Sobriety asks something of you every day.

There is no finish line. No moment where the work stops and you just coast. The challenges show up. The hard days show up. You meet them anyway.

But here is what you never have to earn:

The morning.

When nothing is in the way, it just arrives. Clear. The same way it did yesterday. The same way it will tomorrow.

Most people are calculating the cost of sobriety. The social awkwardness, the explanations, the thing you’re giving up. Nobody tells you to add up the other side of the ledger. Not the years or the dollars. The first five minutes of your own day, fully yours, every single day.

That return compounds.

And at some point you stop being surprised by it — but you never stop being grateful.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

My guest this week on Episode 049 is with on April 23 at 3:00p EDT

What does it look like when someone builds a life they don’t want to escape from?

This week I’m sitting down with , the writer behind Cozy Clarity on Substack. She spent years as a mechanic in an industry that didn’t always make room for her, turned that experience into something, and eventually walked away from a job without a plan — just a blank page and a decision to finally fill it in on her own terms.

Shelly writes about burnout, mental health, and the kind of personal development that asks something of you. Her work doesn’t let you stay comfortable in awareness alone. She’s interested in what happens when you stop waiting and actually move.

We’re talking about building something real, showing up for your own life, and what it means to create from a clear head.

Cozy Clarity

A soft space to unwind, reflect and grow through life’s twists and turns.

By Shelly

📖 What I’m Reading

The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer is a book that has been sitting on my shelf for some time now.

Michael presents the idea that your true self is the awareness behind your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves, and that most suffering comes from identifying with and resisting the constant inner dialogue. It outlines how stored emotional experiences create patterns that shape reactions and limit freedom, and argues that by relaxing resistance, letting go of these stored energies, and observing thoughts without attachment, you can access a state of inner openness and sustained peace. The core framework is less about changing external circumstances and more about shifting your relationship to your mind—moving from control and suppression toward observation and release.

I’ve come to find that being sober, reading is different; the knowledge feels and provides a much deeper experience. I tend to gravitate toward books that extend not only knowledge for my own experiences, but also knowledge that I can apply toward helping the clients I work with.

🎨 What I’m Creating

Yesterday, I attended an annual event here locally in Raleigh. Yoga, NA drinks, picking up litter, it was restorative, energizing and community-driven.

I’m in the process of drafting a new audio series. The tentative title is “From Thinking To Drinking - Creating space to choose differently.” So much of this work we do for ourselves is around our thinking. One could argue it’s the work. How do we manage to be with the thousands of thoughts that we have no control over each day? Before we make a choice, there is a thought that appears before that.

And so this series will explore what that looks like in action. This will live under the Guided Practices section for paid members. I believe it’s going to provide a lot of value. The first one will be coming soon!

🌀 The Sober Creative Collective News

A few things the Collective is creating right now: spent a day leading mindfulness sessions with twelve young women, weaving Native Hawaiian values — aloha as presence, ha as breath — into breath work and a simple art activity. She called it a reconnection with the part of herself that knows how to hold space without forcing anything.

Elsewhere in the Collective, members are exploring creative ways to have non-alcoholic drinks, building and sharing music playlists, and recently made custom t-shirts for a family redwood trip.

The group has also decided to work through The Artist's Way together in bi-weekly meetings, using it as a shared monthly practice. I’m excited we are doing this because I’ve not personally taken the course and it seems very fitting for all of us to learn more about our creative selves.

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

Sobriety is sold as subtraction.

You stop drinking. You remove the thing. Problem solved.

But anyone who’s actually done it knows the removal is just the beginning. Because what you were drinking at is still there. The restlessness. The feeling that you’re somehow behind. The low hum of not-enough that follows you from room to room. Moment to moment.

You weren’t just drinking. You were managing.

And when you stop managing, you have to start feeling. Which means you have to start releasing.

The belief that you’re broken.

That great things happen to other people.

That love is conditional on how well you perform.

That’s the longer road. And it’s the one worth being on.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

She had her first migraine at five years old. By her early twenties, she ended up in the hospital three times in eighteen months — so debilitated she had to withdraw completely from her own life. She kept taking muscle relaxants that helped with the pain. She kept not understanding why.

grew up living from the neck up. Her words. She was calculating, planning ahead, always trying to figure out the next thing. Twenty years of yoga — and still, the movement and the mental life ran on separate tracks. Never integrated. Never actually felt.

She came to sobriety sideways. She never considered drinking a problem. She’d had her own rule about it since her twenties: if she was feeling low, she wouldn’t drink. Only celebration, only amplification of good feelings. She was self-aware about it, maybe more than most. But she’d also never paid attention to what her body was doing in the absence of it.

The Reset changed that. Thirty-one days in, she noticed the space between trigger and reaction had expanded. She described it as feeling like she had a choice — even when she didn’t make a different one. Just the pause was enough. Just the chance.

What happened after was stranger. She bought a non-alcoholic beer mid-Reset, expecting to feel nothing. Instead, she felt the buzz. The relaxation in her face, the warmth through the body. Zero alcohol, full placebo. She’d spent so many years training her nervous system with a particular ritual that the ritual itself had become the signal. Her body didn’t need the substance anymore — it just needed the cue.

When the Reset ended, she tried a regular beer. It tasted like rubbing alcohol. She couldn’t finish it. She hasn’t gone back.

The body, she says, is your most honest feedback system. The problem is most of us think our feelings instead of feeling them. We sense frustration and immediately skip to the story — who’s at fault, whether we’re right, what it means. We never actually sit with the sensation. And then we wonder why nothing moves.

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

She works now as a bioenergetics practitioner and co-founder of Sacred Business Flow, helping entrepreneurs notice where their bodies resist what their minds say they want. The irony she keeps returning to: the same corporate ambition that produced her migraines is what finally drove her toward the thing that healed them. The pain was loud enough to make her pay attention. She’s grateful for that, she says. She means it.

Her creative practices run on the same principle. Watercolor, pottery. Work where you cannot rush the result. A plate takes weeks to dry and fire. Watercolor layers have to cure before you can add the next one. She uses both as deliberate training in patience — in what she calls honoring the sustain phase. Most people, she thinks, only want the beginning of a creative cycle. The dopamine of the new idea. They can’t sit through the part where nothing is happening and you just have to keep showing up anyway.

That, she’ll tell you, is where trust actually gets built. In the quiet stretch where nobody’s watching.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

As co-founder of Sacred Business Flow and a master bioenergetics practitioner, Carolina came to this work through her own body. Years of chronic migraines that started at age five. Hospital visits in her twenties. A corporate career that had her living, as she puts it, “from the neck up.” The healing she found wasn’t through more planning or better strategy. It came through learning to feel again.

What makes this conversation especially meaningful is that Carolina joined the Sober Creative Reset at the start of 2026, not because she identified a problem with alcohol, but as an intentional act of curiosity.

What she found along the way surprised her. A sharpened sense of choice. A wider space between trigger and reaction. And a relationship with her body that had quietly been shifting in ways she hadn’t expected.

Show Notes

[00:00] Introduction

• Carolina Wilke is a co-founder of Sacred Business Flow and a master bioenergetics practitioner originally from Brazil

• She brings decades of experience in healing practices, meditation, and embodiment work

• Her journey began with severe chronic migraines that worsened through her professional life, leading her to explore the connection between the body, mind, and energy

• She joined the Sober Creative Reset in early 2026 as an intentional act of exploration, not from a place of crisis

Key Insight: “Can you feel the space between the trigger and the reaction? Because that space is where your power lives.”

[2:16] The Migraines, the Body, and the Early Years

• Carolina’s migraines started at age five and escalated into multiple hospital visits in her early twenties

• Alcohol made the migraines worse. Hangovers amplified an already painful cycle

• She was never using alcohol to cope with negative emotions. She had an awareness early on that she only drank when she felt good, not to mask how she felt

• Looking back, she sees herself as someone who was “living from the neck up” — all calculation and planning with almost no real body awareness

Key Insight: “I can totally see myself living from my neck up. Like I had no body awareness like that. And I was always like calculating the future, planning like ahead of time, trying to figure it out, like all the steps. And if you think about it, like a lot of us do that and it’s freaking exhausting.”

[5:30] The Reset, the Intention, and the Space That Opened

• Carolina had done detoxes before but had never paired them with a clear intention

• The combination of removing alcohol and entering the Reset with focus changed something. The space between trigger and reaction became wider

• Even if she reacted the same way, she noticed she had a moment of choice. The pause itself felt like power

• She credits the intentionality as much as the physiology

Key Insight: “I felt that not having alcohol increased that space for me. It feels like I have a chance to do different. Like it feels like I have a choice.”

[8:01] The Placebo Effect and What Her Body Learned

• After the Reset, Carolina tried a regular beer and couldn’t drink it. The taste of alcohol had become too strong, like rubbing alcohol

• Before finishing the Reset, she had tried a non-alcoholic beer and noticed a full placebo effect: relaxation, warmth, even the sensation of a buzz

• Her body had been trained by years of drinking to expect a response. The physical ritual alone triggered it

• She no longer drinks regular beer. Her body simply won’t tolerate it

Key Insight: “I felt exactly the same way as I feel when I have alcohol. So the relaxation in my body...I almost feel that if I could keep drinking that I would get drunk without the alcohol.”

[16:22] Thinking Your Feelings vs. Feeling Them

• Most people think their feelings rather than actually feel them

• When an emotion arises, the instinct is to jump to analysis: the reasons, the stories, the justifications. That cuts off the feeling before it can move through

• Carolina’s practice: instead of naming the emotion, locate it in the body. Where is it sitting? What does it feel like? Is it tight, tingly, contracting, warm?

• Breathe into it. If you stay present and keep breathing, the sensation passes like a wave. Processing happens. The story loses its grip

Key Insight: “A lot of people, they think their feelings and they don’t feel their feelings. You feel like frustration and then you can’t really name where you’re feeling your body, then you go straight to your mind and all the reasons why frustration is there. That’s the reason why...and then you don’t process that fully and then you live from your neck up and that’s exhausting too.”

[27:50] Creative Practices and the Wisdom of Slow Work

• Carolina starts her work day by lighting a candle or incense and asking spirit to speak through her. It is a practice of becoming a vessel before creating

• She practices watercolor and pottery, both of which demand patience and detachment from outcome

• Pottery in particular teaches her about cycles and timing. A plate takes weeks to fire. Rushing it does nothing

• She sees these practices as training for life: show up, do your part, and trust the process you cannot control

Key Insight: “Both like pottery and watercolor are a great reminder of divine timing because nothing in those two arts are instant. Slow down, wait, enjoy the moment, and detach from the outcome.”

[33:27] Cycles of Creation and Why We Keep Starting Over

• Creation has four phases: create, sustain, destroy, and void. The dopamine lives in the first phase

• Most people never make it through the sustain phase. When the excitement fades and results are slow, they abandon the project and start a new one

• The sustain phase is where trust is built. Skipping it means repeating the same cycle at the same level

• The same pattern shows up in drinking. Numbing cuts off the body’s feedback, which means no lesson gets processed, only a story to loop on

Key Insight: “If we honor all of the phases, the next cycle is always bigger and it’s always greater. But then we want a shortcut and we go back to creation, but we repeat the same cycle.”

[38:05] Meeting Yourself Through Restriction

• Carolina is currently on a multi-substance detox: no alcohol, no sugar, no gluten

• She uses restriction as a tool to observe her own mind. Cravings become teachers

• When a craving hits, she traces it back to the feeling the substance provides: comfort, relaxation, warmth. Then she asks: can I produce that from the inside?

• When she can access that feeling internally, the craving dissolves

Key Insight: “Whatever the alcohol is giving you, it’s in here. We have the ability to produce that without the substance. So if you can catch and relate to food and alcohol as energies and just ask the question, ‘How can I produce that in me without the need of that?’ Your body will give you clues. It will give you maybe movement, maybe music, maybe something that’s actually helpful and nourishing.”

Key Quotes

“I don’t need to have a problem or a perceived problem to try to improve. We can become better or we can choose to do better, even if you don’t have a problem, per se.” — Carolina Wilke

“If you numb your body, you start drinking. So now you don’t feel it. So the discomfort is not there. There’s no lesson. There’s just the story.” — Carolina Wilke

“A mind state has a body state, so if you’re thinking in a certain frequency, you’re going to lead your body to feel in a certain way. But also if you’re moving your body, a body state can influence your mind state.” — Carolina Wilke

“I would suggest to people, if you drink and you think you don’t have a problem with alcohol, go just for the sake of exploration. Because at the end of the day, you’re exploring yourself. I don’t think it’s about exploring alcohol itself. It’s knowing who you are.” — Carolina Wilke

“With so many restrictions, you start meeting parts of yourself that they’re not available when you’re just indulging yourself with feel goods all the time.” — Carolina Wilke

Resources Mentioned

• Sacred Business Flow — Carolina’s business with co-founder Phil Powis, focused on helping entrepreneurs align their bodies and intuition with their work

• Radiant Flow — An embodiment practice Carolina has taught for years, recently opened outside their coaching community (currently waitlist only)

• Sacred Growth Club — The coaching community within Sacred Business Flow where Radiant Flow was originally housed

• Bioenergetics — The healing modality through which Carolina resolved her chronic migraines and which forms the foundation of her practice

Where to Find Carolina

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

To join the Radiant Flow waitlist: sacredbusinessflow.com/radiant-flow

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her extraordinary insight and wisdom. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

A Bridge to Your Next Step

Carolina said something in this conversation that has stayed with me.

She came into the Reset not because she had a problem. She came because she was curious about who she was without alcohol as part of the picture. And what she found was a version of herself with more space, more choice, and more access to the sensations her body had been trying to communicate for years.

That is exactly what The Sober Creative Method™ was built for.

If you are someone who drinks socially, functionally, casually, and you have never once thought of yourself as having a problem — but you wonder what might be available on the other side of that habit — this is the work.

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day 1:1 coaching journey through Release, Create, and Become. It is not recovery. It is discovery. It is the methodical, supported process of removing alcohol as a variable so you can finally see clearly what has been there all along.

Schedule a Discovery Call

Think about that. The default is alcohol. The explanation is sobriety.

You decline a drink and someone asks if you’re okay? If you’re on medication. If you’re pregnant. Nobody asks why you ordered a beer. There’s no interrogation at the open bar. Alcohol arrives without a story. The absence of it requires one.

That’s not a neutral cultural backdrop. That’s pressure. Low-grade, constant, everywhere.

And it doesn’t go away when you stop drinking. It just changes shape. A work dinner where you’re the only one with sparkling water. A holiday where your family drinks and you watch. A moment where you realize your choice will always require more management than theirs.

What has helped me is realizing that this pressure was never mine to hold.

✍🏻 Essays

The fun part about creativity is there is no requirement to do it. You have an idea and you move. Typically when I’m sitting in meditation, thoughts and ideas appear, sometimes I run with them, sometimes I don’t.

