What makes Jenn’s perspective worth paying attention to is that she doesn’t teach from a place of having it all figured out. She writes and works from the messy middle. In this conversation, she brings something rare: a framework grounded in personal values, honest failure, and the kind of trust that only comes from actually going through hard things.

This episode covers grief, creative burnout, the Front Porch Project she led during COVID that put an estimated $1.28 million back into her local economy, and what it means to make decisions from your values rather than from the fear of judgment.

[02:17] Growing Up Social: Alcohol as a Normal Part of Life

• Jenn grew up the youngest of five siblings in a family where alcohol was woven into every social gathering — not as a problem, but as a given

• Her brothers’ college years set the stage for what fun was “supposed to look like” — and when her turn came, she leaned into it fully, running the party house in college and carrying the habit into her 20s and 30s

• A self-help journey started by reading The Secret in her early career planted the first seeds of wanting a better version of herself

Key Insight: “I often remember just like hating myself in the morning the day after. And it wasn’t enough to keep me to not do it for the longest time.” — Jenn Ocken

[05:44] Her Father’s Heart Surgery and Choosing to Feel Grief

• In 2010, Jenn’s father went in for his second open heart surgery — his heart never pumped on its own again, and he spent five months in the ICU in Indiana while she was living in Louisiana

• She stopped drinking entirely during that period — not out of a rule, but because she wanted to feel the grief fully and understood the power of that

• She stayed social, became the sober driver, and found that choosing to feel was its own form of love

Key Insight: “I got to feel sad and feel that sadness because to me, my dad was worth it. To feel how much I loved him, to be sad for what he was in, and for losing him.” — Jenn Ocken

[08:24] Self-Respect as the Continuation of That Same Honor

• After losing her father, the pattern continued: heavy drinking, a blackout, then a flood of self-hatred the next morning

• Jenn connected this to the standard she had set during her father’s illness — if she could honor him by feeling fully, she owed herself that same care

• She landed on a values-based relationship with alcohol rather than a rule-based one, with clear boundaries that give her more freedom, not less

Key Insight: “I’m the only person that is going to be there 100% of the days that I’m alive. If I can’t treat myself well with kindness, who can I do that for other people to, or ask other people to respect me?” — Jenn Ocken

[13:57] Creative Adaptive Intelligence — What It Is and Where It Came From

• CAI is “the human capacity to navigate uncertainty without abandoning ourselves” — something Jenn noticed she had been doing for years before she found words for it

• She began to see the pattern by comparing her burnout in 2019 to her biggest successes: every real success aligned with her core values; the failures came when she drifted from them

• She distinguishes CAI from adaptive intelligence: adaptive intelligence is how you shift when you enter a room; CAI is what you bring with you to make room for yourself there

Key Insight: “Your creativity is your intelligence. Your creativity is so needed in this world. The way that you navigate what you don’t know is a strength and confidence that is surely untapped.” — Jenn Ocken

[15:04] The Front Porch Project — Creative Adaptive Intelligence in Real Time

• When COVID hit and everything shut down, Jenn launched the Front Porch Project in Baton Rouge — photographing families from the curb onto their porches, asking them to pay it forward to local businesses instead of paying her

• 40 photographers joined the mission; in three months, they estimated $1.28 million returned to the local economy

• Jenn photographed over 900 portraits in those three months — more than she had done in the previous nine or ten years combined

Key Insight: “Every single success, like the super easy successes that come to me like what that project did...that project never negated any of my core values.” — Jenn Ocken

[27:24] Self-Leadership and Being a Mirror

• Jenn teaches CAI not as a prescription but as a reflection — her goal is to help people see what’s already inside them, not to hand them a system to follow

• She revised her core value of “using zeal to empower” when she realized the truth: she can’t actually empower anyone else — empowerment is generated from within

• Self-leadership became the frame: how do you lead yourself through failure and toward the next move with enthusiasm rather than shame?

Key Insight: “I can’t empower someone. I can inspire them. I can motivate them. That empowerment is a self-job. That’s part of your self-leadership. You’re the only one that can empower yourself to do something.” — Jenn Ocken

[31:18] Core Values as a Navigation System

• Jenn uses her five core values as a real-time decision tool in uncomfortable or uncertain situations — not as aspirational ideals, but as functional, non-negotiable boundaries

• She also separates core values from priorities: both inform decisions, but they play different roles, and knowing the difference keeps you from abandoning yourself in the moment

• She shared a recent example from her own life — a friendship misunderstanding that sent her in circles until she could sit with her part in it and own her responsibility without collapsing under guilt

Key Insight: “Whenever that boundary is being squeezed, you return back to yourself. You see where it’s being negated and what is the next decision that can help you navigate the uncertainty of it.” — Jenn Ocken

[42:09] What Jenn Loves Most About Creating — And Why AI Can’t Replace It

• The thing Jenn loves most about both photography and facilitation is the sense of peace and ease she creates with people — when both parties relax into the uncertainty and let it work

• She and Josh connected on what AI-generated photos miss: the physical presence, the energy exchange between photographer and subject, the real-time adjustments, the relationship

• Both agreed that AI will likely make in-person creative experiences more valuable, not less

Key Insight: “When you have a person take your picture, their energy and your energy then collide, and that energy flows throughout every time that picture is being posted.” — Jenn Ocken

[49:25] Trust, Audacity, and Showing Up Anyway

• Jenn is working to expand CAI into courses and community tools — and wrestling with the internal doubt that comes with claiming authority in a new space

• She named the conflict directly: who is she to define a new intelligence framework, when she’s a photographer without letters behind her name?

• Her answer was clear: everyone deserves access to this awareness — and being aware of it is what makes the next move possible

Key Insight: “Being aware of your own innate ability to navigate uncertainty without abandoning yourself will give you empowerment to be able to give yourself empowerment, to move forward, to trust, to grow confidence, to do the next damn thing that you want to do.” — Jenn Ocken

Key Quotes

“I got to feel sad and feel that sadness because to me, my dad was worth it. To feel how much I loved him, to be sad for what he was in, and for losing him.” — Jenn Ocken

“I’m the only person that is going to be there 100% of the days that I’m alive. If I can’t treat myself well with kindness, who can I do that for other people to, or ask other people to respect me?” — Jenn Ocken

“Your creativity is your intelligence. Your creativity is so needed in this world. The way that you navigate what you don’t know is a strength and confidence that is surely untapped.” — Jenn Ocken

“I can’t empower someone. I can inspire them. I can motivate them. That empowerment is a self-job. That’s part of your self-leadership. You’re the only one that can empower yourself to do something.” — Jenn Ocken

“Being aware of your own innate ability to navigate uncertainty without abandoning yourself will give you empowerment to be able to give yourself empowerment, to move forward, to trust, to grow confidence, to do the next damn thing that you want to do.” — Jenn Ocken

Resources Mentioned

• The Secret by Rhonda Byrne — the self-help book that started Jenn’s personal development journey

• Emotional Intelligence — Jenn referenced Daniel Goleman’s work as a touchpoint when talking about defining CAI as a new framework

• Front Porch Project — community photography initiative launched during COVID-19 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

• Sunday Cup of Joy — Jenn’s free weekly newsletter, described as “my little rebellion against hustle culture”

• Creative Return — Jenn’s Substack and self-guided framework for navigating uncertainty

Where to Find Jen

Creative Return

This is not a newsletter about having your shit together or even getting your shit together. It's about recognizing what you already have — and learning to move from there without leaving yourself behind. Yes, and that's the energy here. Every Tuesday

By Jenn Ocken

• 🌐 Website: jennocken.com

• 📬 Substack: Creative Return — longer essays every Tuesday; Sunday Cup of Joy newsletter every Sunday, free

• ✍️ Blog: Thrive Resources — a monthly deep-dive essay on creative adaptive intelligence and related themes

Thank You

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

If Something in This Conversation Stayed With You

What Jen shared today lands differently if you’ve ever numbed your way through something that deserved to be felt. She chose presence over escape, and that choice taught her something she’s still building from.

If you’re wondering whether alcohol is the ceiling on your creative work — or whether something else is keeping you from the clarity you know is in there — let’s talk.

A free 20-minute session, no pressure, just a real conversation.

Schedule a Free Clarity Session →

You have this creative capacity in you too. Everyone does. It might just be dimmed down a bit.

