Resilient, Primed and Purposeful

[Jaunty Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome, everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction, brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance Abuse Coalition. I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: Not everybody who stops using substances does so because they have a substance use disorder. Some do it because of what they think, what they've learned, and what they know.

Mike: Gabriella Flax is a graduate of St. Andrew's College and the London School of Economics and Political Science. I came across Gabriella while reading an article entitled, Why Gen Z Are Shunning Boomer Drinking Habits. Well, as a boomer, that intrigued me. So, I learned that in addition to her academic work and work with industry, Gabriella is also a stress reduction coach who has a terrific social media page called Burnout Resilience.

Mike: Too good to pass up. We get to talk about substance use and mental health at the same time. Welcome, Gabriella.

Gabriella: Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me.

Mike: Well, it's great. Let's start with the obvious one. You're young, right? Do you say your age? Is that all right to say?

Gabriella: Yes, I'm 28 years old, almost 29.

Mike: Okay. Oh. (chuckle)

Gabriella: We're on a away. (laugh)

Mike: Yeah, well, I'm slowing it down. So you decided to go alcohol free a while back. So take it from there. When? Why?

Gabriella: Let's do the story. So my decision to stop drinking has actually a lot to do with my early career. During university, when I was at St. Andrews, I was never a huge drinker, even though as an American going abroad to Europe, I was 18, I was legal from day one.

Gabriella: My favorite university story when people ask me, what was it like going to university in the UK? I tell them that there was an open bar on day one in my dorm. And coming from the US in the world of, you know, fake IDs and all of that, when all of my friends were trying to get those so that they could drink as a freshman on campus, here was my dorm in Scotland.

Gabriella: Open bar from 6pm. And that was as the culture shock really when I got there of saying, it's that easy. And despite alcohol being so readily available, I still never really found myself as a huge drinker. However, when I moved to London for grad school, I started working at the same time. And I noticed that as my drinking increased, it was because I was going to after work drinks with colleagues, especially after stressful days.

Gabriella: Direct correlation between me at a pub and a stressful day of meetings.

Mike: Mm hmm.

Gabriella: I was also traveling a lot for work, and while I loved the travel, my company was based in the UK, but we had offices in Hong Kong and China. The amount of stress that the back and forth between the two countries was putting on my body also directly correlated to drinking.

Gabriella: I wanted to grow my career quickly, and I started entering a pretty vicious cycle of pushing myself in the office. The grind was my best friend. Perfectionism, people pleasing, saying yes to every request that came my way. Well, what did that force me to do? It stressed me out, and then it said, red wine, we'll take care of it after work.

Gabriella: Or go to the pub and have a pint, and you'll be fine. I'd wake up hungover, I'd force myself to go back to work, usually early, because I felt like I needed to get a head start of the day, push through that mental exhaustion, crash at 3pm, have three coffees, have some anxiety and panic attacks late into the afternoon, and really actually become unable to even finish out my day.

Gabriella: And I was so focused on that get ahead in my career to appease that on on paper definition of success, I pushed and pushed and pushed until that cycle burned me out. I ignored those warning signs in my body for so long that I knew I was chronically stressed, I had daily migraines, the body aches, racing mind, and equally most concerning, my curiosity for life had actually dried up.

Gabriella: I found myself routinely thinking, Why am I doing this job? Why am I going out for dinner with these friends? And I knew that something had to change. And I know this has been a bit of a long story, but this is really like the critical point of what happened is I called my grandmother for advice. And my grandmother had always been someone I went to who knew what to say.

Gabriella: And it wasn't even from a place of shared experience, she just knew me in a deeper sense and kind of knew what I needed. And I picked up the phone and she couldn't remember who I was when I said it was me. And she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's two years prior. We knew that, but this was the first time where I heard it, and where her hearing my voice did not trigger a memory of who I was.

Gabriella: In that moment, the fragility of my health came crashing down. I was in my mid twenties at that point. I was fortunate to really have never had to think about my health. I just kind of got along. I had a concussion in university. And that was really the extent of it. And I vowed in that moment to do everything in my power to protect my health.

Gabriella: And I started researching the impact of stress and alcohol on the body, and despite everything I once believed about alcohol being a cure for stress, I flipped it on its head, and I will officially be two years sober on January 1st, 2024, that's in 11 days from now. And it was that conversation with my grandmother paired with the reckoning that the speed at which I was going was not actually setting up me up for the long term success that I wanted.

Gabriella: The two of those things together said, you know, we start tomorrow or we start today and then tomorrow, you know, haven't looked back since.

Mike: You know, I'm involved in prevention education, I was involved for a long time in treatment, and it just, it boggles my mind that somebody can still make the connection that the stress relief cure is a substance.

Mike: We think we've done a great job at education, but man, we got a ways to go. So what did you, what did you find when you stopped drinking alcohol? Well, first, let's run through the list. What'd you find physically?

