Written by Brad Glaser, SMART Recovery facilitator and staff member

The SMART Recovery Handbook has a wealth of tools and concepts to share in your 4-Point Recovery Meetings, but as facilitators, sometimes it’s nice to bring in some additional SMART tools for your groups. SMART’s Successful Life Skills book is one great resource to help you do so. While the book includes many of the SMART tools that we all know and love, there are some additional topics covered in SLS that we have found fruitful and enjoyable to use in standard meetings. I’ll highlight a few:

• Locus of Control focuses on discussing whether our outlook is more external, that is a belief that the world largely happens to us without our input, or internal, a belief that our decisions about the things we can control have a major impact on our lives, our recovery, and our contentment. This tool pairs well with the Hula Hoop Theory in examining where in our lives we have control and what that control might mean for our overall experience.

• Recovery Capital is a tool that has gained major use in the recovery community over the past several years. It asks the individual to assess what elements they have working for them in their recovery across three categories: Physical, Human, and Social. So, we might define having a car as physical capital, being bilingual as human capital, and participating in our SMART community as social capital. Examining these elements helps provide clarity not only around the elements we have working for us now but can also be aspirational in finding those elements we’d like to develop.

• The Six Guidelines for Success are a wonderful discussion topic that our authors included in the Conclusion section. They are, to some degree, a concise guide to SMART thinking. For example: “Practice taking responsibility for your own emotional life.” In my own recent local meetings, we read the guidelines one at a time and paused for discussion about each as we went. I can share that they sparked so much great conversation that we only covered three in the first meeting and had to save the other three for the next!

There is so much more to discover. Lessons from Geese is one beloved section I can’t do justice to here, so I’ll let you read it for yourself. Hopefully, these tools and the Successful Life Skills book as a whole can help bring an extra spark of dynamism to your meetings.