I haven’t written much poetry and I really enjoyed this process. Some moments I wanted to intentionally rhyme. Some didn’t matter.

There’s a structure here from the days when I was feeling depressed and escaping with alcohol, to letting it go and experiencing more freedom.

Even without the booze, the dark thoughts still appear. The difference is I’m able to bring more clarity to them. To be with them. To question them and move through them more quickly than I did before.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

He was top 500 in the world at Overwatch. That’s not a flex — that’s a diagnosis. For years, measured his days in games he could have been playing. Thirty minutes away from home was two matches missed. Summer vacations were 12 to 16 hours a day at the computer, waking up and running the queue before the coffee even finished brewing. His then-girlfriend was there. He barely noticed.

What broke it wasn’t rock bottom. It was a book — a self-help title in Hebrew he now calls “shitty” — that cracked something open during COVID. He started waking at 5 a.m. He started reading. Then investing. Then building. One no to one Overwatch invite, February 2021, and the games were gone.

He quit his six-figure software job in August 2023. What followed was 18 months of failed products, YouTube channels he couldn’t sustain, apps that went nowhere. He committed to reading the same five marketing books on a loop until he made his first dollar online — and nearly broke the streak one week before it happened, just because he needed something else to read.

The Indiepreneur

Join 6,701 readers for a weekly post about entrepreneurship, the life of the entrepreneur and lessons from my entrepreneurship journey.

By Orel

WriteStack came out of a pivot. Users didn’t want AI-generated articles. They wanted help with Substack notes. He listened, shifted, and built. His first paying customer arrived April 6th. He’s been building from that moment forward, recently crossing six figures — a milestone he barely stopped to mark.

He still checks Stripe more than he should. He still feels a drop in his chest when someone unsubscribes. He’s working on it. The anxiety didn’t disappear when the addiction did. It relocated.

What struck me was the throughline: the same obsessive focus that consumed thousands of hours in a game became the engine for building something real. He just needed something worth pointing it at.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 048 with on April 9 at 3:00p EDT

This week I’m sitting down with someone who comes to this conversation from a place most people don't expect: curiosity.

is a co-founder of Sacred Business Flow and a Master Bioenergetics Practitioner based in Brazil. She works at the intersection of embodiment and entrepreneurship, helping people understand why the body often resists what the mind is ready to do.

Carolina joined the Sober Creative Reset this past January out of curiosity, as an act of self-discovery at the start of 2026. What she found was something she didn’t expect: a clarity and sense of agency that had been missing, a deeper ability to notice the space between feeling something and reacting to it.

That space, she says, is where everything changes.

This one is a different kind of clear conversation, and I think you’re going to feel it.

If you are ready to shift your relationship with drinking, here’s how you can work with me.

Alcohol doesn't have to be the obvious problem to be the real one. Sometimes it's just the thing that makes incomplete recovery feel normal. The Sober Creative Method™ is 90 days, 1:1, built around restoring what alcohol has been quietly taking — your energy, your clarity, your creative capacity. Not willpower. Not labels. Just your system recalibrating.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session

If you have shifted your relationship with drinking and you want to be a part of a growing community, here’s how you can do that.

The hard part is behind you. What comes next is the work — the real creative work — and it goes better when you're not doing it alone. The Sober Creative Collective is where people on this path come to create, be witnessed, and build something that couldn't have existed before.

Join the Collective

What broke the cycle wasn't a dramatic crash. It was a book. A self-development book in Hebrew, passed along by a friend during COVID, that opened a door he hadn't known was there. From that moment in early 2021, Orel started saying no — to games, to distraction, to the comfortable pull of escape — and started saying yes to building something real.

A few years later, he quit a six-figure software job in August 2023, spent over 600 days failing, pivoting, and shipping, and built WriteStack into a six-figure SaaS — documenting every step of it on Substack under the name Indiepreneur.

This conversation got into the guts of what that actually took: the discipline, the anxiety, the identity shift, and the inner work that runs underneath all of it.

Show Notes

[05:00] The Gaming Addiction — What It Actually Felt Like

• Orel started playing MapleStory around age 8. By 13 or 14, League of Legends had become his primary obsession.

• “Every time I left home, every time I did something else, all I could think about is how much time did I spend outside the game that I could have spent playing the game.”

• During university summers, he played 12 to 16 hours a day, brought food to his room, barely left, and barely engaged with his then-girlfriend.

• The grip wasn’t just about time. His mind fed on games even when he wasn’t playing — he watched streams and YouTube videos, thought about in-game items while out in the world.

• At his peak in Overwatch, he ranked in the top 500 players globally. Then one day in February 2021, he said no to a game invite. “That was when I felt empowered.”

Key Insight: “I don’t think that I could feel anything else but wanting to play, wanting to play games.”

[18:19] The Shift — Books, Habits, and Finding a Partner in Change

• The turning point came during COVID when a friend introduced Orel to a self-development book. He describes it now as objectively not great, but says “it was the only thing that I knew and it really helped me.”

• He started waking up at 5 AM, reading, and building new habits. A good friend joined him on the same journey.

• “We kept motivating each other into reading books, improving the memory, improving our sleep, meditating.”

• They read around 100 reports of companies together to learn stock investing — “stocks and books replaced the video games.”

• Orel credits that friendship as one of the luckiest things in his life.

Key Insight: “It was a journey from trying to do a lot of things together to doing a few things together to doing one thing at a time.”

[20:42] Quitting the Job & Trying Everything at Once

• In August 2023, Orel left his software engineering position, giving himself two to three years of runway from savings and investments.

• He came out of the gate trying to do everything simultaneously — YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts, a Unity game, multiple apps. “Spoiler alert, nothing worked.”

• YouTube alone was costing him 30 to 40 hours a week. He hired an editor. The money didn’t come. He stopped.

• The lesson arrived slowly: focus on one thing, then focus on it long enough for it to matter.

Key Insight: “It took me some time to figure out that I need to focus on one thing. And then it took me some more time that I need to focus for quite some time on one thing.”

[24:16] Building WriteStack — The Pivot That Worked

• After 18 months of failed attempts, Orel gave himself one final six-month commitment. If it didn’t work, he’d go back to a job.

• The initial idea for WriteStack was an AI article generator. He built an MVP in two weeks. People didn’t want it.

• His first real user, Casper, told him the problem wasn’t articles — it was notes. Orel pivoted immediately.

• He committed to reading the same five books by Russell Brunson and Alex Hormozi over and over, sent hundreds of direct messages, and stayed in the work.

• On April 6th, Casper became WriteStack’s first paying customer. It grew from there.

Key Insight: “Every other big product for LinkedIn and Twitter and whatever it is focuses on short form... that’s when I pivoted and started seeing more and more traction.”

[29:57] Reaching Six Figures — And Why It Didn’t Feel Like Enough

• WriteStack hit six figures in annual revenue. Orel didn’t celebrate.

• “It just felt like I cannot go below that right now. And the stress of staying above that threshold and even growing more than that was so stressful.”

• When Substack released a native scheduler, he watched 30 to 40 unsubscribes hit in a few days. He described the feeling as everything going to hell — even though he knew, rationally, it wasn’t.

• Every cancellation email carries the same weight. Every slow day on Stripe triggers a spiral.

• He described constantly wanting to check his dashboard mid-conversation: “All I can think about is I should open a new tab quickly and check out Stripe.”

Key Insight: “I have that strong feeling in my heart, like somebody leaves — I mean, feeling so bad about it.”

[36:28] Managing the Mind — Body, Awareness, and Anxiety in Real Time

• Orel talked through his approach to catching anxious thoughts before they take over. The key: notice the body first.

• “If I just relax my shoulders and relax my face, I suddenly feel 60% better, 60% more calm.”

• He described a pattern where unexamined thoughts build on each other throughout the day — each one slightly dimming the mood until something finally tips it over.

• He meditated daily for three years at one point, up to 20 minutes each morning. He stopped, and feels the difference.

• He talked about naming feelings — recognizing anger or anxiety out loud to himself — as another tool for interrupting the spiral.

Key Insight: “I think that’s the number one problem is that we’re not aware even of what’s going on in our minds that we’re just spiraling.”

[50:56] What’s Next — WriteStack x Buffer

• Orel announced on the call (first time saying it publicly) that WriteStack is building a collaboration with Buffer.

• The integration will allow users to schedule content on WriteStack and then post to any platform Buffer supports — Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Threads.

• He’s also designing a tag-to-platform routing system, so specific content types automatically flow to the right channels.

Key Insight: “So people can schedule on WriteStack and then post it on any platform that they want.”

Key Quotes

“All I would do is just play video games and secretly wish I had more time alone to play.” — Orel Zilberman

“Everything that I could do with the thousands or tens of thousands of hours that I spent playing video games, that I could do something else.” — Orel Zilberman

“I said no. And that was when I felt empowered.” — Orel Zilberman

“It took me some time to figure out that I need to focus on one thing. And then it took me some more time that I need to focus for quite some time on one thing.” — Orel Zilberman

“The thoughts just go through your mind, they put the stress on you, they make you feel something, they make your body change.” — Orel Zilberman

“If I just relax my shoulders and relax my face, I suddenly feel 60% better, 60% more calm.” — Orel Zilberman

Resources Mentioned

• WriteStack — Orel’s SaaS tool for Substack note writers: writestack.io

• Indiepreneur on Substack — Orel’s newsletter documenting his journey building a six-figure SaaS

• Buffer — Social scheduling platform; upcoming WriteStack integration

• Russell Brunson — Author; Orel read his books on repeat during the WriteStack build phase

• Alex Hormozi — Author of $100M Leads; referenced for the 100 daily outreach strategy

• At the Height of the Success — Hebrew self-development book that first interrupted the gaming addiction (author not named in conversation)

Where to Find Orel

The Indiepreneur

Join 6,701 readers for a weekly post about entrepreneurship, the life of the entrepreneur and lessons from my entrepreneurship journey.

By Orel

• WriteStack: writestack.io

• Orel documents his product-building journey in real time, including wins, pivots, and the honest accounting of what it costs

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation. To for his honesty and openness. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Do You Recognize This?

Orel’s story hit home for me in a specific way. The addiction he describes — the constant mental pull back to the screen, the counting of minutes, the way the brain starts organizing everything else around the escape — that’s a pattern I recognize. The substance or behavior changes. The underlying architecture doesn’t.

What also struck me was this: the thing that helped him most wasn’t willpower. It was direction. He didn’t quit gaming by white-knuckling it. He replaced it with something that had more pull — books, stocks, building, a friend who was on the same path.

If any part of this conversation is landing for you — if you’re sensing that alcohol has become the default way to decompress, cope, or reward yourself — the first step isn’t a big commitment. It’s just a few honest questions.

The Sober Creative Assessment takes about 3 minutes. It helps you see where you actually are and what might be getting in the way.

Take the Free Assessment Here

From movement to aliveness, feeling to being.

Each strip flips behind the eyes.

Caught in thought.

Molecular construct.

Piece by piece.

Forming. Shaping. Unknowing.

The cloud moves.

Heaviness starts to build.

Brick by brick.

The weight grows tired.

Thickness residue locks.

How you are equals fine.

Facial muscles confined.

Sun light fades.

No piercing through.

Hope drowns in the sea of golden bubbles.

Beauty still moves outside of the glass.

Floating through space.

The cloud moves from sky to blanket.

A familiar friend.

Judgement aside.

Mind to slide.

Step by step.

Still moving.

Still dying.

Curious blink focuses inward.

The time to unwind turns to the hand of once was.

Shallow breath becomes lighter depth.

There behind each brick.

Each bubble.

Through the blanket.

The souls meal.

Every beat pulsing.

Flowing.

River red.

Love internal.

Love eternal.

Invisible protection.

The blanket begins to crack.

Pieces fall into tears.

Years of fear dis…appear.

Another cloud forms and sits idle.

It’s there waiting.

Once a director in control.

Behold the teacher.

Transmits the soul.

The feeling still familiar, yet subtle.

Not meant to hold, not meant to push away.

Sense isn’t about why.

It’s about sensation.

Shapes and flows.

One with one.

Light into lightness.

Each breath.

Each step.

Becomes a dance through the thickness.

There’s always going to be an edge. Stress that was never fully resolved. A conversation you’re avoiding. The low hum of something unfinished. Alcohol doesn’t answer any of it. It just turns the volume down long enough for you to stop asking.

When you get sober, the edge doesn’t disappear. But you stop having somewhere to put it. Which means you have to actually look at it.

That’s the harder work. It’s also the more honest one.

What’s the thing underneath the thing? The drink was never really about the drink. It was about whatever you needed to not feel for a few hours. Name that, and you’ve got something to work with.

When you feel the pull, don’t reach for a drink or a reason not to drink. Reach for the thing underneath.

Ask it: What do you need?

Then actually wait for an answer.

Most people never get that far. That’s the practice.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

didn’t have a rock bottom.

No dramatic low. No intervention. She just got honest with herself somewhere over the Atlantic, flying home from Aruba, reading Sober Curious cover to cover on a 17-week library waitlist she’d finally reached. By December 2019, she was done drinking. She never looked back.

Her story is quieter than most you’ll hear in this space. College drinking that felt normal, law school in New York that felt normal, a tech job in her thirties where everyone went out after work and showed up the next day less than stellar — and that felt normal too. The difference for Kerry was that she recognized nothing external was going to force the change. No kids on the horizon. A husband and a cat who weren’t going anywhere. “If I wanted to make a change,” she said, “I was going to have to proactively decide to make a change. The change wasn’t going to happen to me.”

So she made it.

What came out of that decision was a writing life. Kerry runs The Proactive Life on Substack — a newsletter about travel, creativity, work, relationships, and what she calls the subtle art of managing a messy, beautiful life. She writes about the tension between planning and spontaneity, between chaos and craft. She’s a project manager by trade, four years independent, and approaches both her work and her creative life with the same orientation: figure out the system, then make it more fun than it has to be.

That instinct shows up everywhere. She showed up to a hot sauce expo once unprepared and left vaguely destroyed. The second time she packed chicken nuggets for everyone in fanny packs and mapped the whole event in three laps — mildest to hottest — so nobody burned out early. It’s a small story, but it’s also exactly who she is.

She’s working on a book proposal. The writing community she’s been building around herself — a five-person writers’ group meeting in New York, events, connections made on Substack — is part of how she keeps going when the work is invisible.

That part landed with me. So much of what we make, we make alone. Kerry’s figured out that community isn’t optional to the creative process. It’s what keeps the fire going when no one can see what you’re building yet.

The Proactive Life

A newsletter about life as a series of projects—some planned, some unexpected, all worth documenting. I write essays about travel, relationships, creativity, healing, personal systems, and the messy middle between who we are and who we’re becoming.

