So please tell me first and foremost about your business model and your pricing, 'cause I know coaches are gonna wanna know that, and then we'll get into how people find you in a second.

Yeah.

So my main product is my Getting Unstuck course.

It's a six-week program that guides women through taking a break from drinking, and the premise of it is, come take a break from drinking alcohol with me, and I will show you how to do it in a way that feels better than what you've been doing, that feels easy and empowering, not like dry January.

So I'm selling people on trying to take this break, but in a more thoughtful way.

And so within the course they have a daily lesson from me.

It's a video lesson, because people who are going through this kind of behavior change really do need something daily.

So what is one thing that you did right in your business early on that helped you?

What do you mean by that?

Mm-hmm.

I mean that stopping drinking isn't just an exercise in deprivation and...

But this is how I approached it for many Dry Januarys and dry Julys and other things I did to prove to myself that everything was fine.

I thought, "Well, I just need to take alcohol away and cope, and then that's proof that I don't have a problem." But really, all of our drinking, all of it, it makes sense.

So when you were describing your drinking before, you talked about turning off the noise.

So alcohol had this very understandable, important role in your life.

So, so start me back from the beginning of that initial decision and sort of how we got here.

But can we talk about what the emotional skills gap could be if you're using drinking to cope?

Yeah.

Because, like I said, your drinking always makes sense.

And so I think for many of us, we reach an age, perhaps in our late teens, where suddenly drinking is okay.

Although I know actually in America you drink later, don't you? You can't- Go into a pub or a bar and buy alcohol as a teenager, whereas here, you can do it much younger.

And so I think we reach this point of some growth in our teenage years around that time, where suddenly we stop exercising this coping muscle and we start looking for other healthier ways because there's this normalized, glamorized, romanticized drug that has come in on the scene.

And people say, "Oh, yeah, you had a bad day? Have a drink." "Oh, you're stressed out? Have a drink." "Oh, hey, you're celebrating.

[laughs]

And Kate, when you decided that you weren't going to drink anymore, if you could maybe tell us a little bit about how you arrived at that decision, if you like, that choice.

Yeah so I've been worried about my drinking on and off for many years and like I said I went to AA meetings and sort of walked out of them thinking oh well maybe I'm not that bad and I would do dry Januaries and dry Julys and I was buying odd books here and there and filling out quizzes and But I was really, really stuck on the fact that my drinking didn't look like this cliched image of problem drinking that I had so firmly in my head from what I'd seen in movies, TV shows, all that kind of stuff.

And yeah, so I said, you know, I stopped in 2013.

And what happened at the start of that year was I tried to do dry January.

And for the first time, I couldn't do it.

I just I got like five days in and I thought, oh, I can't hack this.

And then that was a real wake up call.

for them I mean and there's no judgment here absolutely and you know everyone is in a different place and we're certainly not telling people what to do but I just think it is very interesting when you take a look and stand back because to people who want to maybe take a look and stand back where would you where would they start?

Mm.

So the women I work with, they have been trying to drink less for years, sometimes decades, and they have all kinds of rules.

I'll only, uh, drink after a certain time or on a certain day.

I'll only have one type of drink.

I'll have ice.

I'll buy those small bottles.

They- they've tried it all, and it doesn't work for them.

Mm-hmm.

Do you have to give up completely or is drinking less helpful?

I think drinking less can be a useful next step, but only if you pay attention to what happens.

So the women I work with, they have been trying to drink less for years, sometimes decades.

And they have all kinds of rules.

I'll only drink after a certain time or on a certain day.

I'll only have one type of drink.

I'll have ice.

So do you have to go and do something like a 12-step program, or are there – obviously there's a sober school, is that based on the same kind of 12-step idea?

So can we start with that question? Why do so many women in midlife feel that there is a shift with their relationship around alcohol, even when so many of us think that we are just normal drinkers?

Mm.

Well, thank you for having me, first of all.

I really appreciate being here.

And that is exactly the question to ask in that framing.

There shouldn't be any judgment here around these shifts because your drinking always makes sense.

Alcohol is a coping mechanism, and it's one that we are conditioned to use.

I want to cut down, but I don't know how to start," what are some of the first steps that they can start doing that will be really supportive for that change?