Gabriella: Physically, oh my gosh, the list is long. I mean, from better sleep to energy to even, I had really, you know, the burnout that I was experiencing, almost this alcohol and, you know, work induced and perfectionism induced burnout, just the relief from all of that, I was able to start eating again, I mean, I really got to the point where I was so exhausted that the idea of washing dishes, I was able to start eating again, I mean, I really got to the point where I was so exhausted that the idea of washing dishes was so painful that I would just forgo dinner.

Gabriella: I'd go, it's easier to not have dinner so I don't have to wash dishes. Because I'm so stressed out and I just can't add anything else to my plate right now. Not to make a, you know, plate pun here. But it was literally that. It was, I saw myself at such a rock bottom. That when you say what are the physical kind of symptoms or the physical benefits.

Gabriella: Everything. There is not one part of my physical well being that has not improved as a result from learning how to manage my stress, from learning how to not drink, and from learning how to incorporate a much healthier approach to work, fitness, mentality, and mindset. Everything has leveled up. Energy levels, off the roof.

Gabriella: I've went from a dead battery to an Energizer bunny. So much so now that (chuckle) there's so many things going on where I'm like, we've got to rein it back in because there's just this boundless energy that allows me to go and create things now that I wasn't able to do before.

Mike: The minute you stopped drinking? What did you use for stress reduction then?

Gabriella: So, a few things. When I stopped, I was so tired that the idea of starting a fitness routine, it really wasn't even available to me. There's so much rhetoric out there of, go to the gym, start lifting. I didn't have that within me to even begin. So I started what I call five minute challenges.

Gabriella: I knew the things from researching them, from talking to different health practitioners. I knew that stress through breath work. Learning how to sit with my thoughts and not intellectualize them, but actually just sit and feel them. If I was stressed, I didn't actually have to de stress. I was allowed to be stressed.

Gabriella: My day was stressful. That was okay. Incorporating little bits of exercise, but doing these things for five minutes. And what that helped me do is it helped me start to rebuild this, the energy and you know, it allowed me to decompress in really short bursts that felt doable. I could walk for five minutes.

Gabriella: I could do a yoga video off YouTube for five minutes. 10 minutes might have been pushing it initially, but 5 minutes? Doable. The reps and repetition of doing that proved to me I was capable of 5 minutes. I had data points that said last week 5 minutes was great, this week we're gonna do 7. And I literally built up a self care routine in minute increments over the few months and that is what helped me come back.

Mike: How about your emotional well being?

Gabriella: Emotional well being, it was a lesson in learning to be vulnerable. On the emotional side, I hid my burnout. I hid my drinking for stress from my family, from my loved ones, from my coworkers.

Gabriella: On the emotional side, it was a homecoming to community. It was being comfortable with saying to my loved ones I'm not doing okay right now. I need support from you. And what could that look like? And there is nothing more healing than a conversation. Because what you'll find is that so much of what you are experiencing either is directly someone can understand it because they are experiencing themselves, or the empathy and the sympathy on either side, it's there.

Gabriella: And those conversations really helped me understand you're not alone, nothing is wrong with you, everything that has happened to you is entirely normal and happens to other people, and there's peace and acceptance. Knowing that this was all okay, I hadn't failed, I wasn't weak, I wasn't broken, it was just, this has happened, let's accept it, and we're gonna be okay.

Gabriella: That was the biggest help for my emotional well being, and learning to be still with my thoughts, learning to be still with those emotions, and just not intellectualize them. Just let them be there.

Mike: What did you say to your colleagues or co workers when they said, Hey, after work, let's go out for a little attitude adjustment.

Gabriella: So, I love my Google Calendar. I live and die by it. I would schedule, on days that I knew the outcome was probably going to be time at the pub, I would send a colleague, or I'd send a friend even, who worked nearby, an invitation for a walk after work. And it would be at the same time that everyone else was going to go to the pub, and I would just say, Hey, what about a walk? We work in right by St. Paul's Cathedral in London. It's absolutely beautiful. Every monument that you see in every movie about London, it's right there. I was like, let's go walk our city. Let's go be tourists in our city for 45 minutes. And I didn't ever bring attention to the fact that we weren't drinking.

Gabriella: I was like, let's just go do a different activity. And knowing that that walk was going to help me, I knew it was also going to benefit them. Because if they were equally stressed out and looking forward to the pub, we were both going to reap the same benefit from that walk. So I would just shoot out calendar invitations.

Gabriella: And if people were saying to me, Hey, you know, you should come to the pub. It will be social. Why aren't you joining? It was a really, for me, I was just saying, I'm not prioritizing drinking right now. And I use the word prioritize because when I first stopped drinking, I struggled a lot with the finality of that.

Gabriella: I didn't know, is this long term? Now I can confidently say, if you're on, you know, the 20th of December, I don't see myself ever going back, and that's a life decision, but initially I struggled with that. Saying that you're not prioritizing alcohol at this moment takes the pressure off of making a decision.