By Kerry Hoffman

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 047 with on April 2 at 9:30a EDT

This week, I'm sitting down with Orel Zilberman — a software developer who spent years disappearing into 12-hour gaming sessions before a single book cracked something open in him. What followed was a complete rebuild: he quit his job, launched a business, failed for 600 straight days, and kept going anyway.

Now he runs WriteStack, a six-figure SaaS for Substack creators, and writes about every step of it at The Indiepreneur.

His story isn't about a dramatic rock bottom — it's about what happens when you finally put down the thing that's been keeping you small, and what you find out you're capable of on the other side.

The Indiepreneur

Join 6,701 readers for a weekly post about entrepreneurship, the life of the entrepreneur and lessons from my entrepreneurship journey.

By Orel

🌿 The Reset Begins in Two Days

Kerry didn’t have a rock bottom. She had a flight home from Aruba and a book she’d waited 17 weeks to read.

That was enough.

What she found on the other side wasn’t dramatic either. Just access. To her writing. To her creative life. To the version of herself that had been there the whole time, waiting underneath the edge she kept turning down.

That’s what 30 days can do.

Not a program. Not a negotiation. A guide who’s been on both sides of it, helping you reach the thing you haven’t been able to get to yet.

You don’t have to figure out what’s underneath alone.

I'm Ready

So when she found herself going out and planning on two drinks, knowing she’d have three, and ending up with four or five — she noticed the problem. The drinking wasn’t following her rules. She was following the drinking’s.

There was no dramatic bottom. No external pressure forcing her hand. She and her husband had decided not to have kids, which meant there was no built-in forcing function on the horizon. No one was going to make this change for her. As she put it plainly: “The change wasn’t going to happen to me.”

So in June 2019, somewhere over the Atlantic on a flight home from Aruba, she read Sober Curious cover to cover. By December of that year, she stopped entirely. And what opened up in that space surprised her — mornings she could actually use, a brain that wouldn’t stop generating ideas, a writing life she hadn’t known she was waiting for, and a book about how to stop letting your to-do list run your life.

Kerry is the voice behind The Proactive Life on Substack, where she writes about systems, grief, travel, creativity, and what it looks like to build a world rather than just a career. She came to Clear Conversations with no performance of recovery — just the clear-eyed account of someone who saw a gap between who she was and how she was living, and closed it.

[00:56] The Drinking Years: College, Law School, and the Tech World

• Kerry started drinking in college and continued through law school in New York City, where going out was simply “what everyone did”

• In her 30s, after pivoting away from law into tech, the pattern persisted — late nights with coworkers, mornings that were less than stellar

• She reflects that she was “in this boat together” with everyone around her, which made it easy to normalize

Key Insight: “When I look back on that, I think, oh, that feels like bad behavior, but we were kind of all in this boat together.” — Kerry Hoffman

[03:03] The Moment of Recognition: Control and Identity

• Around 2018-2019, Kerry began noticing the disconnect between who she was and how she behaved when drinking

• As a type-A project manager, she set rules she never followed: planning on two drinks and ending up with four or five

• She recognized that without an external forcing function — kids, health crisis, relationship pressure — the change would have to come from her

Key Insight: “I knew that if I wanted to make a change, I was going to have to proactively decide to make a change. The change wasn’t going to happen to me.” — Kerry Hoffman

[09:12] The Strategy: One Drink a Week

• Rather than going cold turkey, Kerry chose a single, clear rule: one drink per week

• She felt an all-or-nothing approach would set her up to declare failure at the first slip

• A trip to Japan four months in tested the rule — she broke it, felt terrible, and came home more committed than before

Key Insight: “I knew that a complex set of rules was going to be too much to manage and too easy to break.” — Kerry Hoffman

[15:30] What Sobriety Gave Her: Time, Writing, and the Morning

• Kerry began waking at 5 a.m. to write, journal, or read — time that had previously been lost to winding down and rough mornings

• She describes a consistent observation: even without a hangover, drinking disrupts sleep and slows the brain’s startup the next day

• She flew herself to Savannah, Georgia for a self-designed three-day writer’s retreat, then did it again in Raleigh

Key Insight: “Ever since I stopped drinking, my brain is always exploding with ideas and fun things to write about, things to do, things to try.” — Kerry Hoffman

[18:52] Creativity Beyond the Canvas: Curiosity as a Practice

• Kerry challenges the idea that creativity belongs only to people who paint, play music, or write

• She describes themed dinner parties, a daily photo practice from a writing class with Ann Napolitano, and actively looking for unexpected details on daily walks

• She connects creativity to curiosity, calling it the most appealing quality in another person

Key Insight: “I think creativity is very closely linked to curiosity. And that’s, I would say, the most appealing quality to me in another person — someone who is curious.” — Kerry Hoffman

[27:46] The Proactive Life: Systems, Grief, and the Book in Progress

• Kerry is writing a book about using systems-level thinking at the personal level — becoming the project manager of your own life

• Her argument: goals rarely make it onto the to-do list because people don’t operationalize them alongside the daily demands

• She also writes about grief, travel, and books on her Substack, and recently started a writer’s group of five people in New York City

Key Insight: “Too often, what we want to do, our goals, the things that we aspire to do, they actually don’t make it onto the to-do list, right? Because there are things that we think about, but we don’t operationalize it.” — Kerry Hoffman

Key Quotes

“I knew that if I wanted to make a change, I was going to have to proactively decide to make a change. The change wasn’t going to happen to me.” — Kerry Hoffman

“The drinking is in charge, not me.” — Kerry Hoffman

“I knew that a complex set of rules was going to be too much to manage and too easy to break.” — Kerry Hoffman

“Ever since I stopped drinking, my brain is always exploding with ideas and fun things to write about, things to do, things to try.” — Kerry Hoffman

“I think creativity is very closely linked to curiosity. And that’s, I would say, the most appealing quality to me in another person — someone who is curious.” — Kerry Hoffman

Resources Mentioned

• Sober Curious — the book Kerry read on the flight home from Aruba that sparked her decision to change her relationship with alcohol

• Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott — referenced at a book talk Kerry attended

• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin — Rubin’s practice of choosing a visual theme for daily walks

• Ann Napolitano’s writing class — where Kerry learned the one-photo-a-day practice

• Athletic Brewing — mentioned as an example of how the NA market has expanded since Kerry stopped drinking

Where to Find Kerry

The Proactive Life

A newsletter about life as a series of projects—some planned, some unexpected, all worth documenting. I write essays about travel, relationships, creativity, healing, personal systems, and the messy middle between who we are and who we’re becoming.

By Kerry Hoffman

• LinkedIn: Kerry Ann Hoffman

• Instagram: @soverycary

• Website: soverycary.co

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her extraordinary honesty and insight. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

With The Reset, You Get To Choose

Kerry didn’t wait for a reason. She looked at the gap between who she was and how she was living — and she chose to close it. No external pressure. No dramatic low. Just a clear-eyed decision that the drinking was in charge, and she wanted that back.

That’s exactly the kind of person the Reset is built for.

If you’re getting things done, showing up, functioning — but mornings take longer to come online, focus breaks more easily, and your output doesn’t match your effort — that’s worth paying attention to. Alcohol doesn’t have to feel like a problem to be quietly costing you.

The Sober Creative Reset starts this week. It’s 30 days. One container. Daily reflections, weekly check-ins, and a private space for accountability and support.

No labels. No lifetime decisions. No pressure to decide forever.

This is the Release phase of the work — removing what’s obscuring your footing so you can see what’s actually there.

And this cohort is pay your own price. You decide what it’s worth to you.

Kerry said it herself: the change won’t come to you. You have to decide to make it.

This is where you start.

The negotiation alone is exhausting.

Do I drink tonight? It’s been a long week. I’ve been good. Just one. I deserve this. But tomorrow’s important. Maybe just a glass. Maybe two. Okay, that’s it.

For two years I tracked. I tried to negotiate with myself daily and failed so many times.

That internal back-and-forth cost more than the drink ever did.

When alcohol is removed from the equation, you get that time back. Not hours—years.

Every negotiation you never have to run again. Every morning you don’t spend doing damage assessment. Every evening that belongs to you from the start.

Clarity isn’t dramatic. It’s just yours, automatically.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

started drinking at eleven years old in Indiana. Tequila. Older kids. Fields and bonfires. By twenty-five, he’d been through rehab three times, survived a suicide attempt, and accumulated what he calls “dangerous and stupid adventures, some of which I can actually remember.”

Then one day he was just tired. No program. No sponsor. No structured support. He quit.

What he didn’t realize until his late forties was that he hadn’t actually dealt with the addiction. He’d transferred it.

Into work.

A PhD completed in three and a half years when most people take five. Eighty-hour weeks. Singular focus that paid professional dividends and quietly carved out the people closest to him. His marriage. His kid. Social connection. Any semblance of a hobby. The mechanism was the same — that relentless chase of the next hit — just pointed somewhere society hands you a trophy for.

“It still had the negative consequences,” he said. “I just shifted it to a different area.”

What makes Doan’s story unusual isn’t the trajectory. A lot of people who get sober from substances find out later they’ve just repotted the same plant. What’s unusual is where he is now. At fifty-one, twenty-six years since he quit drinking, he’s not in recovery from work addiction in some clean, resolved way. He’s in the middle of it. Actively working with therapists. Building small daily practices. Trying to be present when he gets home instead of turning every conversation into a monologue about his newsletter metrics.

He gets up early with his two chocolate lab sisters. No phone. No screen. Just the dogs and whatever his mind wants to wander toward that isn’t email. When work creeps in — and it does, every single day — he notices it and redirects. He’s treating it the way he once tried to treat the drinking: one small interval at a time.

There’s something worth sitting with in what he said about the skills he built during his using years — the adaptability, the willingness to experiment, the ability to read a landscape and move fast. Those same capacities are now the engine of a career that reaches 20,000+ subscribers and over 120 institutions. The thing that nearly destroyed him turned out to be the training ground.

That tension — between drive and what it costs you — doesn’t go away when the substance does. It just finds new shape.

If you’re someone who went hard at sobriety and then went equally hard at building something, Doan’s story might land in a familiar place.

How to Teach With AI

Master 'How to Teach With AI' with simple steps and guides. You can leverage AI to be more efficient in course prep, and to increase student engagement and learning. I want to help.

By Doan Winkel

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 046 with on March 27 at 10a EDT

This week, I’m sitting down with — independent project manager, writer, speaker, and self-described dot connector.

Kerry runs The Proactive Life on Substack, a newsletter about building a world, not just a career. Essays on travel, creativity, grief, work, and the beautiful tension between structure and spontaneity.

Kerry’s relationship with alcohol is one that a lot of people will recognize — not rock bottom, but a slow, honest reckoning. After 17 years of drinking, she picked up Sober Curious on a flight home from Aruba and never looked back. What she found on the other side wasn’t just sobriety — it was a writing life, a clearer sense of self, and a proactive approach to all of it.

I think you’re going to love this one.

The Proactive Life

A newsletter about life as a series of projects—some planned, some unexpected, all worth documenting. I write essays about travel, relationships, creativity, healing, personal systems, and the messy middle between who we are and who we’re becoming.

By Kerry Hoffman

🌿 The Reset is Starting Next Week

The negotiation Doan had with alcohol, he eventually transferred it to work. Same mechanism. Different substance. The cost just got harder to see.

Kerry’s version was slower. Seventeen years. A flight home from Aruba. A book she picked up and never put down.

What they both found, eventually, was that removing the thing gave them access to something they hadn’t been able to reach.

Rachael said it after January’s cohort: “What every other attempt was missing was someone who’d been on both sides of it. A guide, not a program.”

That’s what the Reset is.

30 Days.

You don’t have to negotiate this time.

Join the Reset

At 25, after three stints in rehab, a suicide attempt, and a collection of dangerous adventures he can only partially recall, Doan made a decision that no program, sponsor, or support group could make for him. He was exhausted. He quit. What he didn’t understand until his late 40s was that quitting substances wasn’t the same as dealing with the addiction. He had simply moved it somewhere else — into work. Into the all-consuming drive to build, teach, achieve, and impact. Into a PhD completed in three and a half years. Into a newsletter reaching 20,000 people. Into 80-hour weeks that cost him the same things the drinking once did.

Now in his 50s, Doan is doing the harder work — the one without applause. He’s an associate professor of entrepreneurship, an AI education consultant, and a TEDx speaker who has helped shape curriculum at more than 120 institutions worldwide. He’s also a person still learning how to put the phone down, sit with his dogs on a quiet morning, and just be somewhere without his mind already being somewhere else. That tension — between drive and destruction, between output and what it costs you — runs through every minute of this conversation.

[02:08] Growing Up in Indiana: Curiosity, Access, and the Feel-Good Trap

Doan walks back through his teens — parties in Indiana fields, a boarding school outside Detroit with 400 teenage boys, minimal adult supervision, and proximity to a city. No trauma. No triggering event. Just access, older kids, and something that felt good.

• Doan grew up in an intellectual household where parents were “pretty oblivious” — not neglectful, but not paying close attention.

• Boarding school at 16 meant being surrounded by teenagers with “close to unlimited wealth” and little oversight near downtown Detroit.

• He’s explicit that there was no family trauma at the root: “No, it was just friends...we started hanging out with them, and they like drinking beer. I can’t drink carbonation. It makes me throw up. So I was like, can’t do that. What else you got?”

• By 25 he had done rehab, AA, NA — each with an interior motive that wasn’t really about getting sober.

Key Insight: “Literally one day I was like, man, I’m just exhausted.” — Doan Winkel

[07:08] The Transfer: Quitting One Thing, Starting Another

This section is the heart of the conversation. Doan explains what happened after he quit — and why, in his late 40s, he had to admit that quitting drinking wasn’t the same as dealing with the addiction.

• He poured everything into academics and teaching, completing his PhD in about three and a half years when most people in his field take four or five.

• The same addictive pattern — obsession, all-in focus, consequences to relationships — just relocated.

• “It’s done probably on some level irreparable harm with my relationship with my wife, my relationship with my kid, just in general, lots of things.”

• His child heading off to college in their 20s gave him a new vantage point: “coulda, woulda, shoulda.”

• Therapy and “the benefit of 50 years of life” have helped him look back and start to see what actually matters.

Key Insight: “I didn’t really change much in terms of consequences of my actions. I just shifted it to a different area.” — Doan Winkel

[17:46] Work Addiction: The One That Benefits Other People

Doan describes the specific shape his work addiction takes and why it’s so hard to treat — because it produces good outcomes for others while doing damage closer to home.

• Teaching gives him the same hit the substances once did: “People giving me feedback on the impact I can...I just want more of that. It’s still wanting more of the same type of feeling.”

• He has no hobbies. When people ask what he does in his spare time, the honest answer is: “I work. Work, go to sleep.”

• He describes the work obsession as emotionally destructive in the same ways as drinking — ignoring marriage, fatherhood, friendships, and the kind of presence that makes someone a whole person.