Alcohol dulls the part of your brain that does that work, the part that plans ahead and imagines that something better is even possible. You feel it as a morning that’s half gone before you’re out of bed, and a life running at half power, where the person you want to be keeps drifting further from the one you’re living as right now.

And it doesn’t stay in one place. It shows up in your health, your work, your money, your family, your relationship, your friendships, the spiritual side of you, the part of you still trying to grow. Pick any area of your life. If something there feels off, alcohol is probably closer to the reason than you think.

You’re done with it. You’ve cut back, made rules, started fresh on a Monday more times than you can count, and you know the drill by heart. First a feeling of relief, then a growing sense of numbness, followed by a slow recovery, then regret.

And you are so tired of it.

Explore Working Together

You pour what’s left down the sink and tell yourself that was the last one. An hour later you’re tying your shoes and crossing the street to the store for more. I did that more nights than I’d like to admit, so I’m not here to judge you for it. I’m here because I found my own way way out.

Underneath, the same thing keeps happening. You feel the busy pressure of life’s demands, you turn to alcohol to softens the edges, and your body never fully recovers. Your baseline drops a little each time. You push harder to make up for the moments you were off your game, and after a while that just begins to feel like your life.

It doesn’t have to. That creative side of you isn't gone. Alcohol has just been keeping it dim. Stop drinking, and it comes back, clearer than you remember.

How I work

I take people through three stages over 90 days, one on one, with a private weekly session and daily check-ins on WhatsApp.

Release, Create, Become.

We start by getting alcohol out of the way so your energy and clarity can come back online, and for a lot of people I work with that one move changes the whole trajectory. From there we build simple daily rhythms so the clear days hold, and we work through the moments one by one that usually trip you up. By the end, staying off alcohol isn't something you have to work at anymore. It's just who you are now.

You won't have to label yourself an alcoholic or hit rock bottom first. We work with your body, not against it. Once we reset the nervous system, not drinking gets easier and stops wearing you out.

What people say

“By August 2025 I was in really bad shape, drinking daily, foggy and anxious. In our first session Josh showed no judgment, no preaching, and no statistics. He gave me a clear plan. Three months later, I haven’t been near a liquor store in two and a half months, something I couldn’t manage for years.” Yuliya, verified review on Trustpilot

“I immediately felt comfortable and at ease with Josh on our first call. He is non-judgemental and holds space well, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend him to anyone wanting to take action around alcohol.” Anita

Explore Working Together

This is for you if …

You're tired of what drinking has done to your life, and you want a real way out. You know it's holding you back, even if it still feels like the only way to unwind after a hard day. You don't want to fight it forever. You want it behind you.

The next step

The next move is a conversation. We talk about where you are and whether this is the right kind of support for you. You don’t need to have quit already. You do need to be willing.

👉 Schedule a Free Clarity Call

Your energy and clarity aren't gone. They come back once alcohol is out of the way.

Schedule a Clarity Call

I’m Josh. I made films for almost twenty years, and I’ve been sober for over five. I lost a lot of my best energy to hangovers and foggy mornings, and when I took the alcohol out, the clarity my work ran on came back. Now I help other people do the same.

Most people think creativity is for artists. The painter, the musician, the person with the camera. That is not what I mean.

Creativity is the part of you that can picture a different life and start building it. The nurse who finds a calmer way through a brutal shift. The accountant who finds a way to save the client money that no one else caught. The parent who keeps a whole home running on almost no sleep. You have it. Everyone does.

Alcohol dulls the exact part of the brain that does that work. The part that imagines, plans, and decides. It doesn’t always show up in some big, obvious way. Sometimes a hard stretch is what makes you stop and look. Other times you just feel it as a life that’s a little stuck, a little flat, a little harder than it should be.

And it doesn’t stay in one place. It can show up at work, in your health, in your marriage, with your friends, in your money, or in the way your weekends all start to look the same.

Pick any part of your life. If something feels off in it, the drink might be closer to the cause than you think.

I’m Josh. For almost twenty years I believed alcohol helped me relax, connect, and do good work. It was quietly taking more than it gave. Quitting didn’t make me less creative. It gave me back the part of me I always knew was in there.

That is what this is about. Not labels. Not hitting rock bottom. Just one question: what could your life look like without alcohol in the way?

If that question is worth sitting with, you’re in the right place. Here’s where to go next. Pick the one that fits where you are.

1. If you’re just starting to wonder

Maybe you’re not sure yet. You’re curious and you want to follow along without committing to anything. Subscribe. It’s free, and you’ll get my regular stories and ideas.

You’ll also get two things I only send exclusively to subscribers that aren’t available here on Substack:

• Disrupt The Pattern Private Podcast. A short note, sent only to subscribers. It points out one pattern that might be running under your work, your relationships, or other areas of your life, and gives you a moment to choose differently before it shows up again.

• A simple pause practice. When stress, a fight, or a quiet night alone hits, most of us reach for something without thinking. This teaches you to catch the gap between what you feel and the action that follows, so your next move is an empowered choice and not a habit running on autopilot.

Subscribe now

2. If you already think drinking is in your way

You don’t need convincing. You want a clear read on where it’s actually costing you. Take the quiz. Ten brief questions. It will help you see where alcohol might be getting in the way across the 8 key aspects of your life:

• Work

• Finances

• Health & Fitness

• Family & Friends

• Romance

• Personal Growth

• Fun

• Physical Environment

👉 Take the Quiz

3. If you’re ready and want support

You know what’s going on, and you are ready to make a change with someone in your corner. Book a call. We’ll look at where you are and what kind of support would actually help.

👉 Book a Free Call

Not for you?

That’s okay. If none of this fits, no hard feelings. Close the tab and get on with your day. I’d rather you spend your time where it actually helps you.

If it does fit, pick your step above and let’s go.

Josh

In this conversation, James opened up about getting kicked out of school at 17, a two-year bender that nearly derailed his life, and the moment on September 5, 2021 when his wife told him she was scared. That was the last day he drank. What followed was a five-year journey toward clarity, purpose, and one of the most honest takes on branding, creativity, and human potential you’ll find anywhere.

What struck me most about James is his refusal to be preachy. He’s not here to tell you what to do. He’s here to show you what’s possible when you stop numbing the thing that makes you dangerous.

[00:00] Welcome and Introduction

• James Martin is a branding mentor, bestselling author, and international speaker based on the south coast of England

• He has spent 20+ years advising brands including Canva’s Design Advisory Board, Affinity, and Lincoln Design Company

• He publishes The Real Brand Life, a weekly newsletter for creators and founders

• His central idea: a brand is a recognizable reputation — what people believe about you when you’re not in the room

Key Insight: “At the center of everything James does is one idea, that a brand is a recognizable reputation.”

[02:33] The Road to Sobriety

• James grew up in the UK’s binge drinking culture, starting substances at 11 and escalating through his teens

• He was kicked out of school and home at 17 and spent two years “getting absolutely battered most days”

• He got sober on September 5, 2021 — the day his wife told him she was scared

• He went fully teetotal that day: no alcohol, no smoking, no drugs

Key Insight: “My wife said that that was the first time she’d ever been scared for me and that was the last day I drank, smoked, did any drugs.”

[12:50] What Clarity Actually Changed

• The biggest shift James noticed was mood stability — fewer extreme highs and lows

• He describes himself as fiery and intense, but sobriety made him steadier

• Client feedback and online criticism are far easier to process now

• He attributes his clearer sense of direction to having more control over his emotional reactions

Key Insight: “The most exciting thing for me is having more control over the mindset and the way I react and my emotions because I know if I can control those, I can fucking change the world.”

[16:37] The Three-Step Mission

• James shared his personal three-step plan that guides every decision he makes

• Step one: earn one of the most trusted reputations in the creative industry

• Step two: build extraordinary opportunity for others

• Step three: create real-world impact

• He described having a clear mission as protection against distraction — what he calls finding his “azimuth”

Key Insight: “My mission is to help human creativity shape the world. That is the kind of big mission. There are multiple ways in which I can do that. And will try to do that over the coming years. But that’s the thing that gets me up in the morning.”

[21:00] Writing as Discipline and Discovery

• James nearly hit a million followers on Instagram but found the treadmill unsustainable

• Substack became a place to slow down and think deeply

• He writes a monthly column for Fast Company — a goal he set at the start of the year and achieved faster than expected

• Writing his second book wasn’t enjoyable, but it forced him to get clear on who he wanted to become

Key Insight: “The pace that writing and thinking about writing and the things you want to write about want to be known for when you write are the things that empower me the most.”

