the thing.  That boredom is constructive and pays dividends.  Let alone doing your tasks well, the real dividend is learning to focus your own attention.  Think about it.  Buddhism, meditation, being present—all things that have seen recently renewed popularity—are means of being that have been discussed and written about since humanity has been recording its own ideas.  No one is more powerful than the person who can focus her attention building her life boring brick by boring brick.  Ask Heraclitus who said, “Under the comb, the tangle and the straight path are the same.”  Your will and attention are that comb, your life is that mane. 

Or, Ryan Holiday’s more contemporary version:

"All these issues are solvable.  Each would collapse beneath the process.  We’ve just wrongly assumed that it has to happen all at once, and we give up at the thought of it.  We are A-to-Z thinkers, fretting about A, obsessing over Z, yet forgetting all about B through Y" (The Obstacle is the Way, p. 91, Bolding added).

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.