• Back when he was using, all he could think about was the next drink or the next fix. Now: “I struggle mightily to stop thinking about work — just being present wherever I am.”

• The pattern of thinking has been there since early life. Getting free of it is the actual hard work.

Key Insight: “It’s more still equally, I think, emotionally destructive.” — Doan Winkel

[23:21] Building New Habits: Small Steps, Real Presence

Doan talks about what’s actually working for him now — not grand overhauls, but structured small moments that create space between him and the pull of work.

• His two chocolate lab sisters are a built-in morning ritual: early wake-up, no phone, no TV, just time with the dogs and whatever comes to mind that isn’t work-related.

• When work creeps in — and it does, every single day — he trains himself to redirect: “emails gonna be fine later, still gonna...whatever.”

• Coming home from work, he tries to be curious about his wife’s day rather than launching into a monologue about his own.

• Travel is a bigger reset: “let’s just chill out...it’s not work stuff.”

• He compares the practice to early sobriety: “I’m not going to drink for an hour” — just building the habit in small increments.

Key Insight: “I’m not trying to overhaul anything. I’m not doing anything really big. It’s just these kind of smaller moments to build habits.” — Doan Winkel

[29:13] Creativity, Sobriety, and Transferable Skills

Both Josh and Doan explore the overlap between the resourcefulness required to sustain an addiction and the drive that fuels creative and entrepreneurial work.

• “We had to be creative to keep doing what we were doing. So again, it’s sort of transferred over.”

• The skills of adaptability, reading situations, and staying scrappy under pressure — developed during using days — translate directly to entrepreneurship.

• “There’s skills we’ve developed and ways of thinking and ways of engaging with the world that we developed. We could transfer those to more positive ways and more positive outcomes.”

• Doan describes himself as having “hustle for days” and “creativity for days” — and credits the unconventional route to those strengths.

Key Insight: “We built those skills and they’re actually really valuable if put to use in a positive way.” — Doan Winkel

[30:45] Teaching AI and Preparing Students for What’s Actually Next

Doan shifts into his professional work: why he’s so invested in AI education, what he believes college is failing to do, and how a mastery-based approach is different.

• His TEDx talk — titled “College Can Prepare You for the Real World, But It Doesn’t” — is, in his words, “still very relevant today, unfortunately.”

• He sees his job as helping students get work that’s meaningful, pays the bills, and gives them purpose: “I see my job as helping them do that, as doing everything I can do to help them do that.”

• Most classroom learning isn’t transferable on its own — students need coaching to connect the dots, and they need real projects, not just concepts.

• On AI: “It’s not so much that it’s going to take jobs...it’s the people who don’t know how to use it are going to be replaced by people who do know how to use it. That’s it.”

• He compares AI literacy to internet literacy: not optional, not a threat to identity — just the next thing people need to get good at.

• His mastery-based framework emphasizes real-world projects, accountability, and skill-building over content delivery.

Key Insight: “I don’t need to impart a whole bunch of content or knowledge...What I need to do is coach and train them on how you apply these things and how you transfer this knowledge and these experiences into things that are going to be in whatever you want to do in life.” — Doan Winkel

Key Quotes

“Literally one day I was like, man, I’m just exhausted.” — Doan Winkel

“I didn’t really change much in terms of consequences of my actions. I just shifted it to a different area.” — Doan Winkel

“It’s still wanting more of the same type of feeling. It’s just in a positive way that it’s a positive impact on others instead of a destructive impact on me or on others.” — Doan Winkel

“The people who don’t know how to use it are going to be replaced by people who do know how to use it. That’s it.” — Doan Winkel

“We built those skills and they’re actually really valuable if put to use in a positive way.” — Doan Winkel

Resources Mentioned

• How to Teach with AI — Doan’s free Substack newsletter focused on AI in education

• “College Can Prepare You for the Real World, But It Doesn’t” — Doan’s TEDx talk

• Mastery-based learning — the pedagogical framework Doan uses with students, focused on real projects and skill transfer over content delivery

• Work addiction / behavioral addiction — explored throughout the conversation as a concept distinct from substance dependency, with overlapping patterns

Where to Find Doan

How to Teach With AI

Master 'How to Teach With AI' with simple steps and guides. You can leverage AI to be more efficient in course prep, and to increase student engagement and learning. I want to help.

By Doan Winkel

• LinkedIn — Doan’s most active platform for connection, conversation, and sharing his work: search Doan Winkel

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , , and to for his candor and courage. Showing up honestly — especially when you don’t have everything figured out — is the thing. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

From This Conversation to Your Own

Doan’s story isn’t a recovery story in the traditional sense. It’s something more complicated and, for a lot of people in this community, more recognizable. The addiction didn’t disappear when the substance did. It found other places to live — productive ones, even admirable ones. But the cost was real.

That’s exactly why the work matters. Sobriety is one piece. What comes after — who you’re building, how you’re showing up, what you’re actually doing with the clarity you’ve earned — that’s where The Sober Creative Method™ picks up.

If you’re past the first question and into the harder one — not “should I stop?” but “what do I actually want my life to look like?” — that’s the 90-day work. We go through it together: Release → Create → Become.

Learn More About the Method

Here’s what most people don’t realize: alcohol doesn’t actually reduce stress, it mimics relief while it dismantles your body’s ability to manage it. Every drink disrupts your sleep architecture, spikes your cortisol, and leaves your nervous system more reactive than before. Over time, your baseline stress level rises, and the drink that once took the edge off starts becoming the edge itself.

For me, healthier stress relief looks like meditation, walking, hitting the gym, breathwork, rest, incense, music, and eating food that actually fuels me rather than drains me. These aren’t substitutes for drinking. They’re upgrades.

And I’m not alone in discovering this. Janelle walks, reads, spends time with her family, and prays. She said a moment came on June 9th, 1996, when she felt something shift and heard a voice ask: “You could get worse, but why would you want to?” She stopped drinking that day and never looked back. Her words: “I love being sober. There’s nothing like it in the world.” It’s so true.

What do you do besides drinking to help relieve stress?

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This week I sat down with — strategist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Sacred Business Flow — whose story is really about what happens when the body starts sending signals you’ve been too busy to hear, and whether you have the courage to listen.

Sacred Business Flow - Helping people move from idea to creation — from the head to the heart — and build businesses that don’t require hiding from.

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

Phil started drinking at 15, grew up in the South where it was woven into the culture, carried it through college and into his tech career in Boston, where happy hour after work was just how you connected with people. He never put a problem label on it. It was social infrastructure. It was part of who he was.

Then at 29, things started shifting in ways doctors couldn’t explain. Fatigue. Aches. Waking up exhausted. He eventually found an ancestral health nutritionist named Mary Rudick who put it to him plainly: if you’re trying to heal, alcohol isn’t going to help that. Phil didn’t fight it outright. He just found the other dietary changes easier to start with. But eventually he stopped drinking — and didn’t drink for over a decade.

During those years, a golf ball-sized tumor appeared in his neck. Multiple biopsies at Mayo Clinic couldn’t give him a definitive answer on whether it was cancerous. He walked around with that uncertainty for about a year and a half — the daily, low-grade fear that things were only going in one direction. He did the dietary work, moved to Costa Rica, started working with on the emotional and energetic side, and eventually had the tumor removed. The recovery came fast. What surprised him afterward was how much fear had been driving everything — even the good decisions. He thought he was going to die. And once that weight lifted, he started letting himself back into experiences he’d been locked out of for years, including food, including the occasional drink.

That’s the part of Phil’s story that tends to make people in a sobriety space pause. He started drinking again after his recovery, and he describes it as reclaiming agency — a celebratory beer in Puerto Viejo on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, Carolina beside him, feeling like someone who’d gotten his body back. He’s clear that this is deeply personal. He still notices that alcohol blunts his creative process — he’s a 4 a.m. person, does his best writing in those early hours, and the nights he drinks he considers himself creatively offline. It just doesn’t work for him in that state.

Which is what brought him into the January Reset. He’d been drinking here and there for a couple of years and got curious about what a pause would show him — not from a crisis, but from a desire to stay conscious about the things that govern his choices. He described the container as non-judgmental and said it gave him space to reconnect with his own journey on his own terms.

We also talked about what Sacred Business Flow is building. Phil described what he called the love-led leap — the moment someone committed to moving their idea from concept into creation. Most of his work has served people who’ve already made that decision. But he and Carolina have been noticing a whole other group: people who hold something in their heart and just aren’t ready yet. The embodiment work Carolina does — nervous system, energy, somatic practices — has mostly lived behind closed doors for private clients. They’re opening it up more broadly, at an accessible price point, for people who don’t need to know exactly what they’re building yet. Just people who want room to explore.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 045 with on March 20 at 10:00a EST

Doan has spent years inside the classroom studying what actually makes learning stick — and what gets in the way. As an associate professor of entrepreneurship, keynote speaker, and creator of the How to Teach With AI newsletter, he’s been obsessing over the relationship between mental clarity, creative engagement, and output quality long before those words got trendy.

In a world moving at the speed of a new AI tool every Tuesday, Doan brings a grounded question to the table: What does it actually take to show up at your best when the stakes are high?

We’re going to talk about presence, performance, and what it means to do your most meaningful work from a clear mind.

If you've ever felt like you're capable of more than what's been showing up on the page, this one's for you.

How to Teach With AI

Master 'How to Teach With AI' with simple steps and guides. You can leverage AI to be more efficient in course prep, and to increase student engagement and learning. I want to help.

By Doan Winkel

🎉 Who I’m Celebrating

The Sober Creative Collective recently launched and I’m celebrating one of the newest members - .

Noelle is creating Foxglove and Flour — a Cottage Vegan bakery, that promotes inclusion, clean ingredients, no artificial colors. Our mission is Baked with Magic, Rooted in Kindness!

She recently said, “From joining this collective I hope to gain a community. A community of individuals from all walks of life and talents, to be here for each other and help each other grow. To learn more about people and their journey. A safe place to share ideas, future projects, get into what feeds our souls. I love learning about people and hopefully bring light to those who feel the world is trying to dim theirs.”

If you would like to join the collective and be a part of building alongside this incredible community filled with all things sobriety and creativity, I’ll leave the link below to learn more.

What is the Collective?

Something feels off—and alcohol might be the reason.

For some, it’s subtle: Creative work takes more effort than it used to. Mornings feel heavier. Recovery takes longer. The spark you rely on doesn’t arrive when you need it. You’re producing more effort than output.

For others, it’s obvious: You’ve tried cutting back. Setting rules. “Only on weekends.” Starting again Monday. You know the loop: relief → numbness → recovery → regret. You’re tired of compensating.

The Quiet Cycle Most Don’t See

This pattern isn't your fault. It's how the system works when alcohol is involved.

Here's what's actually happening:

Pressure builds → alcohol softens the moment → recovery is incomplete → your baseline lowers.

Nothing dramatic. No collapse. Just a subtle drain on energy, clarity, and creative capacity. So you compensate. You work harder. You rely more. You recover longer.

Over time, this becomes familiar — and familiar starts to feel normal.

Until you realize you're producing more effort than output.

This Is Where Alcohol Becomes a Barrier

Not because you lack control.

Not because you’re failing.

But because alcohol interferes with recovery — physically, emotionally, creatively.

When recovery is compromised:

• Energy doesn’t fully return

• Clarity stays fragmented

• Work requires force instead of flow

Removing alcohol is both discovery and transformation.

You discover that the gifts you’re accessing were buried under incomplete recovery.

And as recovery stabilizes, the shift becomes tangible — you feel clearer, more present, more capable.

What I’ve Observed Across 30+ Conversations

Over the past year, I’ve had in-depth conversations with more than 30 people who realized alcohol wasn’t serving them—filmmakers, writers, artists, coaches, entrepreneurs, photographers, journalists, professors.

Different fields. Different drinking patterns. Different paths to sobriety.

But three patterns show up consistently:

The time discovery

“I didn’t realize there were two full days in a weekend. I can do so many things.” When recovery time disappears, capacity expands. A writer who spent Saturdays recovering and Sundays dreading Monday suddenly had 48 hours of usable weekend.

A meditation teacher said, “I couldn’t imagine now the thought of having a whole Sunday written off.”

Projects that felt impossible suddenly had space.

The clarity returns

Not just “less foggy”—actual cognitive sharpness. A neon artist described needing to be “razor sharp, not confused, not forgetful”—and credited sobriety as part of that foundation.

A poet said she’s been “even more prolific and more proud of the work” since getting sober.

The outputs prove it: One writer published 450,000 words in 18 months. Another placed 30+ pieces in major publications including the New York Times.

The identity shift

Many started drinking to cope with work pressure or life stress. Sobriety revealed they didn’t need substances to access their gifts—the gifts were there all along.

An artist described finally having “the courage to call myself an artist” after years of hiding his work. A writer put it this way: “Who I am as an artist is so much more potent now that I’m sober. There’s no distortion.”

The work didn’t just continue—it accelerated.

What Changes When Alcohol Is Removed

When alcohol leaves the equation, something simple but powerful happens:

Your system recalibrates.

Energy stabilizes.

Clarity returns in usable blocks.

Your capacity becomes accessible again — not forced, not rushed.

For some, this feels like relief. For others, it feels like momentum. For everyone, it feels sustainable.

Introducing The Sober Creative Method™

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day, 1:1 coaching experience for people who want to remove alcohol as the barrier to their full capacity.

This is not about labels.

It’s not about hitting rock bottom.

And it’s not about giving anything up.

It’s about creating the conditions where clarity, energy, and presence become reliable again.

The Framework: RELEASE · CREATE · BECOME

This work follows a clear sequence — but everyone enters at a different point.

You don’t need to “achieve” all three to benefit.

Often, Release alone is the win.

Stage 1: RELEASE

Stabilization and relief

We remove the patterns that keep your system depleted.

This includes:

• examining how alcohol functions in your daily patterns

• releasing the belief that you need substances to show up fully

• restoring your baseline energy and clarity

• interrupting the effort → recovery → effort loop

Result:

Your system begins to recover instead of compensating.

Stage 2: CREATE

Rhythm and consistency

Once clarity stabilizes, creation becomes reliable again.

We build:

• daily rhythms that support focus and recovery

• practical strategies for industry environments

• practices that work without artificial stimulation

• systems that reduce decision fatigue

Result:

Work becomes steadier and requires less force.

Stage 3: BECOME

Integration and sustainability

This stage is about making it automatic—not something you manage daily.

You develop:

• Confidence that clarity is your new baseline, not something you maintain through effort

• Strategies that work long-term without constant vigilance

• An identity where sobriety and your work naturally support each other

Result:

This stops being something you do and becomes who you are.

What’s Included

The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day coaching experience that includes:

• Weekly 60-minute coaching sessions

• Daily WhatsApp support and check-ins

• Trigger and pattern mapping

• Rhythm and energy stabilization tools

• Strategies for navigating social and professional situations

• 30 / 60 / 90-day milestone celebrations

• Compassionate support if setbacks occur

This is designed to make your life simpler, not busier.