[32:02] Sobriety and Creativity — Is It That Simple?

• James pushed back on the idea that sobriety automatically makes you more creative

• He acknowledges he did strong work while drinking — the question is really about fulfilling potential

• What sobriety gave him: longer days, more drive, and a clearer vision of who he wants to be

• He thinks everyone is wired differently and resists labeling people as one thing or another

Key Insight: “I feel like I am now able to fulfill my potential because I’m not in recovery a lot of the times of the day.”

[36:49] Human in an AI World

• James believes technology is always trying to catch up to human creativity, not the other way around

• His operating principle: “automate the predictable, humanise the meaningful”

• He argues that brands will be judged by what they choose to keep human

• He predicts we’ll naturally gravitate toward smaller circles and closer communities as automation expands

Key Insight: “Art school will be the new MBA because people and businesses will be needing this creativity to stand out in a not very creative world. So it will be the best creative that will get these businesses and these brands and people noticed... I think creativity is our strategic advantage so we've got to fuck shit up mate.”

[41:45] The Mastery Process and What AI Is Costing Us

• James cited a study across 80 countries showing intelligence scores dropping for the first time in generations

• He links this to short-form content and the ability to skip struggle, trial, and error

• The process of getting better at something — not the outcome — is where the real value lives

• Writing his book over six to eight months was the win; what it sells is secondary

Key Insight: “The process of writing the book was the win for me. The two years of doodling around then the quite intense six to eight months of writing... was the win because it took time and it hurt and I didn’t want to do it some days but I still did it.”

Key Quotes

“My wife said that that was the first time she’d ever been scared for me and that was the last day I drank, smoked, did any drugs.” — James Martin

“I know if I can control those, I can fucking change the world.” — James Martin

“I feel like I am now able to fulfill my potential because I’m not in recovery a lot of the times of the day.” — James Martin

“Automate the predictable, humanise the meaningful.” — James Martin

“Creativity is our strategic advantage so we’ve got to fuck shit up mate.” — James Martin

Resources Mentioned

• Reputation OS Framework — James’s system for building a recognizable reputation on your own terms

• D&AD Festival — Design and art direction conference James referenced while discussing creativity and AI

• Fast Company — Publication James now writes for monthly

• Squarespace — Referenced through David Lee, Chief Brand and Creative Officer, discussing creativity as “the only job left”

Where to Find James

The Real Brand Life

The Real Brand Life is a weekly space for creatives, founders, and builders who are curious about substance more than they are noise. If you’re tired of branding being reduced to trends, tactics, and templates, you’ll feel right at home here.

By James Martin | Made By James

• His second book is on pre-order now, dropping in September — pre-order in May includes a book club, a free course, and additional bonuses

• Watch for announcements in early July about his next major project around building opportunity for others

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation and to for his honesty, his conviction, and a vision big enough to build schools. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

Ready to Remove the Barrier to Your Best Work?

James and I don’t come from the same path, but we arrived at the same conclusion: clarity changes what you’re capable of. More energy. Longer days. A sharper sense of who you want to become.

That’s exactly what The Sober Creative Method™ is built around.

It’s a 90-day 1:1 coaching journey using the Release → Create → Become framework — built for those who are done working around the thing that’s holding them back. If you’ve been circling the question of what your work could look like with full access to yourself, this is where you start.

Learn about The Sober Creative Method™

Not all at once. Gradually. A layer at a time.

First it takes the edge off. Then it takes more. And it keeps going.

You stop feeling the hard things. But you also stop feeling the good things. The things that used to land don't anymore.

Numbness isn’t neutral. It has a cost.

Sobriety doesn’t just give you your mornings back. It gives you your nerve endings. The world gets louder. Sharper. More saturated.

That can be uncomfortable at first. Feelings you’ve been insulating against for years come back online. Some of them are hard. Some of them are devastating.

But some of them are the reason you’re here.

The ones that make you want to create something. Write something. Say something true. The ones that remind you that your life is actually happening and you are actually in it.

Alcohol offered relief from feeling. Sobriety offers something else entirely: access.

Access to the full range of what it means to be alive. Allowing grief and wonder to move through you.

You were made to feel all of it.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

Jessica knows nothing has a grip on her anymore.

has lived several careers in the span of most people’s one. Pediatric oncology nurse. Flight nurse for ICE running three or four flights a day across the US and Central America. Nurse practitioner. Stock market analyst. Ghostwriter. And now, full-time Substack creator running three publications at once.

Her path into sobriety doesn’t follow the standard arc. She used substances recreationally for years — festivals, the occasional MDMA, nothing that felt alarming. Then she went fully remote. No alarm. No boss. No commute. Monday started feeling like Saturday. The structure that had kept everything in place dissolved, and stimulants filled the gap. By early 2025 it had become what she calls a nosedive.

She spent nearly 20 weeks in an intensive outpatient program — group therapy three times a week, ten hours a week total. She’s been substance-free since. She was a month out when we talked.

What struck me in the conversation was how clearly she connected the dots across all three of her professional lives. In pediatric oncology, she watched children and families navigate fear and physical trauma at extremes most people never see. She came away with a conviction that healing is psychological and neurological long before it’s biological. Hockey at a competitive level reinforced it — mental toughness isn’t about being unbreakable, it’s about how fast you recover. Then she got into stock trading, which she describes as a system that strips out every variable except two: discipline and emotional regulation. If you can’t manage your nervous system when the market moves against you, the information you have means nothing.

Same truth, three different arenas.

Writing, she says, just flows. She started publishing online in 2021 on the advice she’d seen repeated everywhere: one post per week for two years, expect nothing in return. The point isn’t the audience. It’s proving to yourself you can keep a commitment. A year and a half in, someone noticed and asked her to ghostwrite their stock market content. That led to her own monetized publications. Now she runs three: NP Fellow: Become the CEO of Your Health (mental health and functional medicine, her original newsletter since 2022), Nurse in the Market (swing trading and long-term investing), and Unstuck to Publish (a Substack-building workshop that spun into its own publication almost by accident).

NP Fellow Become the CEO of Your Health

A mental health & functional medicine newsletter helping you build emotional regulation, mental clarity, and health ownership.

By Jess, The Creator

On sobriety: she doesn’t dress it up. She said she never regrets quitting anything. The pull for her is simple — no comedown waiting around the corner, nothing running out, nothing with a grip on her. Clear-headed. That’s it.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on May 21 at 10A EDT

James Martin built one of the most recognized voices in the branding world while drinking his way through most of it. He’ll be the first to tell you that. What he’ll also tell you is that he has no idea how he pulled it off — and that clarity, not substances, is what finally let him see what he was actually capable of.

James is a branding mentor, bestselling author, and the person behind The Real Brand Life newsletter. He spent two decades helping creative people build reputations that earn trust, and it wasn’t until September 2021 that he stopped wishing the day away so he could get to the drinking part of it.

This week, he joins me on Clear Conversations to talk about what sobriety revealed about his work, his identity, and what it actually means to show up with your whole mind available.

The Real Brand Life

The Real Brand Life is a weekly space for creatives, founders, and builders who are curious about substance more than they are noise. If you’re tired of branding being reduced to trends, tactics, and templates, you’ll feel right at home here.

By James Martin | Made By James

🤝 Collaborations

Tomorrow at 12:30P EDT I’ll be sitting down with from The Divergent Talent Alchemist and the topic of conversation will be “Creating a Life You Don’t Want to Escape From.”

The Divergent Talent Alchemist (DTA) is where Jen explores how identity becomes strategy — for founders, leaders, creatives, and organizations navigating reinvention.

Over 5 years now sober from alcohol, I’ll be sharing how I’m merging my 20+ years of creative video and photo experience into what I’m now building with The Sober Creative.

I’m looking forward to our conversation!

WATCH HERE

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

In this conversation, Jessica got real about what happened when she started working from home, lost her structure, and found herself in a 20-week outpatient program for mental health and substance use. She came out the other side clear-headed, writing more than ever, and with something to say about what sobriety actually feels like when you strip it down to its simplest truth: “nothing has a grip on me.”

What struck me most about talking with Jessica was how she connects her athletic background, her clinical training, and her financial education into one unified understanding of human performance. The body follows the mind. The mind follows discipline. And discipline, she would tell you, is not a personality trait — it is a practice.

