Concur w/ the sponsor idea. In my case I made a short list of the people who said things that resonated w/ me over the course of the 1st few months, then got up my nerve to ask the guy at the top of the list. There was a combined AA/Alanon picnic recently, the AA speaker said from a male perspective approaching another man to be your sponsor is sort of like asking him to be your valentine.. too true. lol
Mine is a double-winner, could fairly call him a triple-winner, I was attracted by the clarity & simplicity of his recovery as revealed over that few months. He has a lot of challenges to his recovery even now but has been in program long enough and worked hard enough to have made the mistakes often enough to have a good idea of what he wants and doesn't. He freely talks about how he messes up dealing w/ his qualifiers... he is the exact opposite of a guru, he's in the mud w/ the rest of us slogging away.