What Makes This Approach Different

Lived experience, not theory: Nearly 20 years navigating high-pressure work environments where drinking was normalized. I understand what it means to function on incomplete recovery, to push through fog, to wonder why capable work feels so hard.

Nervous system work, not willpower: We work with your biology, not against it. When your system stabilizes, the effort required to stay clear drops dramatically.

No moralizing, no labels: You’re not asked to identify as anything. You’re a capable person whose system needs recalibration. That’s the frame we hold throughout.

Structure that reduces effort: Support, clarity, and containment—not willpower alone.

These four elements work together—but they work because they address something most approaches miss.

Most people trying to change their relationship with alcohol encounter the same options:

Willpower alone works until the next high-pressure deadline, networking event, or week where everything compounds at once. Eventually, your body wins.

Traditional recovery programs center on rock bottom, lifelong identity, and group support. The Sober Creative Method™ is built around restoring your system’s ability to recover, disrupting the patterns that keep you depleted, and maintaining professional momentum throughout.

Therapy addresses emotional patterns and trauma—critical work—but rarely connects the dots between alcohol and why your energy, clarity, and capacity feel unreliable.

None of these start with what’s actually happening: alcohol prevents your system from recovering fully.

When you can’t recover, discipline doesn’t work. Structure doesn’t work. Willpower doesn’t work.

The Sober Creative Method™ restores your system’s ability to recover—so the other work you’re doing (therapy, support systems, personal development) can actually take hold.

This Work Changes Lives

From Jari: “The call with Josh was insightful, as he was able to ask questions and listen, as I discovered what I already knew through expressing myself.”

From Anita: “I immediately felt comfortable and at ease with Josh on our first call. His knowledge and passion to support people who are contemplating change in their reliance on alcohol is very clear. He is non-judgemental and holds space well. In particular, we discussed the overlap between ADHD and substance abuse—they very commonly occur together. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Josh’s services to anyone wanting to take action around alcohol.”

From Kai: “I had a great time chatting with Josh—he has a way of connecting to you from a place of unquestionable experience and humility.”

What a 10+ year daily drinker experienced:

“By August 2025, I was in really bad shape—drinking daily, with a swollen face, feeling foggy and anxious—and I noticed that my alcohol intake kept increasing. Then I came across Josh’s essay on the Sobriety application, which impressed me a lot. So I decided to start one-on-one coaching.

In the very first session, Josh showed no judgment, no preaching, and didn’t talk about alcohol statistics. He offered a clear, structured plan with positive creativity.

Now, after 3 months working with Josh, I am seeing tangible results (with no medication or supplements). I am still in recovery, but now I am very positive and optimistic. I haven’t opened the door of the liquor store for two and a half months—which I wasn’t able to achieve for many years until I started working with Josh.

Money-wise, the coaching sessions with Josh are absolutely worth it when seeing how much improvement my life has had with his coaching. I would highly recommend Josh’s coaching to anyone struggling with similar issues as I am.”

This Is a Fit If…

You feel depleted or unmotivated, and you know that’s not who you are.

Alcohol feels like it’s quietly interfering with your work, even if it still feels helpful in the moment.

You’re tired of compensating — pushing through low energy, fog, or inconsistent recovery.

You know you’re capable of more, but stability needs to come first.

You’re curious what becomes possible when clarity returns.

Common Questions

Do I need to quit drinking before starting?

No. You need willingness, not perfection.

Is this therapy or addiction treatment?

No. This is coaching informed by lived experience and nervous-system awareness.

What if I slip during the process?

Setbacks are met with support and recalibration, not judgment.

Will this really work for me?

Yes. Not through willpower or perfection — but by restoring the conditions your clarity and capacity actually require to return.

Your Next Step

If this resonated, the next step is a conversation.

A space to talk honestly about where you are and whether this container is the right support.

Schedule Your Free Clarity Session

Your energy, clarity, and creative capacity aren’t gone.

They’re waiting for space to return.

Josh Woll is a filmmaker and mentor with nearly two decades in the creative industry and over five years of sustained sobriety. After years of losing creative capacity to hangovers, foggy mornings, and incomplete recovery, he discovered that removing alcohol restored the energy and clarity his work depended on.

Through The Sober Creative Method™, Josh supports people in removing alcohol as an interference—so their clarity, energy, and creative capacity can return.

By the time a golf ball-sized tumor appeared in his neck—with a 50/50 chance of cancer—Phil had spent years trying to outwork, outsmart, and outlast whatever was happening inside him. What the diagnosis gave him wasn’t a plan. It gave him a reckoning. And from that reckoning, everything changed: his diet, his relationships, his location, his relationship with alcohol, and eventually, the business he built alongside his partner Carolina Wilke.

That business, , operates from a simple premise—your business challenges and your personal challenges are the same pattern showing up in different rooms.

In this conversation, Phil traces the long arc from sickness to clarity, shares where he’s landed on alcohol after 10 years without it, and talks about what he’s building next for people who hold something in their heart but haven’t yet found the courage to move toward it.

[01:00] Phil’s Early Relationship with Alcohol

Phil grew up in the South and started drinking around 15 or 16. He carried that through college, into corporate life in tech in Boston, and into his professional years—never feeling like it was a “problem” per se, but acknowledging there were periods where it was probably more than useful.

• Alcohol was deeply tied to social identity—happy hours, networking, the culture around him. It wasn’t something he questioned; it was just part of how he connected with people.

• The shift only came when his health started to deteriorate, and even then, alcohol was the last thing he was willing to let go of.

• He eventually stopped drinking entirely—and wouldn’t drink again for over ten years.

Key Insight: “I was still so tied into this identity of going and how I was connecting with people and socializing and things like this, that it was hard to let go of.”

[07:00] When the Body Starts Sending Signals

In his late 20s, Phil went from feeling like the picture of perfect health to waking up exhausted, dealing with aches, headaches, and a body that no longer felt like his. Doctors couldn’t pin it down.

• He worked with ancestral health nutritionist Mary Rudick, who had her own story of illness and recovery. One of the first things she asked him to do was cut out alcohol.

• Phil made the other dietary and lifestyle changes more easily—fasting protocols, food restrictions—but alcohol took longer. The health motivation eventually won out.

• He didn’t drink for over 10 years, a period that overlapped with his most serious health challenges, including the tumor.

Key Insight: “She’s like, if you’re on any sort of a healing path, this is not going to be helpful for that.”

[11:30] The Tumor, the Surgery, and the Real Recovery

Phil spent about a year and a half walking around with an undiagnosed tumor while going to the Mayo Clinic for biopsies that couldn’t confirm whether it was cancerous. He was living in a low-grade, constant fear.

• He was simultaneously working with (who would later become his business partner) on nervous system regulation and emotional work, doing dietary protocols, and exploring whether he could heal without surgery.

• He eventually had the tumor removed. What followed was a rapid, remarkable recovery—one he credits to the compounding effect of all the shifts he’d made.

• After the surgery, he realized how much of what he’d been doing—even the good, purposeful work—had been driven by a fear that time was running out.

Key Insight: “I couldn’t, before that surgery, I couldn’t even do like one push-up...my nervous system was so fried.”

[17:00] Choosing to Drink Again—and What That Meant

After years of restriction during his illness, reclaiming his health meant slowly allowing things back in. Expanding his diet. Letting himself have birthday cake again. And, eventually, having his first beer.

• For Phil, that first drink in Costa Rica with Carolina wasn’t a relapse or a capitulation—it was a celebratory claiming of his health. A marker of arrival.

• He was clear that this is a deeply personal decision, and that he believes drinking can be a healthy social ritual when done responsibly and in moderation—for some people, in some seasons.

• He joined the January Sober Creative Reset not from a place of necessity, but curiosity: what would it feel like to pause again, from a place of power rather than survival?

Key Insight: “For me in that moment, it was a very beautiful celebratory claiming of my health back again.”

[19:15] The January Reset: Choosing Clarity from Power, Not Fear

Phil came into the Reset asking a question most people in this community know well—who am I when I’m not using this thing to cope, connect, or coast?

• He found the Reset to be a non-judgmental container where people were exploring their relationship with alcohol for very different reasons, and that felt important.

• He’s been health-focused in his 40s in new ways—working toward physical goals he’s never had before—and part of that was wanting to examine alcohol’s role honestly.

• His takeaway: it’s useful in any area of life to periodically question what’s running you and whether you’re conscious of it.

Key Insight: “I think this is a very helpful thing to do in different aspects, not even just with alcohol, but other aspects of your life—is always to be questioning the role that things are playing and just making sure that you’re not being governed by things in ways that you’re not conscious of.”

[23:25] Creativity, Mornings, and What Alcohol Actually Does to the Work

Phil is a 4 a.m. person. His best creative work—everything he writes for Substack, the ideas that flow without friction—happens in those early hours. That’s always been true, with or without alcohol in his life.

• When he does drink, he’s made a clear personal rule: no creative work after that point. The ideas don’t fire the same way. He described feeling “blunted” and “not sharp.”

• He’s never used alcohol as part of a creative process—unlike some of the documented history of writers and artists who did—because his most alive creative time is the morning, not the evening.

• The correlation he’s observed: alcohol signals to his brain that the creative day is over.

Key Insight: “I feel that alcohol does stunt...even though I still drink, I do feel that it stunts my creative process.”

[30:20] What Phil Is Building: Sacred Business Flow and the New Community

Three years into Sacred Business Flow, Phil and Carolina have been working with people who want to bring something from their hearts into the world—usually a business expression—but keep hitting invisible resistance.

• Their existing work requires people to have already made a committed decision to move. But they’ve seen a whole group of people who hold a vision but aren’t quite there yet.

• They’re launching a new community called Radiant Flow—a lower-cost, widely accessible space built around embodiment practices: movement-based, yoga-inspired, breathwork-influenced work designed to build capacity for creative expression.

• The distinction Phil draws: most regulated people have inner practices that maintain a baseline of safety. Radiant Flow is for expansion—for moving through discomfort, resistance, and into the actual creation process.

• Phil is also moving to Rio de Janeiro, settling beachside, and curious about what a new environment will do for his own creative output.

Key Insight: “We’re helping people who hold something in their heart, a desire to create something...and maybe for a variety of reasons, they found it difficult to kind of get traction and move forward with that.”

Key Quotes

“After so many years of it being part of my identity, it was actually a bit confronting.” — Phil Powis

“I realized it wasn’t until after the fact that I realized how much I was carrying around this idea...I had this deeply ingrained kind of subconscious belief that I was effectively slowly dying.” — Phil Powis

“I think there is a way that drinking can be a healthy, social, celebratory ritual when done responsibly and when done in moderation.” — Phil Powis

“Drinking or no drinking, I would say that alcohol has never really been part of my creative process and I see it more as a hindrance.” — Phil Powis

“I think your reset really gave me a really beautiful opportunity just to reconnect with my own journey and to see how I felt.” — Phil Powis

Resources Mentioned

• Sacred Business Flow — Phil and Carolina Wilke’s business and coaching framework (sacredbusinessflow.com)

• Sacred Growth Club — their existing community on Substack

• Radiant Flow — Phil and Carolina’s new embodiment-based community (launching at the time of this recording)

• Mary Rudick — ancestral health nutritionist referenced in Phil’s health journey

• from Zen Habits — a creator Phil worked with during his consulting years

• Mayo Clinic — where Phil received care and biopsies during his illness

Where to Find Phil

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

is co-founder of Sacred Business Flow alongside . Find his writing on Substack as part of the Sacred Growth Club community. Their work sits at the intersection of business strategy and nervous system regulation—helping people move from idea to creation with both clarity and embodied readiness.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for his generosity, honesty, and the kind of story-sharing that makes this community worth showing up for. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

The April Reset Is Open — At Whatever Price Works for You

Phil came into the January Sober Creative Reset asking who he’d be if he chose to pause alcohol from a place of power, not necessity. He left with clarity.

Phil’s testimony from the reset:

I was part of Josh’s Sober Creative Reset in January of 2026. Josh created an incredibly supportive structure for allowing us all to examine our relationship with alcohol and the part we want it to play in our lives. In the end, I am not choosing to abstain from Alcohol fully, but the gift of this challenge was insights on when and why I choose to drink and how I want to approach it consciously going forward. This was a wonderful experience that I would recommend to anyone wanting to examine their relationship with alcohol.

This conversation is a reminder that your relationship with alcohol doesn’t have to fit a label. It just has to be something you’re honest about. The Reset gives you a structured, non-judgmental space to get honest—about what’s running you, what you’re protecting, and what might open up when you create some distance from it.

This April’s cohort is capped at 25 members, and the pricing is now pay-what-you-can. Because the barrier to examining your relationship with alcohol shouldn’t be a price point.

If this conversation resonated, would love to share this experience with you in April.

Join the Reset

For years, I reached for something outside myself to quiet the voice that said I wasn’t enough.

The drink didn’t silence it. It just turned down the volume long enough to forget the track was still playing.

Sobriety didn’t make the voice disappear either. But it gave me something the drink never could — the ability to actually hear what’s underneath it.

And underneath it? Something older than the doubt. Something that was there before anyone told me I had to earn my place here.

That’s what I keep coming back to. Not that I’ve made it. Not that I’ve figured it all out.

But that I always was enough — and the work now is just remembering.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This week I sat down with — nurse, healthcare executive, stroke survivor, and the voice behind Becoming You — whose story is really about what happens when the life you built around being the strong one gets taken from you all at once.

BECOMING YOU with Florence Acosta

Daily Inspirations about intentional living, mindset, personal development and being the truest version of you.

Florence spent nearly three decades in healthcare, eventually running a surgical center as executive director. Before that she was a certified registered nurse anesthetist — the person who brings someone to the edge of consciousness and is responsible for bringing them back. She held people’s lives in her hands as a professional routine. And by her own admission, she put herself last for most of it. That’s just what you do when you’re the one everyone leans on.

She came into her marriage already knowing what addiction looked like from the outside. Her former father-in-law was an alcoholic, and Florence — a trained nurse who could care for patients in four-point restraints at work — watched his family slowly stop trying. Not because they didn’t love him. Because they’d been trying for so long, and he was never open to receiving it, and eventually the silence just became the pattern. She gave me the sharpest image of this: the man walking out of his grandson’s first birthday party in the middle of summer, jacket pockets stuffed with beer cans. A room full of people who saw it and said nothing. Nobody wanted to cause a scene. So it went under the rug. And then more things did. And that habit of silence bled into her marriage until it ended it.

Somewhere in there — this was 2019, before the stroke — Florence joined a women’s circle. Nineteen women, meeting weekly for nine months. There was a talking basket that went around the room. Florence was always the last to speak. She’d spent so long not asking for what she needed that even naming it out loud felt like too much. That circle is where she first internalized that she mattered too.