[00:33] Welcome and Introduction

• Josh introduces Jessica as a nurse practitioner, former pediatric oncology nurse, competitive hockey player, stock market analyst, and full-time Substack writer.

• Jessica is the creator of NP Fellow: Become the CEO of Your Health, a mental health and functional medicine newsletter built on science-backed, practical tools.

• Her background spans five years in pediatric oncology, competitive hockey at a high level, and stock market analysis — three fields that all taught her the same thing: capacity matters more than information.

• Jessica calls herself “the friend you’d call at 2 AM — the one who actually gets it.”

[03:39] Her Story: Substance Use, Structure, and Starting Over

• Jessica opened up about a difficult year that began when she transitioned to working from home full-time. Without external structure, she said, “every day is the weekend” — and that freedom became a problem.

• She described getting deeper into stimulant use, which eventually led her to enroll in an intensive outpatient program: group therapy three hours a day, three times a week, plus individual sessions — roughly 10 hours of therapy per week for 20 weeks.

• She had just completed the program about a month before this conversation and had not used any substances since entering it.

• She was honest about the pull that a heavy workload can create: “with all this work it just makes you want to be like… if I just took an Adderall I could burn through this.” She is choosing to do the work differently now.

Key Insight: “I’m not waiting for something to run out. Nothing has a grip on me. So it’s just freeing. And then the peace of mind and the clear mind is priceless.” — Jessica Drapluk

[08:43] Pediatric Oncology and the Long Road to Nurse Practitioner

• Jessica was drawn to pediatric oncology because her aunt had worked in that specialty her entire career. She described it as “super niche nursing” — a sub-specialty most people actively avoid.

• After five years at the bedside, she got her master’s to become a nurse practitioner, graduating right as COVID hit. Clinics were shutting down and NPs were being laid off.

• She pivoted to a flight nurse job with ICE, managing nurses on deportation and transfer flights. She described it as similar to military life — stranded on tarmacs, overnighting in different countries, working exclusively with law enforcement and military personnel.

• She was eventually let go when the contract ended, and she never returned to the clinical workforce. Ghostwriting came next, and then her own Substack publications.

Key Insight: “Bedside nursing is back-breaking work. It’s really hard. It’s not sustainable for anybody for 25 to 30 years. It’s a great rewarding experience but I don’t want to be doing that when I’m 50.” — Jessica Drapluk

[15:47] Writing, Publishing, and Why It Doesn’t Scare Her

• Jessica started writing online in 2021-2022 after watching advice to publish once a week for two years without expecting anything in return. She did it to prove to herself she could keep the commitment.

• She does not schedule articles weeks in advance. Her standard: “The most that I’ll ever have an article in the queue and scheduled is 48 hours tops. That means I was really on it.”

• When asked what she enjoys about writing, she was direct: “It just comes easy to me. It doesn’t really feel like work and it doesn’t feel awkward. It doesn’t feel scary.”

• She now runs three Substack publications simultaneously — NP Fellow, Nurse in the Market, and Unstuck to Publish — plus ghostwriting for two additional publications, producing six original articles per week.

Key Insight: “The reason why you’re publishing online once a week every week for two years is to prove to yourself that you could actually keep up your commitment as a writer.” — Jessica Drapluk

[20:42] Mental Health Now: Routines, Recovery, and Rewiring

• Since leaving the program, Jessica has built her own daily structure: morning yoga, walking twice a week, and continuing to participate in alumni groups from the program Monday through Friday — Canva workshops, bullet journaling, astrology — whatever keeps her connected to a rhythm.

• She described the process of adjusting to sober productivity: “I’m rewiring my brain that staying up all night is not an option.” Work gets done. It just gets done differently.

• The volume of her output keeps her engaged, but she is also learning to rest. She chose sleep over a late-night deadline, and it was a small but meaningful shift.

• The expanded workload also creates its own temptation. She was candid about that tension — and about the fact that she is navigating it without reaching for old shortcuts.

Key Insight: "It keeps me busy but it also — since my problem was with Adderall — with all this work it just makes you want to be like… if I just took an Adderall I could burn through this. There's no friction, you just do it. But I'm just trying to get away from it completely." — Jessica Drapluk

[24:17] Drive, Work Ethic, and Not Wanting to Be Average

• Jessica traced her drive directly to her athletic upbringing. She and her brothers woke up at 4 AM in middle school for hockey lessons before school. Two practices a day was routine. Her father took them to run sprints on the days they did not have practice.

• Her definition of not wanting to be average is specific: “I don’t want to be average as in broke or overweight and tired and in pain like the average person.”

• She sees financial literacy, physical health, and meaningful work as interconnected. The more you build in one area, the more capacity you have in the others.

• She described a clear throughline: more success leads to more people helped; more people helped leads to greater impact and more resources to help further.

Key Insight: “I just don’t want to be average. Like it’s so easy to become above average. Why not?” — Jessica Drapluk

[28:32] The Stock Market as a Skill Anyone Can Learn

• Jessica’s view on investing is rooted in a simple premise: there are only three ways to build wealth — own real estate, own a business, or own other businesses through the stock market. For most people, the market is the most accessible entry point.

• She described the market as “rigged to go up” — it goes up 71% of the time, and the other 29% represents buying opportunities. Her advice to beginners: start with index funds like the S&P 500 (SPY or VOO) or the Vanguard Total Market Index (VTI).

• Her framework for stock analysis moves top-down: start with macro conditions, move through sectors, then drill into individual stocks. She believes most people can learn to analyze the market in 15 minutes to an hour with the right system.

• She plans to offer stock market workshops through Nurse in the Market to help people — particularly millennials — understand how to navigate investing without fear.

Key Insight: “The stock market’s not going anywhere. So if you’re going through something rough, it’s always there for you. And if God forbid you miss it for a day or a week or a month, no one cares. It’s going to be there when you come back.” — Jessica Drapluk

Key Quotes

“I’m not waiting for something to run out. Nothing has a grip on me. So it’s just freeing. And then the peace of mind and the clear mind is priceless.” — Jessica Drapluk

“At the end of the day, having your health intact is what makes being sober worth it for me.” — Jessica Drapluk

“I just don’t want to be average. Like it’s so easy to become above average. Why not?” — Jessica Drapluk

“The reason why you’re publishing online once a week every week for two years is to prove to yourself that you could actually keep up your commitment as a writer.” — Jessica Drapluk

“Bedside nursing is back-breaking work. It’s really hard. It’s not sustainable for anybody for 25 to 30 years. It’s a great rewarding experience but I don’t want to be doing that when I’m 50.” — Jessica Drapluk

Resources Mentioned

• SPY / VOO — S&P 500 index funds (500 stocks), mentioned as a starting point for new investors

• VTI — Vanguard Total Market Index, approximately 1,500 stocks

• E-Trade / Charles Schwab — Brokerage platforms recommended for beginners

• Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) — The treatment model Jessica used: group therapy three hours a day, three times a week, with individual sessions

• Top-down market analysis — Jessica’s framework: macro assets → sectors → individual stocks

Where to Find Jessica

NP Fellow Become the CEO of Your Health

A mental health & functional medicine newsletter helping you build emotional regulation, mental clarity, and health ownership.

By Jess, The Creator

• NP Fellow: Become the CEO of Your Health — Mental health and functional medicine newsletter (her original publication, running since 2022)

Nurse in The Market

Helping busy professionals navigate the stock market using a systematic approach so you can build wealth on your own terms without looking at charts all day.

By Jess, The Creator

• Nurse in the Market — Stock market analysis, swing trading picks, and investing education: NurseInTheMarket.com

Unstuck to Published

Turn your Substack from an idea into a live, paid publication—in 60 minutes, without guessing what to do next.

By Jess, The Creator

• Unstuck to Publish — Substack-building workshop for new writers; learn to build your publication from scratch in 60 minutes or less. Workshop runs every other Saturday.

• Live Debate with Mick — May 30th, 10 AM Eastern — Eminem vs. MGK: who’s better? Catch Jessica and Mick live on Substack.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her honesty, her energy, and her willingness to share a story that is still unfolding. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

From This Episode to Your Next Step

Jessica spent 20 weeks in an outpatient program, came out clear-headed, and immediately got back to work. She is producing six original articles a week, running workshops, ghostwriting for others, and building toward stock market education. That is not hustle culture. That is what it looks like when your nervous system is regulated, your mind is clear, and you actually have access to your own capacity.

