Podcast Episode Details

Seven Years of Sobriety with founder Janet Gourand

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Episode 136

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Today is Tribe Sobers 7th birthday!

We’re offering a birthday discount of 20% off our Kickstart online course and Annual membership – just go to tribesober.com to book and enter the code “birthday2022” – valid from now until the 16th November

It’s exactly 7 years today since our very first workshop in Cape Town!

We wanted to mark the occasion and say thank you

To say thank you to the Tribe Sober team and of course to all our members. 

To say thank you to everyone who has ever done a challenge or had coaching, everyone who’s ever done a workshop or donated to our annual Dry January fundraiser!

And of course thank you to everyone who listens to this podcast – we appreciate you!

In this Episode

• Janet shares the story of Tribe Sober – how it started and how it evolved
• How it evolved into an international community – all supporting each other to make the transition from problem drinking to thriving in their sobriety
• We pick the story up in May 2015 – that’s when I quit drinking (if you want to know why and how then you can catch that story on Tribe Sober podcast episode 1)
• The day after I quit drinking I started a blog – I’ve always loved writing and I wanted to log my journey, process my emotions and hold myself accountable.
• My blog was called WorldWithoutWine as that more or less described the strange place I found myself in – a world without Sauvignon Blanc…
• Blogging was my therapy and I got lots of comments saying “me too”!
• Suddenly I realized I wasn’t alone in this struggle… so I gritted my teeth and kept it going.
• I was about 4 months sober when I was hit by those early sobriety blues. I was in limbo, I’d quit the booze but didn’t quite know how my life was supposed to function without it.
• I’d got the hang of the not drinking part but I definitely wasn’t thriving in my AF life
• In fact I felt flat, a bit depressed and rather bored
• My friends weren’t helping – they were saying things like:
• “Are you still doing that not drinking thing?”
• “Surely you can have “just one” after such a long break?
• Apart from people who were responding to my blog I had no sober friends at all so felt quite lonely and a bit alienated from our alcohol drenched society
• I began to wonder if I’d done the right thing but was determined to keep going - that was the year when evidence about the link between breast cancer and alcohol was coming into the public domain and I certainly didn’t want my breast cancer coming back so I soldiered on for the sake of my health
• I was retired from my corporate job by this time
• Sobriety had freed up a lot of time but I had no idea what to do with that extra time.
• I did spend time reading QuitLit and discovered Annie Grace’s book This Naked Mind and that was a bit of gamechanger for me.
• That’s when I realized that I’d been white knuckling it and that I had to create a mindshift rather than relying on willpower.
• That made me realise that although I was sober the job was not yet done – I had to learn how to thrive in my sobriety – rather than feel deprived with being hit with bouts of FOMO.
• I’d developed the habit of a daily walk by the sea every day to avoid witching hour and it was on these walks that I began to get ideas
• I could literally feel my creativity coming back..
• One  day I had an idea…
• What if…
• What if… I used my 25 years of experience in training and development to design a workshop which would help other people to get sober and learn to thrive in their sobriety
• I was confident that I could teach people HOW to stop drinking and give them a toolkit – strategies and tools that had worked for me.
• Although I hadn’t quite got the hang of thriving in my own sobriety I wanted to build a community so that we co

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  Published on 3 years, 1 month ago