Then, at 50, she had a massive hemorrhagic stroke — a ruptured arteriovenous malformation she was likely born with and never knew about. It took her ability to drive. It took her career. It stripped the identity she had spent decades building around competence and holding everything together for everyone else.

Here’s what got me about Florence: she’s not someone who talks about sobriety in the traditional sense. Her relationship to alcohol is through proximity — witnessing what it does to families, to communication, to the invisible architecture of a household. She knows the cost of silence around it. She knows what it looks like when people decide it’s easier to not say the thing. And she spent a long time being one of those people, too — until she couldn’t anymore.

When she came back from the stroke, she started writing. We talked about that for a while — what it means to create something when the professional identity is gone, when you can no longer define yourself by the role. She’s building a business now with her sister. She’s learning, at this stage of life, that you can go faster alone but you go farther together.

There was a moment mid-conversation where her story about the jacket pockets brought up something for me about my own brother, and I had a moment on air. Florence just sat with it. That’s probably the thing I’ll remember most — that she creates space for exactly the kind of honesty she spent most of her life not being allowed to have.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 044 with on March 11 at 9:30a EST

What does it look like when your business stops working against you — and starts working with you?

This week I’m sitting down with , co-founder of Sacred Business Flow, a strategist who spent years building what looked like success from the outside while quietly falling apart on the inside. His business was generating over $100K a month. He was also burning out, dealing with a string of health issues, and eventually facing a cancer scare that stopped everything.

What came out of that reckoning wasn’t a new strategy. It was a completely different understanding of what was blocking him — and why strategy alone never quite fixes it.

Phil also brings a perspective I don’t get to explore very often on this show. He’s not in recovery. Alcohol was off the table during his health crisis out of necessity — and when he got his health back, choosing to drink again felt like reclaiming agency. Like freedom. But lately he’s been sitting with a different question: who is the version of him that chooses not to drink from a place of power, not because he has to, but because he’s curious about what that opens up?

He joined the Sober Creative Reset in January and came away not with an abstinence commitment, but with something more valuable — real clarity about when and why he reaches for a drink, and how he wants to approach it going forward.

That kind of conscious, non-judgmental exploration is exactly what this community is built for.

This one’s going to be a good conversation.

Sacred Business Flow

Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

🎉 Who I’m Celebrating

You already know what it’s like to give something up and find more of yourself on the other side. That’s the whole premise behind the Sober Creative.

The world of AI is moving faster than we can keep up with. isn’t telling people to avoid AI. He’s asking a harder question: what are you quietly giving away when you use it without thinking? For creative people especially, that question matters. The tools that promise to make your work easier have a way of also making it less yours — if you let them.

Slow AI

Knowing when to use AI and when to leave it the hell alone.

By Dr Sam Illingworth

Sam is one of the few voices in this space who treats your judgment as the thing worth protecting, not the obstacle to be removed. His newsletter, read by over 10,000 people, is built around intentional use — knowing when to reach for the tool and when to stay with the discomfort a little longer, because that’s where your actual work lives.

He’s also just launched something worth knowing about: the Slow AI Curriculum, a 12-month program that just earned formal CPD accreditation — 25 professional development credits, internationally recognized, and tax-deductible as a professional expense. The price goes up to £100/year this Sunday to reflect that.

Sam was also a guest on Clear Conversations and you can view our conversation here.

For anyone building a creative practice that’s genuinely theirs — one that doesn’t outsource the hard parts — this is the kind of thinking that belongs in your corner.

☀️ What’s Next

Something new is open.

I’ve been sitting with this one for a while — longer than most things I write. Because what I was trying to name isn’t easy to name.

It’s that specific feeling of choosing clarity and then standing in it, wondering what the hell to do next. Not the crisis. Not the beginning. The after.

That’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough.

What happens when the hardest part is behind you — and you look around and realize the work of becoming is just getting started?

I launched something this week that tries to answer it.

Not a program. Not a course. Not coaching.

Something I think is rarer than all of those.

There’s a quote inside from someone who’s been on this path for forty years that stopped me cold when I read it. She said something about community that I hadn’t found a way to put into words yet — and then she just did.

If you’ve found yourself on the other side of what you were using to escape and thought now what — this is worth a read.

As a nurse. As a CRNA holding patients’ lives in her hands. As an executive director managing surgical teams, patient safety, and the invisible weight of being the person everyone else leaned on. As a daughter-in-law who watched her former father-in-law disappear into addiction while his family quietly stopped asking. As a wife who kept saying what she needed — and kept being met with silence.

She gave and gave and gave. And she never once stopped to ask what was left in her own cup.

Then, at 50, a stroke made the choice for her.

A ruptured AVM she was likely born with and never knew about took her career, her ability to drive, and the identity she had spent decades building around strength and responsibility. It stripped away every role she had used to define herself.

What she found underneath — slowly, through a women’s circle, through daily writing, through the courage to finally speak — was something she had been too busy pouring out to notice: herself.

This conversation is about what happens when the cup runs dry. And what becomes possible when you finally decide to fill it.

[00:00] Introduction — A Life Built Around Giving

• Florence is a Michigan-based writer, retired healthcare professional, and the voice behind Becoming You, a daily Substack on intentional living and personal growth.

• She spent nearly 30 years in nursing — including as a CRNA and executive director of a surgical center — before a hemorrhagic stroke at 50 permanently changed her life.

• The stroke came from a ruptured AVM she was likely born with and never knew she had. It took her career, her ability to drive, and the identity she had built around being the one who holds everything together.

• Florence now writes daily for people — women and men — who learned early that it wasn’t safe to ask for what they needed.

Key Insight: “She’s living proof that sometimes it takes losing the life you built to finally start living the one that was always yours.” — Josh Woll

[04:01] The Family That Stopped Asking — Addiction Up Close

• Florence opened up publicly for the first time about her former father-in-law’s alcoholism — a presence she witnessed from the earliest days of her marriage.

• As a nurse, her first instinct was to help. She couldn’t understand why those closest to him had gone quiet.

• Over time she understood: they had tried for years, exhausted themselves, and eventually the silence became easier than hope. His drinking became the family’s unspoken backdrop.

• He would wander from home and turn up at the liquor store. He’d leave family events with beer cans stuffed in his jacket pockets in the summer heat — and nobody said a word, because no one wanted to cause a scene.

Key Insight: “They were saying things to try to get him to help himself, but it’s been so long that they were doing this that they just gave up on him, and this became his normal.” — Florence Acosta

[07:58] The One Word That Makes Help Possible

• Florence and Josh both arrived at the same word when talking about why helping someone in addiction is so hard: open.

• Josh reflected on his own experience — people around him asking if he was sure he wanted another drink, and him being completely certain he was fine. No perspective on what others were seeing.

• Florence connected it back to her father-in-law: he was never open to receiving help. And without that opening, even the most persistent love eventually wears itself out.

• The hard truth: you can’t fill someone else’s cup if they won’t hold it out.

Key Insight: “You have to be open to receiving it, to receive that help.” — Florence Acosta

[13:21] The Cost of Always Putting Yourself Last

• Florence described the particular weight of her anesthesia work: bringing patients to the brink of death and being held responsible for bringing them back.

• But when asked what she did to take care of herself through all of it, her answer was immediate and honest: “I didn’t really take care of myself. I always put myself last.”

• As a nurse, as a nurturer, as a caregiver — she poured everything out and kept running on empty.

• The turning point came in 2019 when she joined a women’s circle: 20 women, meeting weekly for nine months, with two three-day offline retreats. It was the first time she was asked to reflect on what she actually needed.

Key Insight: “I always put myself last. And I didn’t start putting myself first until 2019 when I joined this organization.” — Florence Acosta

[17:23] The Talking Basket — Practicing the Ask

• The circle used a practice called the talking basket — passed around so each person could voice their needs out loud, in front of others.

• Florence was always the last to go. Always shy. Always hesitant to take up space or ask for anything.

• The teachings weren’t meant to be answered to the group — they were meant to be sat with privately. Florence did the work. And through that reflection, she arrived at something simple she had never really let herself believe: I’m important too. I matter.

• That realization — that her cup deserved to be filled too — changed everything that followed.

Key Insight: “We can’t pour from an empty cup, right? So as nurses, we have to fill our cups up, too. Because you can give proportionately. But how can you give yourself emotionally if you don’t fill your cup, too?” — Florence Acosta

[21:23] When an Empty Cup Breaks a Marriage

• Florence connected the dots between her father-in-law’s untreated alcoholism and the slow unraveling of her marriage.

• Her former husband had learned, growing up, to sweep hard things under the rug. He’d done it with his father for years. And when Florence told him what she needed, he did the same thing to her.

• Not out of cruelty — out of habit. Out of a pattern so ingrained it felt like normal.

• The birthday party image captures it: everyone watching her father-in-law leave with beer cans in his jacket pockets. Nobody saying a word. The silence was the problem.

Key Insight: “Brushing under the rug became normal for him. And ultimately, that’s what led to the demise of our marriage.” — Florence Acosta

[27:41] Filling the Cup — Community, Creativity, and Becoming You

• Florence launched her Substack without researching it — she just built the page, started writing, and trusted that the right people would find it.

• What fills her cup now: quality time with her mom, her husband, her stepdaughter. The comments on her Substack. The back and forth with readers who feel less alone because of her words.

• She’s also building something new with her sister — a creative project she can’t fully reveal yet. The shift she named: as a child she preferred to work alone because you can go faster. What she knows now is that you can go farther with someone beside you.

• Her platform, Becoming You, is still growing — and still grounded in the same belief that started it: authentic is the only thing worth being.

Key Insight: “I just want people to come to this space and feel like they’re not alone and they can be themselves authentically. Because if you’re not you, then you’re fake. And we don’t want fake people in our lives.” — Florence Acosta

Key Quotes

“They were saying things to try to get him to help himself, but it’s been so long that they were doing this that they just gave up on him, and this became his normal.” — Florence Acosta

“You have to be open to receiving it, to receive that help.” — Florence Acosta

“I always put myself last. And I didn’t start putting myself first until 2019 when I joined this organization.” — Florence Acosta

“We can’t pour from an empty cup, right? So as nurses, we have to fill our cups up, too. Because you can give proportionately. But how can you give yourself emotionally if you don’t fill your cup, too?” — Florence Acosta

Resources Mentioned

• Becoming You — Florence Acosta’s daily Substack newsletter on intentional living, mindset, and personal growth

• Women’s Circle / Sisterhood — The nine-month community experience Florence joined in 2019, including weekly gatherings and two three-day offline retreats

• Substack — The long-form writing platform both Florence and Josh use to build real, vulnerable community

Where to Find Florence

BECOMING YOU with Florence Acosta

Daily Inspirations about intentional living, mindset, personal development and being the truest version of you.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to for her honesty, her openness, and for trusting this space with a story she hadn't shared before. And to , , , , , and everyone else who showed up and listened — your presence is what makes these conversations worth having.

Your Cup Deserves to Be Full Too

Florence spent nearly thirty years giving everything she had.

As a nurse. As a caregiver. As the person everyone leaned on. She poured and poured and never once asked what was left in her own cup.

Not because she didn’t care about herself. Because she never stopped long enough to check.

Most of us don’t.

We keep going. We keep producing. We keep showing up. And somewhere along the way, the depletion starts to feel like just... the terrain. Normal. Expected. The cost of doing the work.

Alcohol fits neatly into that story. It softens the edges at the end of a long day. It makes the empty cup feel temporarily full.

But it doesn’t fill it. It just makes you less aware of how empty it is.

That’s what 30 days without it tends to reveal. Not emptiness — but capacity. The thing that was there all along, waiting for the noise to settle.

Florence eventually found her way to that question.

What’s actually in my cup? What’s mine?

The Reset is a supportive path to the same inquiry.

30 days. One container. Real clarity. No labels. No lifetime decisions. No pressure.

Just a structured stretch of time to find out what’s underneath.

Learn More About The Reset

Not the applause. Not the finished thing. The act itself. The making.

That feeling — that’s not a side effect of sobriety. That’s who you are without the noise.

The noise doesn’t disappear, though. It shifts.

And somewhere in the middle of making something — the voice gets loud.

Is this good enough? Does this matter? Who am I to do this?

That’s the moment. Not for a critic. Not for feedback.

Just someone who sees you in it. Who knows what it cost to get here.

Who quietly says — keep going.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

This week I sat down with Mary Peeples — writer, former editor, theater kid turned Substack essayist — whose path to sobriety and creativity is one of the more honest ones I’ve heard.

Mary started performing before she knew she was performing. At six, she had the entire Phantom of the Opera memorized. By eleven, she was playing Annie at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta and mouthing “I’m sorry” to standing ovations because she already knew it wasn’t good enough. That kind of perfectionism doesn’t go anywhere — it just changes form.

Boarding school at 15 stripped away the small-town identity she’d built around being the girl who could sing. Surrounded by other exceptional, competitive kids, she lost her footing. The eating disorder came first, then the drinking at 19 — and once it started, it moved fast. She was self-medicating undiagnosed ADHD, some PTSD, and the particular grief of not knowing who she was without a performance to anchor herself to.

By her mid-twenties she’d been editor-in-chief of a regional publication, torched the reputation she’d built, and was — in her own words — a social liability. She knew she needed to go to rehab for about two months before she actually went. She showed up still drinking. And walking into that facility, she says, was a relief for everyone.

530 days later — that was the count on the day we recorded — getting sober is not actually what she describes as the hard part. The hard part has been forgiving herself for the version of her that hurt the people she loved. For becoming, as she put it, a shell of her former self in front of their eyes.

What struck me most is how creativity has come back in layers. First the singing returned — quietly, around the house. Her dad noticed it before she did. Then drawing. Then, finally and most terrifyingly, writing — because she’d once been a writer and felt like she’d lost it entirely. Substack became the place where all those versions of herself could fight for the keyboard and figure out who she actually is now.

She’s working through The Artist’s Way. She does yoga. She journals. She practices honest communication as a daily discipline. And she’s learning to trust the creative impulse before the inner critic can dismantle it — that gap between curiosity and execution where the voices tell her she has nothing worth saying.

She does. And she’s learning to believe it.

Her Substack, , is where that work lives.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My Next Guest on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 043 with on March 5 at 9:30a EST

Sometimes the most powerful creative breakthroughs don’t come from finding your voice — they come from surviving the moment you lost it.

My next guest on Clear Conversations is . Florence is a former healthcare executive, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist, and the writer behind Becoming You with Florence Acosta on Substack. At 50, she survived a massive hemorrhagic stroke that took her career, her independence, and the identity she had spent decades building around competence and control. But it also did something else — it forced her to stop.

Florence has spent her life watching what happens when people don’t deal with what’s underneath. She saw it in her patients. She saw it in her family. And eventually, she had to see it in herself.

This week, she joins me to talk about what it looks like to reclaim your voice after you’ve been strong for too long — and what becomes possible when you finally stop performing safety and start living honestly.