That is exactly what The Sober Creative Method™ is built around.

This 90-day 1:1 coaching experience uses a Release → Create → Become framework to help individuals remove alcohol as the barrier to their most meaningful work.

If you have been wondering what you could actually produce with a clear mind — or if you have started to sense that something is holding you back — this is worth a look.

Explore The Sober Creative Method™

You had dreams before the drinking took over.

Maybe you still do. Maybe they live somewhere underneath the noise.

When you get sober: that empty space in the cup is filled with time. It comes back in the mornings. In the evenings. In the hours you used to spend recovering from the night before.

That time is yours now.

That’s the substance dreams are made of. Not motivation. Not talent. Not the perfect moment. Time. Attention. Presence. The willingness to show up for something that actually matters to you.

Drinking didn’t just cost you mornings. It cost you the belief that you were someone who could build the thing you kept postponing. It kept the volume low on the part of you that wanted more.

When you let it go, that part gets louder.

The version of you that wanted to make something, create something, become something — that version didn’t disappear. It was just waiting for the space.

You’re making the space now.

That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

🧘Guided Practices

Your thoughts aren’t the problem. Your relationship with them might be.

We average somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day.

Most of them we never notice.

But some of them — the ones that show up when we’re stressed, overwhelmed, or just worn down — those ones we feel. And before we’ve even had a chance to examine them, we’ve already reached for a drink.

That’s what this new audio series is about.

From Thinking to Drinking: Creating Space to Choose Differently is an exploration of the space between discomfort and the decision to drink. Not a lecture. Not a program. Just an honest look at what’s actually happening inside us in those moments when the automatic response kicks in.

In the first episode, I walk through something simple — two people taking the same walk, on the same path, having two completely different experiences. The difference? What was happening inside them before they ever took a step.

That’s the thing about our thinking. It shapes everything. And most of the time, we don’t even realize it’s running the show.

This series is for anyone who’s ever wondered why the impulse to drink feels so automatic. If you’ve asked yourself that question, this is a good place to start.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

got sober at 20. Never had a legal drink in the US.

By that point he’d already moved to Australia alone with $2,000, gone off the rails on hard drugs, come back broke, and moved in with his parents. A stranger at the coffee shop where he worked saw something in him and suggested rehab.

He went. Sitting in rooms with people in their 50s and 60s who’d been at it for decades, he recognized himself in their stories. He saw where the road went.

He didn’t plan to stay sober forever. He just decided he couldn’t build the life he wanted while drinking the way he drank.

From there: Portland community college. Oregon State. Harvard PhD. Senior federal scientist. Congressional advisor during COVID. Then he and his husband rebuilt a dilapidated sailboat and sailed away from all of it. They’re currently anchored in Guatemala with almost no sailing experience when they left.

His take on fear: it’s information, not a verdict. He had an irrational fear of bears. He camped alone in Yellowstone anyway. He’s terrified of financial insecurity. He quit his job and took to open water anyway. What he’s learned is that the idea of the thing is almost always scarier than the thing itself. Once you’re in 10-foot swells with no option to turn back, you rise to it.

Sobriety taught him that first.

His Substack, Radical Paths, documents the whole transition in real time — no clean ending, no hindsight.

Radical Paths

Honest lessons for navigating radical life transitions — from a sailboat, in real-time, as I live what I teach.

By Cory Gerlach

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with on May 14 at 2:00p EDT

This week I’m sitting down with Jessica Drapluk — nurse practitioner, former pediatric hematology oncology nurse, competitive hockey player, stock market analyst, and full-time Substack writer.

Jessica built NP Fellow: Become the CEO of Your Health around a simple but hard-earned conviction: most health content gives you information, but information alone doesn’t change anything. What changes things is capacity — the ability to stay regulated, make clear decisions, and keep moving when life doesn’t cooperate.

Her path through oncology nursing, competitive sport, and trading floors gave her a framework that most wellness writing skips entirely.

This is a conversation about what it actually looks like to build internal stability that holds, and what becomes possible on the other side of the patterns that have been quietly running the show.

NP Fellow Become the CEO of Your Health

A mental health & functional medicine newsletter helping you build emotional regulation, mental clarity, and health ownership.

By Jess, The Creator

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

He has been sober for 18 years. He got sober at 20. He never had a legal drink in the United States.

What comes through in this conversation is not a highlight reel. Cory writes about radical life transitions from the inside, in real time, through his Substack Radical Paths—documenting what it actually costs, what breaks down, and what emerges. He is currently anchored in Guatemala, living on 100 square feet of sailboat in over-100-degree heat. And he would not lead with that.

This episode covers what sobriety taught him about doing hard things, how he thinks about fear, and why he believes the struggle itself is where meaning lives.

If you have ever stood at a crossroads between the life you have built and the life you are drawn to, this one is worth your time.

[01:45] Introduction

• Teenage punk from an LA suburb who got sober at 20, went from Portland Community College to a Harvard PhD

• Spent years as a senior federal scientist and congressional advisor, including real-time COVID-19 briefings with members of Congress

• In 2024, rebuilt a dilapidated sailboat by hand with his husband and sailed away—nearly 5,000 miles up and down the East Coast, through the Bahamas, now anchored in Guatemala

• Writes weekly about radical life transitions through his Substack, Radical Paths

Key Insight: “What makes Corey’s story worth paying attention to isn’t the adventure itself—it’s how he thinks about change. He writes about radical life transitions from the inside, in real time... Not in hindsight, not with the benefit of a clean ending.” — Josh Woll

[02:15] Before Sobriety — A Small Life in a Big World

• Grew up in an LA suburb, came out in high school around 2003-2004, and used alcohol and drugs to cope with living in a world that was not welcoming of queer people

• Wanted out of LA badly enough that at 19 he flew to Australia with $2,000 and a one-way ticket, no safety net

• Australia’s drinking age was 18—one of the reasons he chose it—and within a week he was using hard drugs, including crystal meth

• After six months abroad, he came home flat broke, moved back in with his parents, and things got worse

Key Insight: “I know that’s a common thing that people can relate with—they call like geographics—where people deep in addiction will be like, oh, you know what I really need is just to move. Like that’s going to fix everything. And sometimes maybe that works, but a lot of times you just take your problems with you and start new ones.” — Cory Gerlach

[06:20] The Turning Point — A Customer, a Phone Call, a Friday Night

• A customer at the coffee shop where Cory worked recognized something in him—the man had a daughter who had struggled with heroin and he gently suggested rehab

• Cory called on a Friday. They could not take him until Sunday. He told them he would be fine—and that Friday night was the wake-up call

• He did not go into rehab thinking he would stop drinking forever. He thought his problem was cocaine. The realization came when he started identifying with people decades older whose stories matched his exactly

• He saw his future if he kept going, and he made a different choice

Key Insight: “I trusted that in order for me to really have to build a life that I wanted, I wasn’t going to be able to do it while drinking and using—because I knew the way that I did it was not in any moderation whatsoever. I never even had the fantasy of moderation and I was a total and complete mess.” — Cory Gerlach

[15:46] Sobriety as a Foundation — The Mirror Moment

• About a month into sobriety, still living with his parents, Cory caught himself in a mirror and felt something shift

• That moment cracked open a new belief: that being sober, having hope, forming real connections—that was enough

• He carried that anchor forward into everything else: community college, Oregon State, Harvard, government work, and eventually sailing

• The first year and a half of sobriety was the hardest thing he had ever done—and it set the template for every hard thing that followed

Key Insight: “I feel like a millionaire right now. I feel so... I feel like I have everything I need.” — Cory Gerlach

[20:43] From Harvard to Open Water — Building a Radical Path

• After finishing his PhD, Cory built an unusual government career—using his science background to advise on public health policy, including one-on-one briefings with members of Congress during COVID-19

• He and his husband eventually felt they had drifted from their core values of authenticity, adventure, and freedom

• They decided to go sailing with almost no experience—his husband had sailed small dinghies one season; that was the sum of it

• They bought a boat that needed massive work, moved to North Carolina, and spent 10 months rebuilding it by hand before it was sailable

Key Insight: “It wasn’t even like a question of like can I do it—it’s like do I want to do it? And also realizing that if I’m sober, I have everything I need.” — Cory Gerlach

[26:46] Fear Is Not a Stop Sign — It Is Information

• Cory describes himself as an ordinary person when it comes to fear—not wired like Alex Honnold, whose brain literally registers fear differently

• What has changed is his relationship to fear. He does not let it be the deciding vote

• He camped alone in Yellowstone to face his irrational fear of bears. He walked alone through New Orleans and Bogotá to face his fear of violence

• The finding, repeated every time: the idea of the thing is far scarier than actually doing it

Key Insight: “It’s not acceptable for me to let fear stop me from doing things... there’s things I want to do and my first thought is fear and then I’m faced with a decision about, okay, do I do it or not?” — Cory Gerlach

[37:35] Doing Hard Things Is the Point — Easy Is Not the Answer

• Cory pushes back on the idea that the goal is to find a shortcut—he does not advocate that anyone quit their job and become a sailor

• What he does believe is that real change requires committing to a timeline. In sobriety, it was “give yourself a year.” On the boat, it was the same

• Meaning does not come from achieving the dream. It comes from the work toward it—and from discovering that even after you get there, you will want something else

• The challenge is not an obstacle to the life. It is the life

Key Insight: “I don’t know anyone that’s really been able to do like a big life change—including sobriety—that didn’t require a shit ton of work, you know, at least one day at a time.” — Cory Gerlach

Key Quotes

“I trusted that in order for me to really have to build a life that I wanted, I wasn’t going to be able to do it while drinking and using—because I knew the way that I did it was not in any moderation whatsoever.” — Cory Gerlach

“Recovery and sobriety was like one of the first things where I learned that... doing hard things is actually okay. That’s how I get where I want to go next.” — Cory Gerlach

“It’s not acceptable for me to let fear stop me from doing things... there’s things I want to do and my first thought is fear and then I’m faced with a decision about, okay, do I do it or not?” — Cory Gerlach

“We’ve done hard things before and we can do them again.” — Cory Gerlach

“There isn’t really such thing as a happily ever after when we follow our dreams, per se. Things are hard along the way and we have fear and we struggle and we have challenges. We’re able to get through it over time. And over time, you start to have a life that you are really proud of and really love.” — Cory Gerlach

Resources Mentioned

• Free Solo (documentary) — Alex Honnold’s free climb of El Capitan; discussed in the context of how individuals experience fear differently

• Dark Wizard (documentary) — A climber and tightrope walker who operates without safety equipment; referenced when discussing the spectrum of risk tolerance

• The Revenant — Leonardo DiCaprio film; Cory’s mental image when camping alone in bear country

• “Geographics” — The phenomenon in addiction where someone believes moving will fix their problems; referenced from recovery culture

• Radical Paths — Cory’s weekly Substack newsletter documenting life transition in real time

Where to Find Cory

Radical Paths

Honest lessons for navigating radical life transitions — from a sailboat, in real-time, as I live what I teach.

By Cory Gerlach

Substack: Cory writes weekly at Radical Paths—stories about the real cost and reward of radical life change, told from a 30-foot sailboat somewhere in the Americas.

He also works one-on-one with people standing at their own crossroads—people who have built the career, hit the milestones, and still feel like something is off.

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , , and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to for his honesty and generosity of spirit. Documenting a life transition in real time—without a clean ending, without the comfort of hindsight—takes real courage. This conversation is the kind that stays with you.

Is Something Holding You Back?

Cory talks about what happens when you have built the career, checked the boxes, and still feel like something is off. Alcohol often lives in that space. Maybe you have made the rules, reset the counter, had the conversation with yourself more times than you can count. Maybe you are not even sure it is a problem — you just know something keeps getting in the way.

Answer 10 questions, see clearly where you stand, and learn what your next step is.

It takes 5 minutes and it is completely free.

Start here with the free assessment

Read more

Your body has always known.

Before you could name what was wrong, it knew. The tight chest. The bad sleep. The low hum of something being off. You felt it. You just learned to reach for something that would turn the volume down.

But the signal was never the problem. It’s the choice that followed it that created one.

Grief is supposed to feel like grief. Anxiety is supposed to feel uncomfortable. The body isn’t malfunctioning when it hurts — it’s working. It’s trying to move you somewhere.

The hard feelings pass when you let them be what they are. You don’t have to fix them or solve them or explain them. You just have to stay.

And when you start trying to think your way out of the problem, you end up creating more problems when you could just stop thinking.

Thoughts happen, thinking is a choice. You can choose to let go.

The wisdom in you is older than your habits. It was there before the version of you that needed to escape.

It’s still there.

🎙️Clear Conversations: Creative Minds in Sobriety

She Was Never Sober. Then She Was Done with Everything.

grew up surrounded by cars. Her whole family was into them. She wasn’t. She played clarinet — first chair bass clarinet, nationals, all-county. That was her world.

Then she got her first car. A tech told her she needed a long list of repairs. Her dad and brother looked at it and said she didn’t need any of that. After her brother fixed the two things that actually needed fixing, something shifted. She decided nobody else was ever touching her car again. She was going to learn how to do it herself.

She became a mechanic. The only woman in the shop for most of it. She cycled through brands — worked at just about every dealership you can name — trying to find an environment where she actually belonged. At a couple of those shops, there were other women. She’d try to connect. It would start fine, and then at some point, without explanation, those women would stop letting her in. She still doesn’t know why. She stopped trying to figure it out and just moved on.

Meanwhile, she’d been smoking weed since she was 15. The automotive world doesn’t drug test. By the end, she was smoking from the moment she woke up until the moment she went to bed, working or not. It got to where she was never really in a clear headspace. And she felt alone in a way that was hard to name — not without people exactly, but without the right ones. She was using all of it to keep telling herself: keep going, doesn’t matter, keep going.

At some point she stopped believing that.

Three and a half years ago, she quit everything at once. The job. Weed. Alcohol. All of it on the same day. The first few weeks were rough. Her mind kept telling her nothing was changing, nothing would change, she’d just go back to it. But her boyfriend, her parents, her family kept telling her: a couple weeks means nothing. Give it time. And eventually the fog started to lift.

The three-month mark is where things turned. She didn’t feel the difference before that. After it, she did.

She stayed unemployed for about ten months — long enough to stop reaching back toward the automotive world and actually sit with the question of what she wanted. She found Substack. Started writing. Created digital products. Built something new.

Cozy Clarity

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

By Shelly

The writing she does now at Cozy Clarity runs on a specific conviction: awareness isn’t the same as action. Knowing something about yourself doesn’t change anything. At some point you have to put it down and do the next thing, whatever that is. Her essays don’t let you off the hook on that distinction.

Her creative process is hard to describe because she doesn’t really have one. Ideas show up during the day — at her part-time job, in passing — and she writes them into her notes app. When she gets home and starts working, more comes. She calls herself a professional at winging it. She never goes in with a plan. She just starts, and it follows.

For people questioning their relationship with alcohol or weed, her advice is simple: get to month three. Before that, it doesn’t feel like you’ve given it a real chance. After it, your body starts telling you something.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

never fit in. He knows why now.

He was 11 when his mother got cancer. The bullying at school was already happening. Nobody in his house talked about feelings — his father was born in 1920, a different world. So Jonathan just absorbed it all. Filed it away. Found no name for the unease he carried.

Then he found a drink. And eventually cocaine. His mother died when he was 17, and if he’s honest, he used that as permission. A reason. He started developing another personality on top of his own — the one that could walk into rooms, hold the attention, not feel scared. For a long time, that worked.

What he eventually figured out — years, two relapses, and a lot of research later — is that he was never broken. He was sensitive. And nobody had ever given him a map for that.

Jonathan Hoban is the founder of Sensitivity Management, an integrative framework built on evolutionary psychology, polyvagal theory, attachment science, and the body. His central argument: sensitivity isn’t weakness. The etymology alone says it — to sense, feel, assess, perceive. It’s a survival mechanism. We’re all born highly sensitive. What differs is the conditioning.

What he calls the sensory regulation cycle explains most of what people misread as personal failure. A day accumulates stress. Energy drains. Resilience drops. By evening, you’re in what he calls heightened sensitivity — overthinking, impulsive, all your feelings pushing up at once because you don’t have enough left to keep them down. That moment — that I need to take the edge off moment — isn’t weakness. It’s a depleted nervous system doing exactly what a depleted nervous system does.