This one is quiet and real and hits differently.

BECOMING YOU with Florence Acosta

Daily Inspirations about intentional living, mindset, personal development and being the truest version of you.

🤝 Collaborations

When from Camino Calls invited me onto her Substack Live, I had a feeling this would be more than a casual chat — and it delivered.

What started as an introduction to our two worlds quickly revealed how much they overlap. Rebecca helps pilgrims plan their journeys on the 1,200-year-old Camino de Santiago, while I help people navigate sobriety. But the more we talked, the more the parallels became impossible to ignore — the unknown at the start, the community you lean on, the internal shifts you can’t predict, and the way both journeys ask you to shed things you didn’t realize you were still carrying.

We got into my own path to sobriety — how alcohol stopped working long before I stopped using it, and how five and a half years later, the compounding effects on my energy, creativity, and emotional depth have been something I couldn’t have scripted.

We also talked about the Dry January Reset, what it looked like to hold that container for a mixed group of people, and what they walked away with — mostly, awareness they didn’t know they were missing.

If you’ve ever felt like sobriety and pilgrimage were speaking the same language — this one’s for you.

🎉 Who I’m Celebrating

The JD Letter

For people with multiple interests who are tired of eating soup with a fork. If your curiosity doesn't fit one label, this is for you.

By Jess

If you’ve ever felt like you have too many interests to fit neatly into one lane, The JD Letter might be exactly what you’ve been missing.

Written by — a former professional basketball player for Portugal’s Women’s National Team turned writer — this Substack is built for people she calls “multi-passionate”: those who resist the pressure to pick one thing and abandon everything else.

What makes Jess’s voice worth following is her credibility. She’s not theorizing about the tension between range and focus — she’s lived it. A decade playing elite basketball, three national titles, college ball in the U.S., then a full pivot into writing, entrepreneurship, and coaching. She speaks three languages, has lived in four countries, and has tried everything from stock trading to launching a Shopify store. She knows what it’s like to carry many identities at once, and to feel scattered because of it.

The newsletter explores the messy interior of being broadly curious in a world that rewards specialists. Topics include identity, loneliness, creative direction, and what it actually looks like to build a life that holds multiple passions without constantly starting over. Her tone is personal and honest — less self-help guru, more thoughtful friend who has already asked the hard questions and is still working through them.

If you’re tired of advice that tells you to niche down and kill off the rest of who you are, The JD Letter offers a different perspective: one that takes your whole self seriously.

🌿 What’s Next

There’s a moment that happens when the ripples settle.

The water goes still. Then you can see.

You’ve been moving fast — working, managing, producing, recovering, repeat. The surface of the water is always disturbed. And when the water is clouded with what’s shaken underneath, it doesn’t show you much.

But when it goes still — even briefly — you lean over and there you are.

That’s what 30 days without alcohol does for most people. Not a dramatic transformation. Just... stillness. In the stillness, a clearer picture of what’s actually there.

The Reset is open.

Secure Your Spot

Mary Peeples has lived many lives inside one. The theater kid from South Georgia who played Annie at the Fox. The boarding school girl who quietly lost herself trying to fit in. The 23-year-old editor-in-chief who, by her own account, torched it all by 25. And then, the one who finally walked into rehab — not as a breaking point, but as a bridge back.

What makes Mary’s story so powerful isn’t just the sobriety. It’s the honest, patient work of excavating who she actually is beneath all the performances. The writing. The drawing. The day her dad heard her singing around the house again and knew she was coming back to life. The small, sacred acts of a person learning to trust herself.

In this conversation, we talk about perfectionism, identity, creative recovery, and what it really means to dig out your own groove. Mary is currently 530 days sober, building her Substack , and stepping back into music for the first time in years.

This one’s for anyone who has ever lost their creative voice — and wondered if they could find it again.

Show Notes

[0:00] Introduction — The Many Lives of Mary Peeples

• Mary began performing on a national tour of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas at 10 and played Annie at the Fox Theater in Atlanta at 11.

• Even in moments of standing ovations, she was mouthing “I’m sorry” — a perfectionist before she knew what that word meant.

• Singing became her identity in a small South Georgia town, but it also created an early tension between who she was and who she was expected to be.

• Her story is one of a creative person who had to lose nearly everything to finally find what was real.

Key Insight: “The more accomplishments I had, the more fun my life felt. And, you know, the more adventure there was.” — Mary Peeples

[7:13] The Beginning of Drinking — Self-Medicating a Perfect Storm

• Serious drinking began around age 19, following years at a high-pressure boarding school where Mary lost her sense of self.

• She was surrounded by competitive, high-achieving peers and used achievement as a way to make friends and earn belonging.

• An undiagnosed ADHD diagnosis until age 21, combined with rejection sensitivity and a pressured environment, created what she describes as a “perfect storm.”

• Genetics and family history also played a role — Mary speaks openly about this without shame.

Key Insight: “It was me self-medicating my ADHD... partly some PTSD from being in an environment where I didn’t know who I was.” — Mary Peeples

[11:05] Walking Into Rehab — Surrender as a Choice

• Mary knew she was going to rehab for two months before she went, and she chose to do it thoughtfully and methodically.

• She describes rehab not as a crisis intervention but as “my only bridge back from whatever isolated island I had put myself on.”

• The structure of rehab — morning routines, yoga, group sessions — felt oddly familiar, like boarding school or summer camp. Her body found homeostasis quickly.

• The harder part wasn’t getting sober. It was facing the damage she had done to the people she loved.

Key Insight: “Getting sober was easy... It has taken me more than 530 days to start to forgive myself for the hurt and the damage that I did to my loved ones.” — Mary Peeples

[15:31] Creativity in Recovery — Digging Out Your Own Groove

• In active addiction, Mary had lost all sense of creative urgency. The voices of the outside world — expectations, boxes, a lack of nuance — drowned out her own.

• Getting sober gave her the space to ask a question she hadn’t asked in years: Who am I, really?

• She returned to drawing, took art classes, and slowly began writing again — even though writing had felt completely out of reach.

• Her father’s observation that she was “singing around the house again” became one of the most moving markers of her return to herself.

Key Insight: “I dug out my own groove by getting sober. And I once again was fortunate and blessed enough to take a lot of time.” — Mary Peeples

[19:56] Substack and the Unexpected Community

• After a full year away from social media, Mary discovered Substack — the last place she expected to find creativity and community again.

• Writing consistently, even without a clear weekly theme, began to nourish her in ways she hadn’t anticipated.

• Her Substack Little Edits Atelier started as “the healing rack,” a recovery-focused space, before expanding into something more reflective of her full creative identity.

• Writing has also served as an olive branch — healing relationships with friends of 20+ years through the honesty of her words.

Key Insight: “Reading stuff from people like you and writing my own stuff... it has nourished me in a way that I never thought possible.” — Mary Peeples

[21:00] The Toolkit — Practices That Support a Sober Creative Life

• Mary’s recovery toolkit includes: yoga, The Artist’s Way morning pages, daily journaling, drawing, art therapy, and honest communication.

• She completed a 90-day intensive outpatient program after rehab, and the practices she built there became “secondhand nature.”

• Affirmations from The Artist’s Way have been particularly grounding — including “My creativity is meant for divine goodness.”

• Her framing: “staying 10 steps ahead of my subconscious.” Spiritually grounded, practically applied.

Key Insight: “It opens your ears up to your intuition, which then leads to creative choices that you’re channeling from this great big universe.” — Mary Peeples

[25:04] Writing and the Inner Critic — Curiosity vs. the Voices

• Mary’s most recent Substack piece documented 50 days into The Artist’s Way, describing how her inner world now feels “on the tip of her tongue.”

• She drew a beautiful parallel to Homer invoking the Muses in The Odyssey — the idea that true creative power has to come from somewhere beyond yourself.

• Despite her editorial background, she still wrestles daily with inner voices that say “you have no authority.”

• The work is learning to stay in the curiosity without letting the inner critic kill the execution.

Key Insight: “There’s a curiosity that I have. And then like kind of in the back of my head, the curiosity and in the execution, what voices are trying to keep me from believing in myself.” — Mary Peeples

[30:02] What’s Next — Back to Music, Back to Life

• Mary is working at a record shop, returning to music through a path she never could have predicted — and calling it “exposure therapy.”

• She traveled abroad for the first time (to Greece) while sober, describing the willingness to feel fear and do it anyway as a core recovery value.

• Her mom told her over Christmas: “Mary, you’re like your 40-year-old self now.” She took it as a compliment.

• She describes this chapter as the end of a long treasure hunt — and what she’s finding in the trove is “all full of light.”

Key Insight: “It’s doing the things and taking the leap even if you’re scared.” — Mary Peeples

Key Quotes

“Getting sober was easy. It has taken me more than 530 days to start to forgive myself for the hurt and the damage that I did to my loved ones.” — Mary Peeples

“I dug out my own groove by getting sober.” — Mary Peeples

“It opens your ears up to your intuition, which then leads to creative choices that you’re channeling from this great big universe.” — Mary Peeples

“I was just a bird with broken wings, seriously.” — Mary Peeples

“It gets dark, but then it gets really, really bright and light, and then you don’t believe that it’s real.” — Mary Peeples

Resources Mentioned

• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron — morning pages practice and affirmations

• The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz — referenced in conversation around beliefs and agreements we hold about ourselves

• Homer’s The Odyssey / The Iliad — invoking the Muses as a metaphor for channeling creative power beyond yourself

• Big Fish (film, dir. Tim Burton) — referenced as a metaphor for being a big fish in a small pond

• Ella Enchanted — referenced humorously in the context of gullibility and believing what others say

• Yoga, journaling, and art therapy — all mentioned as consistent recovery and creative support practices

Where to Find Mary

Mary Peeples writes at Little Edits Atelier on Substack — a space where her identity as a theater kid, former editor, and sober creative all fight for the keyboard. Her writing is honest, curious, and worth your time.

Little Edits Atelier

Annie showed up. The editor burned everything. The drunk crashed the party. The sober girl is documenting it all. They're fighting for the keyboard. This is the live feed.

Mary shared this link after our conversation, it’s her performing Annie on stage. The end when she walks off gave me chills. Keep singing Mary!!

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Mary Peeples for her extraordinary honesty, warmth, and willingness to go deep. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

What Becomes Possible When You Can Finally Hear Yourself?

Mary Peeples spent years performing for other people’s approval. The stage. The sorority. The editorial office. Always shape-shifting. Always striving. Always a little louder on the outside than she felt on the inside.

And somewhere along the way, the creative voice she’d had since she was six years old just... went quiet. The writing dried up. The singing stopped. She didn’t lose it all at once. It just slowly slipped away.

530 days later, she’s singing around the house again. She’s writing things that surprise her. She’s trusting the words coming out of her mouth for the first time in a decade.

That’s what clarity does. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Slowly, the way light filters through trees when you’re finally standing still long enough to notice it.

It doesn’t hand you a new identity. It gently returns the one you set down somewhere along the way.

The Sober Creative Reset is 30 days of that kind of attention — daily reflections, weekly group calls, and a small private community of people who are ready to slow down and notice what’s been growing underneath the noise. No pressure. No lectures. Just mornings that invite something from you, and a warm container that holds you while you explore.

The next Reset opens for enrollment tomorrow. Early access pricing is $149 for the first 24 hours — after that, it moves to $199. Twenty-five people. No more.

If something in this conversation resonated — if you recognized even a little of yourself in Mary’s story — that quiet recognition is worth following.

Learn More About The Reset

P.S. You can access all previous episodes here. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, you’re always welcome here.

Not silence — the forest is never silent. But underneath the birdsong and the wind moving through the canopy, there’s something steadying. A sense that everything here is doing exactly what it’s meant to do. Growing. Releasing. Becoming.

That’s the feeling I want to hold for this next Reset.

What happens when you step into the forest?

You slow down. You start noticing things you’d walked past a hundred times — the way ferns unfurl from nothing, the patience of a butterfly waiting on a leaf, the way light filters differently when you’re inside the trees instead of looking at them from the road.

That’s what these 30 days will be. Not a dramatic leap. A deliberate step into a different kind of attention.

“Josh guides his Reset in a way that goes beyond simply ‘stimulating not drinking.’ We received a daily email with a question to reflect on — not about alcohol, but rather about what becomes possible without drinking. Or what shows up in our awareness when there’s no alcohol involved. Those questions really made me think, in a way that went much deeper than I had anticipated.”

— Inge van de Graaf, Netherlands

Most of us aren’t lost. We’re just moving too fast to notice what’s growing underneath the noise.

Alcohol doesn’t make the trail easier — it just makes you okay with not seeing clearly. The fog becomes familiar. The low light starts to feel like the only light.

Thirty days without it isn’t a sacrifice. It’s a clearing.

“Through this Creative Reset, Josh offers a powerful invitation to release the patterns that quietly drain energy and clarity. It creates intentional space to pause, reflect, and choose a different response... it affirms our inherent capacity to move through inner struggle and step into a more peaceful, empowered way of being.”

— Sandy B., United States

Here’s what the Reset actually is.

Every morning, a short reflection lands in your inbox. Not a lecture. Not a checklist. A single question or observation designed to slow you down and turn your attention inward — toward what’s actually happening inside you, not just around you.

Once a week, we meet. We share what’s surfacing. We move through it together.

There’s a private group for the in-between moments — the Friday evenings, the hard afternoons, the mornings when clarity is there and you want to name it before it slips away.

Twenty-five people. No more. The container stays small on purpose.

“What I really liked about the daily reflections was that they weren’t about alcohol. I know that using alcohol isn’t really about drinking alcohol — it’s about something unique to each of us. It is found in the deepest part of me, in the stillness of the moment that Josh offered to me... I have been sober since January 1, 2026.”

— Rachael, Canada

The forest doesn’t ask you to be different before you enter it. It just receives you where you are and starts working on you slowly — the way light does, the way a well-worn path does, the way 30 mornings in a row eventually do.

You don’t have to know what you’re looking for. You just have to be willing to walk in.

The next Sober Creative Reset opens for enrollment tomorrow.

Early access pricing is $149 for the first 24 hours.

After that, the pricing moves to $199.

The container will hold 25 people.

“Josh is one of the kindest, warmest humans I have ever come across. He has created a beautiful, safe, non-judgement space just full of hope, encouragement, support and empathy. He sees everyone’s journey is different and embraces that and uses those differences to bring together people to just be their best version of themselves.”

— Noelle Richards, United States

If something in this landed — if some part of you recognized the fog, or felt the pull of what clarity might feel like — trust that. It’s usually that quiet voice that knows the next step.

Learn More About the Reset

Whether you’re walking 500 miles across Spain or choosing to step away from alcohol, both journeys ask the same things of you: the willingness to face the unknown, the courage to let go of what’s no longer serving you, and the humility to ask for help. As Rebecca put it during our conversation, “The language of sobriety is a lot of the language of pilgrimage.” Both are about becoming. Both are about community. And both require you to stop performing and start being present.