For people in or around addiction, this reframe matters. Jonathan doesn’t buy that the opposite of addiction is connection. His word is freedom. Addiction, he says, is prison — a total loss of self, running on fantasies that drift further from reality the longer it goes. What sobriety gave him wasn’t a new personality. It gave him back the one he already had.

He also pushes back on the recovery-as-hustle instinct. People come out of active addiction and immediately want to sprint. He says: don’t. Your body just went through a war. It is using energy to repair itself. The clarity people describe at three or four years out isn’t discipline — it’s a body finally learning how to regulate again. Sleep. Nap. Let it heal.

The piece I keep thinking about: he says that for him, addiction turned out to be a gift. Not because it was good, but because it made self-regulation non-negotiable. He has to manage his energy, protect his rest, recognize when he’s spiraling. If he doesn’t — month by month, the survival mode creeps back in. One drink, one drug off. He knows it. He uses that knowledge.

You can listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well.

My guest this week is with of Radical Paths on May 7 at 9:00a EDT

Most people who redesign their lives do it quietly, then write about it years later with all the rough edges smoothed down.

Cory Gerlach is doing it differently. He left a senior federal science career, rebuilt a dilapidated sailboat by hand with his husband, and set off to cross oceans with almost no sailing experience. He's been documenting it all in real time — the doubt, the hard-earned lessons, the clarity that comes from choosing your challenges instead of having them handed to you.

Eighteen years sober, Cory brings a perspective on intentional living and creative work that's grounded in lived experience, not theory.

This week on Clear Conversations, we're talking about what radical transitions actually look like, what sobriety has made possible in his life, and what it means to build something meaningful when the outcome is still unknown.

Radical Paths

Honest lessons for navigating radical life transitions — from a sailboat, in real-time, as I live what I teach.

By Cory Gerlach

🎉 What I’m Celebrating

The first of May marked the completion of the April Reset. What I love about doing the Sober Creative Reset is each person’s journey is so unique. All of our paths are different, yet we are all trying to achieve a similar goal, how to find more peace and harmony in our lives.

What I believe is so important with these resets is not so much the structure, while that is important, is community. It’s having another person who is there with you, who see’s you, who knows what you are experiencing and can provide support along the way.

This work is hard. It’s very hard. And it’s quite easy to be hard on ourselves. The work becomes a process of letting that go, of shifting that mindset, of becoming more aware.

I don’t have a date in mind yet for the next one, but you’ll be sure to find out when that date is set.

I’m very proud of everyone who showed up this month. Celebrating you all.

Here are some recent reviews from Trustpilot that I’m celebrating 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 a psychotherapist, author, and founder of Sensitivity Management, Jonathan has built a framework that reframes sensitivity not as a flaw to fix, but as a survival mechanism to understand. His work pulls from evolutionary psychology, polyvagal theory, attachment theory, and sensory processing science to explain something most people have felt but never had language for: why feelings hit some of us so much harder than others.

This conversation went deep. We talked about his own path through addiction, the moment he realized sobriety wasn’t just about stopping — it was about learning to manage what was underneath all along. If you’ve ever reached for a drink at the end of a hard day and couldn’t explain why, this one’s for you.

Show Notes

[00:00] Introduction

• Jonathan is the founder of Sensitivity Management, a psychotherapist, and published author with Hodder and Stoughton

• His framework draws on evolutionary psychology, polyvagal theory, attachment theory, and sensory processing science

• His work has been featured in The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and on BBC News and ITV

• He’s currently exploring the relationship between sensitivity and addiction on his own Substack

Key Insight: “Perhaps most relevant to this conversation is something Jonathan plans to explore on his own Substack — the relationship between sensitivity and addiction, the idea that for many of us, substances were a way of managing what felt, at the time, unmanageable.”

[02:01] Jonathan’s Story — Loss, Fear, and the First Drink

• Jonathan grew up in a household where feelings weren’t discussed — his father was born in 1920, and sensitivity wasn’t on the table

• His mother was diagnosed with cancer when he was 11 and died when he was 17; he began drinking and using cocaine as a way to manage unprocessed grief

• He describes feeling “porous” — overwhelmed by stimulation, unable to let things go, running in survival mode for most of his life

• Relapses eventually led him to a reckoning: “my last one was the one where I said, that is it because I left the building and I was no longer me”

Key Insight: “Sensitivity is not what creates my addiction, but it definitely led me to it as a way to escape and a way to regulate.”

[07:55] What Sensitivity Actually Means

• The word sensitivity comes from the Latin to sense, feel, assess, and perceive — it is not weakness, it is a survival mechanism

• We are all born highly sensitive; the difference is in how that sensitivity was conditioned over time

• Sensitivity is about the sensory nervous system — visual, auditory, gut, and interoceptive signals

• The stigma around the word sensitivity prevents people from naming it — and if you can’t name it, you can’t work with it

Key Insight: “We are all sensory beings. The word sensory tells us that we are governed by our sensory nervous systems. When we look at mental health, it’s not all up here — it’s through our visual senses, auditory senses, gut senses, interoceptive senses.”

[13:29] The Sensory Regulation Cycle

• Jonathan developed the Sensory Regulation Cycle to show how sensitivity fluctuates throughout the day

• The cycle: stress event → energy drain → lowered resilience → heightened sensitivity → pitfalls (overthinking, impulsivity, porousness) → sensory spiral → burnout

• When energy is low, resilience is low — and that’s when self-sabotage moves in without warning

• The goal isn’t long breaks; it’s the quality of regulation: “it’s not the quantity of regulation, it’s the quality of regulation”

Key Insight: “When you’re more regulated, you can access the positives of sensitivity — empathy, connection, creativity, strategic thinking. Heightened sensitivity means you’re in survival mode — overthinking, impulsivity, self-sabotage without even realizing it.”

[22:15] Why the End of the Day Feels Unmanageable

• Every sensory input throughout the day — emails, noise, phone pings, screens — drains energy

• By evening, resilience is low, which means feelings surface without a filter

• Impulsivity spikes: you’ll make the call you shouldn’t, pick the fight, pour the drink

• The reframe: “this is not anxiety — this is just because I’m tired”

Key Insight: “How many times in the evening have you thought, I’m going to do that, and you’ve got no resilience to stop yourself from doing it?”

[26:13] Regulation in Practice — What Actually Helps

• Turn off your phone and calm your visual senses first — it’s the most overstimulated of all the senses

• A 20-30 minute window of quality regulation can restore focus, clarity, and energy

• Nature (even just looking at the sky) regulates through the visual sense

• Be honest about which senses are most drained — for Jonathan, it’s visual and auditory

Key Insight: “A small period of regulation and energy management — if I lose energy in one part of the afternoon, I only need 20 minutes. I come out and my energy is back up. Focus, clarity, performance, productivity.”

[30:10] Addiction, Energy, and Why Recovery Takes Time

• The longer you’re in addiction, the more depleted your energy becomes — and the harder it is to choose differently

• “When people are so depleted in addiction — you know, we’re running on we’re just tired all the time”

• Recovery demands rest first: sleep, naps, restoration — the body is healing and using energy to do it

• Sensitivity management in recovery is not optional: “I have to prioritize regulation on a daily basis and managing my energy on a daily basis out of fear that if I run in a highly sensitive state in survival mode, I will pick up again”

Key Insight: “For me, addiction is a gift because for me, it makes me me. I have to prioritize regulation on a daily basis.”

[33:31] What Addiction Really Means — and What Freedom Looks Like

• Jonathan respectfully disagrees with the “opposite of addiction is connection” framing

• For him: “Addiction is prison. The opposite of addiction is freedom.”

• Sobriety is about becoming someone he recognizes and respects: “Sobriety is someone I know, I like, and I value”

• Community and connection matter deeply in recovery, but freedom is the foundation underneath

Key Insight: “Addiction is complete. Addiction is a complete change of character. It’s someone I don’t like. It’s someone I don’t know.”

Key Quotes

“Sensitivity is not what creates my addiction, but it definitely led me to it as a way to escape and a way to regulate.” — Jonathan Hoban

“I’ve never met someone in addiction that isn’t sensitive.” — Jonathan Hoban

“Addiction is prison. The opposite of addiction for me is freedom.” — Jonathan Hoban

“For me, addiction is a gift because for me, it makes me me.” — Jonathan Hoban

“If you can’t name sensitivity, you’re shutting the door on everything.” — Jonathan Hoban

Resources Mentioned

• Sensitivity Management Framework — Jonathan’s proprietary model integrating polyvagal theory, attachment theory, evolutionary psychology, and sensory processing science

• The Sensory Regulation Cycle — Jonathan’s visual tool mapping how sensitivity fluctuates from baseline through burnout

• Johann Hari — referenced and respectfully challenged; Jonathan’s counterpoint to “the opposite of addiction is connection”

• Ice baths / nature walks — regulation practices Jonathan uses personally to lower ADHD presentation and restore clarity

Where to Find Jonathan

Jonathan Hoban is the founder of Sensitivity Management and an integrative psychotherapist based in London. He works with individuals and organizations including Warner Brothers, the Department for Transport, and firms in the legal and insurance sectors.

Website: www.sensitivitymanagement.com

He’s also launching Live Coffee Shop Talks — up-close workshops across London where he breaks down the Sensitivity Management framework in an accessible, community-centered format.

Thank You

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

From This Conversation to Your Life

What Jonathan described — that low-level hum of unease at the end of the day, the need to take the edge off, the way sensitivity turns into survival mode when energy runs out — that’s the exact threshold where so many people reach for a drink.

Not because they’re weak. Because they’re depleted and don’t have the tools to do anything else.

That’s what The Sober Creative Method™ is built around. A 90-day, 1:1 journey designed to help you remove alcohol as the barrier to your clearest, most creative work — and build the identity and the practices to sustain it.

If Jonathan’s framework made something click for you today, this is the next step.

Start Here

Shelly is the writer behind Cozy Clarity, a Substack she describes as “a space where soft and strong collide.” Her work sits at the intersection of personal development, mental health, and the lived experience of figuring it all out in real time. Her essays don’t let readers off the hook — they write directly about the gap between knowing something and doing something about it.

In this episode of Clear Conversations, Shelly shares how quitting her job, stepping away from substances, and going nearly a year without a paycheck led her to the work she was meant to do.

It’s a conversation about listening to your body, allowing yourself to feel discomfort, and what happens when you stop running from the same day on repeat.

Show Notes

[00:00] Welcome & Guest Introduction

• Josh introduces Shelly, the writer behind Cozy Clarity on Substack

• Cozy Clarity covers personal development, mental health, mindset, and “the lived experience of figuring it all out in real time”

• This is Shelly’s first-ever Substack Live

Key Insight: “Cozy enough to feel like home, but honest enough to ask something of you.” — Josh, reading from Shelly’s Substack description

[3:06] From Music to Mechanics: An Unlikely Origin Story

• Shelly grew up in a car family but had no interest in vehicles — she was a musician, first-chair bass clarinetist who competed at the national level

• After getting her first car and nearly being taken advantage of by a dishonest tech, she decided she’d never let that happen again and taught herself the trade

• She became an apprentice at a dealership and worked her way up fast, eventually working for nearly every major automotive brand

Key Insight: “After that, I was like, I don’t want anybody else to touch my car again. So I want to learn how to work on cars now.” — Shelly

[5:07] Being the Only Woman in the Shop

• Working as a female mechanic was difficult — Shelly was often the only woman in the shop

• She sought out other women in the industry and tried to learn from them, but each time those connections fell apart under unclear circumstances

• The combination of isolation and lack of genuine support wore on her over time

Key Insight: “I kind of felt isolated from everybody else at a certain point. And so I was kind of using all of that stuff to suppress it and just tell myself it doesn’t matter. Just keep on going.” — Shelly

[7:30] Recognizing the Breaking Point

• When the environment at her last shop changed under new management, Shelly decided it was time to step back from automotive work entirely

• She describes feeling like she was “reliving the same day over and over and over again”

• She quit her job, stopped smoking marijuana (which she’d used daily since age 15), and stopped drinking — all at once, three and a half years ago

Key Insight: “It felt like the same day on repeat. I feel burnt out. I’m reliving the same day over and over and over again. I don’t know how to escape it. So I knew something had to change.” — Shelly

[12:37] A Year of Deliberate Unemployment

• After leaving the automotive world, Shelly stayed unemployed for nearly ten months on purpose

• She tried going back to a heavy-duty shop briefly, realized quickly it wasn’t the path she wanted

• She found Substack, went “full throttle” — started writing, built a website, created digital products

Key Insight: “I just kind of figured I need to take a step back from this and maybe start not going away from it, but just exploring what else is out there and what else would spark my interest. ‘Cause I am a multi-passionate person.” — Shelly

[14:30] Early Sobriety: The First Three Months

• The first few weeks were brutal — the urge to go back was constant

• Family and her boyfriend kept telling her to give it time: “Nothing really happens noticeably in a couple of weeks. Just give it some more time and see how you feel”

• It took three months before she started noticing a real difference, a timeline Josh confirmed matched his own experience

Key Insight: “Before you hit the three month mark, it feels like you’re not really giving it a chance. But after the three month mark... just keep pushing it until you hit that mark and see what your body tells you, see what your mind tells you, see how you feel.” — Shelly

[18:35] Creativity, Process, and the Art of Winging It

• Shelly doesn’t work from a formal creative process — ideas surface throughout the day while she’s working her part-time job and she captures them in her notes app

• Once she sits down to write, more ideas come and things flow from there

• She calls herself “a professional at winging it”

Key Insight: “I usually never go into anything with a plan. It just, I just start and it just comes to me after I start.” — Shelly

[26:25] Sitting Still in a Do-Do-Do Culture

• Shelly and Josh discuss the cultural pressure to always be moving, always be producing

• Shelly believes that doing nothing — sitting with your thoughts for an hour or more each day — is actually productive, even when it doesn’t feel that way

• The practice of listening to your body has guided every major decision Shelly has made: leaving shops, leaving substances, finding writing

Key Insight: “You’re allowed to just do nothing for a while. Just sit there and feel your thoughts, think of new things. You don’t constantly have to be go, go, go... even though it feels unproductive, I think it actually is pretty productive.” — Shelly

Key Quotes

“I started smoking like from the second I woke up to the second I went to bed... it got to a point where I felt like I was never sober. I was never really in a clear mindset.” — Shelly

“I feel like a lot of it has to do with the idea that it’s not really pushed on that you’re just allowed to go out and do your own thing. A lot of people have it in their head that you wake up and you go to work, and that’s just how it is. That’s how it’s supposed to be. It’s not always how it actually has to be in real life.” — Shelly

“Sometimes you really do just have to sit there and be with it, just feel it for a while. Even if that means sitting there and honestly just sitting there and staring at a wall if you need to.” — Shelly

“Give it at least to month three. What I’ve come to find out is after three months, it’s like before you hit the three month mark, it feels like you’re not really giving it a chance.” — Shelly

“I feel like it’s definitely part of the universe is trying to align you for where you actually belong and trying to push you in the right direction.” — Shelly

Resources Mentioned

• Cozy Clarity (Shelly’s Substack) — essays on mental health, mindset, and personal development

• “You’re Not Lazy. You’re Burnt Out, Overstimulated and Craving Peace” — Shelly’s featured essay on running on autopilot and finding your spark again

• Upcoming essay: Part-time jobs and the multi-passionate person — how working fewer hours can unlock more of who you are

• Digital products (relaunching): Anxiety journals, a Digital Creator’s Guide, mental health guides, and automotive maintenance checklists

Where to Find Shelly

Cozy Clarity

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

By Shelly

Website (coming soon): https://www.CozyClarity.com (Shelly posts regular updates on her Substack about the relaunch — follow there for the announcement)

Thank You

A heartfelt thank you to , , and many others who joined us live for this conversation, and to for her honesty, her openness, and her willingness to share a story that’s still unfolding in real time. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.

A Note Before You Go

Shelly’s story keeps coming back to the same thing: she listened to her body. Not because she had a framework for it, or because someone told her to. She just kept paying attention to what felt off and made her move.

That’s what this work is about. Not a perfect plan. Not a dramatic revelation. Just getting clear enough to hear yourself — and then having the courage to act on it.

If alcohol has been part of how you cope with the version of life you’re trying to escape from, that’s worth looking at. The Sober Creative Method™ is a 90-day 1:1 journey built specifically for those who are ready to remove alcohol as the barrier to living more freely.

Not a detox. Not a recovery program. A method for becoming the version of yourself that’s been waiting on the other side of clarity.

Schedule a Discovery Call

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.