We talk about my five and a half years of sobriety, the power of public accountability, how the 30-Day Reset creates a container for transformation, what the Spanish approach to alcohol can teach us, and why we’re putting a Sober Creative Camino out into the universe. This one goes deep—and it goes wide.

Show Notes

[0:00] — Introductions & Finding the Unexpected Overlap

• Rebecca introduces herself as the host of The Camino Calls and shares her mission to help walkers—especially those 45 and over—plan their journeys on the Camino de Santiago.

• When Rebecca first heard about Josh’s sobriety coaching work, she thought it had little to do with her. Following his writing changed that perspective entirely.

• The discovery that launched this conversation: the parallels between physical pilgrimage and sobriety as an inward journey are deep and undeniable.

Key Insight: “What I’ve learned—things about awareness and about choice and how we choose to walk through our lives.” — Rebecca Weston

[1:15] — The Sober Creative: Merging Two Paths

• Josh shares how The Sober Creative was born from merging his nearly 20-year career as a filmmaker and video producer with his personal sobriety journey.

• A documentary he worked on about NASCAR driver Kyle Larson is coming to Amazon Prime—an example of the creative work that has flourished in sobriety.

• Josh describes his relationship with alcohol not as extreme, but as coping-based: using it to deal with difficult emotions rather than for recreation.

• Five and a half years sober, the gains have been profound: energy, sleep quality, gym performance, and creativity have all transformed.

Key Insight: “It’s really about creating a more intentional life—and not allowing alcohol to be kind of the centerpiece of decisions that you might make throughout the day or at the end of the day if you feel like you need it.” — Josh Woll

[4:24] — Navigating Social Pressure Without Drinking

• Rebecca asks about the real challenge: What do you say when you’re in a social setting, choosing not to drink, and people push back?

• Josh’s approach: keep it short and simple. “I don’t feel like it right now.” No long explanation needed.

• The more you make it a thing, the more it becomes a thing. Lean into the decision, let it move through quickly, and get into the actual connection.

• Rebecca shares a Camino parallel: pilgrims who choose luggage transport instead of carrying a pack sometimes face judgment on the trail. The lesson is the same—you don’t owe anyone an explanation.

Key Insight: “If you just step into that and just honor that decision, it moves through quickly and you can get into the conversation and the connection—and that’s really what it’s about.” — Josh Woll

[11:40] — Sobriety as Pilgrimage: The Inward Journey

• Both sobriety and the Camino share the same language: facing the unknown, making difficult changes, finding people to let go of, and asking for help.

• Josh describes sobriety as a pilgrimage inward—a lifelong internal journey to figure out who we’re becoming.

• He tracked his patterns for two years before making a public commitment to abstain from alcohol for a full year. That public accountability was a major turning point.

• At three months in, Josh knew alcohol wasn’t going to give him anything moving forward. His choice became his power.

Key Insight: “Sobriety is like a pilgrimage inward—it’s this internal journey to navigate and kind of figure out who we’re becoming. And it’s not like a set destination.” — Josh Woll

[15:27] — The 30-Day Reset: A Container for Awareness

• The Reset is open to anyone who drinks—whether someone is ready to quit entirely or simply wants to see what a month without alcohol feels like.

• The January Reset included daily emails, weekly one-hour group meetings, a WhatsApp community, and guided meditations—multiple entry points so participants could engage on their own terms.

• The greatest takeaway for participants: the ability to step back and become aware of things they hadn’t noticed before.

• Josh plans to run the Reset four times in 2025. The Spring Reset launches April 1st.

Key Insight: “I think that’s the strongest thing that I think people came away from was the ability to step back and be aware of certain things that they didn’t really have before.” — Josh Woll

[25:41] — The Sober Creative Method™ & One-on-One Coaching

• The Sober Creative Method™ is Josh’s 90-day coaching framework built on three phases: Release → Create → Become.

• Release: letting go not just of drinking habits, but of the thought patterns around why you chose to drink.

• Create: building new structures, rhythms, and expressions of who you’re becoming.

• Become: stepping fully into the version of yourself that was waiting on the other side.

• One-on-one coaching is described as holding up a mirror gently—reflecting back patterns and possibilities without pressure or judgment.

Key Insight: “It’s really just kind of being a mirror and holding up the mirror in a gentle, kind way—hey, I’m seeing this and what do you think of trying this this week?” — Josh Woll

[28:09] — Building the Sober Creative Collective

• Josh is developing a monthly membership community—the Sober Creative Collective—for people who want to live an intentional, sober life and sustain it over time.

• The Collective will include workshops, weekly prompts, and community connection that feeds into and alongside the Resets and one-on-one coaching.

• A viewer comment during the live conversation captured Josh’s approach perfectly: “You don’t break a pattern with force, and Josh has the gentleness that it takes to help.”

• Josh’s philosophy: “I’m not a big fan of labels. If you label a person, it’s a bit of feeling constrained. We’re meant to expand and grow and lean into possibility.”

Key Insight: “Alcohol is a means that kind of takes that away from us—that ability to expand and grow and lean into possibility.” — Josh Woll

[32:10] — What Spain Can Teach Us About Alcohol & A Sober Creative Camino

• Rebecca shares observations from living in Spain: alcohol there is cultural and social, not escapist. People nurse a glass of wine. They’re not drinking to get drunk.

• Spain reportedly has the most bars per capita in the world, yet very low alcoholism rates—a difference Josh attributes to intention and community.

• The concept of la vida en la calle—life in the streets—means socializing happens outside, unhurried, with no server pressure to keep ordering.

• The episode closes with a desired wish: Josh and Rebecca would create a Sober Creative Camino—a future collaboration they’re inviting people to dream about with them.

Key Insight: “It’s about the support that you get from the people around you—and it’s not about the drink.” — Josh Woll

Key Quotes

“Sobriety is like a pilgrimage inward—it’s this internal journey to navigate and kind of figure out who we’re becoming. And it’s not like a set destination.” — Josh Woll

“I wake up and it’s like, I’m so tired, I’m so tired of being tired.” — Josh Woll

“I have a choice—my choice is kind of my power right now.” — Josh Woll

“The language of sobriety is a lot of the language of pilgrimage.” — Rebecca Weston

“We’re meant to expand and grow and lean into possibility—and alcohol is a means that kind of takes that away from us.” — Josh Woll

Resources Mentioned

• The Camino de Santiago — A 1,200-year-old network of pilgrimage trails throughout Europe ending in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

• The Sober Creative Reset — The public 30-day sobriety challenge that inspired the format of the Reset program.

• The Sober Creative Method™ — Josh’s 90-day coaching framework (Release → Create → Become).

• Sacred Business Flow on Substack — The business community where Josh and Rebecca first connected.

  Sacred Business Flow

  Clarity, visibility, clients. A business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside.

  By Phil Powis ❤️⚡️

• Menu del Día — The Spanish “menu of the day” concept, discussed as a window into intentional, non-consumptive drinking culture.

• Kyle Larson NASCAR Documentary — Coming to Amazon Prime; a recent project near completion Josh worked on during his 20-year career in video production.

Where to Find Rebecca Weston

The Camino Calls

I inspire people 45+ to walk the Camino de Santiago. With 14+ years of experience, I share tips in my Sunday newsletter, host live interviews, and lead small-group walks—guiding the first 3 days so you’re confident to continue on your own.

By Rebecca Weston

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , , and many others for who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her warmth, curiosity, and the beautiful world she’s built around the Camino de Santiago. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

What’s Next

Every Pilgrimage Begins Where the Path Enters

This conversation with Rebecca reminded me of something I keep coming back to: the most powerful journeys aren’t always the ones that take you across a country. Sometimes the most important walk you take is inward.

If something in this episode stirred something in you—if you’re wondering what your work looks like when recovery is no longer compromised, when your mornings come online faster, when focus stops breaking—that’s worth paying attention to.

The Sober Creative Reset is a 30-day guided alcohol-free container for people who rely on focus, judgment, and creative output. It’s not rehab. It’s not a lifetime decision. It’s a performance experiment—and a chance to see what changes when the interference is removed.

What’s included: daily reflections, awareness and grounding practices, weekly guidance and check-ins, and a private community for accountability and support.

No labels. No pressure. Just 30 days of clarity.

Early access pricing opens March 1st for 24 hours only.

• 🗝️ Early Access Price: $149 (March 1st only — 24 hours)

• 🌿 Regular Price: $199 (after March 1st)

Awareness grows here.

Learn More

What do you dream your life to be?

Not the highlight reel version. The real one. The one where your mornings feel like yours. Where your work has weight. Where you’re not just getting through the week but actually moving through it with some sense of direction.

Maybe you feel stuck. Maybe you feel lost. Maybe you feel unfulfilled.

And you can’t always explain why. Things aren’t bad, exactly. You’re functioning. People rely on you. From the outside, it probably looks fine.

But something isn’t landing the way it should. Your energy is inconsistent. Your focus breaks. You start things and don’t finish them. Stress accumulates. You get to the end of the day and wonder where it went.

You’re circling with no clear direction.

And the quiet part — the part most people don’t say out loud — is that somewhere along the way, you stopped questioning whether this is just how it is now.

That’s not acceptance. That’s what numbing looks like from the inside.

This Week on🎙️Clear Conversations

Episode 042 with on February 26 at 1:30p EST

This week, I'm sitting down with someone who has been, by her own count, approximately twelve different people by the age of 26 — and every single one of them shows up to the page.

Mary Peeples is a writer, former Editor-in-Chief, and the voice behind , a Substack that lives at the intersection of recovery, identity, and the kind of honesty that makes you feel less alone in your own contradictions.

At 11, she was mouthing "I'm sorry" to standing ovations. At 23, she was running an editorial room. At 25, she was in rehab — and 500 days later, she's still asking the questions that matter.

This is a conversation about what happens when you stop trying to delete your previous versions and let them all have a seat at the table.

Little Edits Atelier

Annie showed up. The editor burned everything. The drunk crashed the party. The sober girl is documenting it all. They're fighting for the keyboard. This is the live feed.

🤝 Collaborations

There’s a new section I’ve introduced to The Sober Creative — “Collaborations.”

The most powerful creative work rarely happens alone. This is a living archive of what gets made when purpose meets partnership — guest essays, mixed media projects, live conversations, and more. Different creators, different platforms, different formats. All of it rooted in the belief that sobriety doesn’t just clear the path for your own creativity — it opens the door to creating something bigger than yourself.

In a spontaneous request from my friend at WriteStack - we joined each other for a Substack Live session.

What started as a casual intro quickly turned into a real exploration of addiction in all its forms: Orel shared his 16-year battle with video game addiction and the moment on a family vacation that cracked his awareness open, while I talked about the neuroscience behind why we escape discomfort and how five and a half years of sobriety has compounded into something I never could have predicted.

We covered the trigger-thought loop, practical awareness tools, and even dug into what Orel is building with WriteStack and why authentic engagement on Substack matters more than ever in 2026.

If you've ever found yourself halfway into a distraction before you even realized you picked it up — this one's for you.

This week on Tuesday at 3P EST, I’ll be a guest on ’s series “Camino Conversations.”

Rebecca runs the newsletter The Camino Calls, where she inspires people 45+ to walk the Camino de Santiago. She has walked the Camino de Santiago over 12 times, has been living along one of its routes in Spain since 2021. She’s a guide, a storyteller, and someone who thinks deeply about what it means to commit to a path.

She hears pilgrimage language in the way I talk about sobriety. Devotion. Discomfort. Growth. Inner trails we don’t want to face.

We’ll talk about social pressure and what actually happens at the dinner table when you turn down a drink. We’ll explore what Spain’s relationship with alcohol can teach the rest of us. We’ll get into trust, walking your edge, and what it looks like to stop trying to control the narrative and just walk.

The Camino Calls

I inspire people 45+ to walk the Camino de Santiago. With 14+ years of experience, I share tips in my Sunday newsletter, host live interviews, and lead small-group walks—guiding the first 3 days so you’re confident to continue on your own.

By Rebecca Weston

🎉 What I’m Celebrating

My dear friend is running something really interesting this coming weekend (Feb 27 – March 1) — a free 3-day challenge called Design Your Creative House.

The concept is simple and beautiful: over three days, you’ll sketch a floor plan of your creative life as it actually is — not as you wish it were. You’ll name the rooms, find the heart of the home, and stand at the threshold of the one you’ve been avoiding.

It’s free, it only takes 20-30 minutes a day, and it’s the kind of inner mapping work that I think resonates deeply with what we talk about here — getting honest about what’s really going on beneath the surface before we try to change anything.

Day 3 wraps with a live open house celebration where you can share what you discovered and see into other people’s creative worlds. There are also prizes for the most courageous participants.

To join, head to Rachel’s Substack (Creative Courage with Rachel Connor) and comment “I’M IN!!!” on her post. She’ll send you everything you need by Thursday.

Which room in your creative house are you most curious about?

🌿 What’s Next

Something I want you to know before March 1st

I'm running the next Sober Creative Reset in April, and I wanted to give you the details before signup opens.

But before I get to the details, I want to share something Rachael wrote after completing the last one:

“I knew that every time I tried to stop drinking alcohol that I was one step closer to being able to kick the bottle to the door. I have read books, listened to podcasts, talked with my sober friends and family... but the one thing that was missing from my experiences was a ‘Josh’. Someone who’s been there, on both sides of the drinking, to guide, to encourage, to welcome and to ponder with.”

That’s the thing this Reset is designed to be. Not a program. Not a label. A container — 30 days of structure, daily reflections, and real support while your system gets a chance to actually recover.

Here’s what’s happening:

On March 1st, the Reset opens with early access pricing of $149 for 24 hours. After that, it goes to the regular price of $199. There are 25 people in each Reset. That's intentional — it keeps the container small enough that everyone actually gets support, not just access to content.

The Reset isn’t complicated. You remove alcohol for 30 days. You get a daily reflection prompt — not about alcohol, but about what becomes possible without it. You get weekly check-ins, a private space for accountability, and me in your corner.

Inge, who had done Dry January every year since 2020, put it this way after doing the Reset:

“Josh guides his Reset in a way that goes beyond simply ‘stimulating not drinking’... Those questions really made me think, in a way that went much deeper than I had anticipated.”

And Phil, who joined the January cohort:

“Josh created an incredibly supportive structure for allowing us all to examine our relationship with alcohol and the part we want it to play in our lives.”

This isn’t about deciding forever. It’s about 30 days of clarity — and seeing what you notice when the fog starts to lift.

If you’ve been on the fence, if you’ve tried cutting back and found yourself back in the same loop, or if you’re just genuinely curious what a month without alcohol does to your focus, your mornings, your work — this is worth trying.

Early access opens March 1st at $149. After 24 hours, it moves to $199.

25 seats. Small by design.

There will be more details at the end of the week.