Mike: Mm hmm.

Gabriella: In the same way that you might not be prioritizing, I don't know, cooking right now because you're really enjoying going out to new restaurants or you're really prioritizing cooking because you've found that it's something that lights you up, I just don't have to prioritize alcohol. And it's as simple as that.

Gabriella: And that response to my colleagues, usually, actually, I don't think anyone ever came back to me and said anything else. They're like, okay, cool. Like, because it's not really a common thought, we don't think about prioritizing different parts of our life like that. And whether they thought anything else of it or took it at face value.

Gabriella: No one questioned it.

Mike: Well, and you owned it, so you didn't put it on them or make it a discussion like, I'm not drinking, so they have to defend their own drinking then.

Gabriella: Exactly.

Mike: You know, speaking of defending the drinking, I'll open a little Pandora's box here for a minute. I'm hoping you say no, but I don't know how you could do it.

Mike: Do you ever read the comments in your socials?

Gabriella: Mm hmm. I do and I don't. I read them a lot earlier. Now, I have stopped. And why I read them earlier is I was really curious, you know, I love telling, I love my, bringing attention to my story, not to try and say, Hey, this is the golden path and this is what you should do.

Gabriella: But just because as someone who made the decision at 25 to stop drinking, I was like, are there other 25 year olds out there who are trying to like, I just wanted evidence. I wanted people to know that you can do this. There are other people out there. And comments really helped me understand what the rhetoric was towards my story.

Gabriella: What are the things I know what people have told me. I've had so many conversations where people question my decision to not drink, but I live one life. I'm one girl, living in London, with an American passport, working in tech. What does that conversation look like for someone who's so different from me?

Gabriella: And the way that I started to understand that is by reading my comments to see what other people out there were saying. So initially, yes. Now I don't. (chuckle) And reason being you know, I'm confident in what I am doing. Are there days I waver? We're human. We're allowed to have, you know, little breakdowns and I can't say that I show up every single day with this unwavering confidence.

Gabriella: But it also just doesn't impact me. There's really nothing that someone could say to me right now in a comment that would sway what I feel so intentional and what I care so much about at this point and how I choose to present myself and bring myself online in terms of how I work with people, in terms of the company I've now created, like going alcohol free, removing alcohol from my life.

Gabriella: It gave me that confidence to not feel like I have to please everyone. Because I also know in my early days pleasing everyone doesn't help, doesn't get us anywhere.

Mike: Well, and it's amazing how judgmental people get when they feel like they're threatened when you, which you weren't. I'll just, these two made, I'll read you two comments because I, I find them entertaining to be. That's a weakness, I suppose, like bad television.

Mike: One commenter wrote, when you're talking about stress, my stress reduction is a beer and a cigar. And another wrote, my stress reliever is called Jim Beam. Well, that's the reason I bring it up. That makes your point, doesn't it?

Gabriella: It quite literally goes, I relieve stress with alcohol or I relieve stress with a cigar. And look I probably commented that somewhere years ago like that. That was how I thought it was what I believed and really interesting you were saying earlier. You know from the education piece of trying to illuminate that alcohol and stress management, you know, amongst all other things that alcohol can influence, but they're not peas in a pod.

Mike: No.

Gabriella: And yet, look how socialized and conditioned we are to just believe that because especially in the UK with pub culture, the lights go on in pubs at 11 a. m. It's like the lights are on, the permission to drink is there. It's so ingrained in day to day life that we don't ever stop to think, is there another way?

Gabriella: Because it's just how things have been, and I'm so grateful to see the alcohol free movement in terms of products and mindset changing. The UK is doing a great job of that. The majority mentality is still, the lights in the pub are on, we can drink.

Mike: Yeah, well, I, you know, and to go along with that, there's the perception.

Mike: I, I heard you being interviewed a while ago, and the interviewer asked how to be social if you cut down, and this is a quote, and not being someone who just stays at home (laugh) and doing puzzles. That stigma still exists that if you're not using, you're a drag. But you have a social answer for that.

Mike: You're not a drag.

Gabriella: Yup, so I would say, as a sober person, I probably go to more parties now than I did when I was drinking. And it's not to say that I have a raging party life. I'm definitely more of a homebody. But, I've become much clearer on what fun looks like to me at this part in my life. And something that Alcohol Free Living has really taught me, and I think I got to this conclusion because the brain fog, and you just get a bit more mental clarity on yourself, is our definition of fun changes as we grow and evolve.

Mike: Yup.

Gabriella: So it's actually an exercise that I do with people to, when we stop drinking, of what does fun now look like to you? Because, historically, we've attributed fun to the pre drinks at 8pm, then we're going to the bar at 9, then you're there until closing, you go to the club after, and we spent a lot of our university years, early career, even into mid career.

Gabriella: Whatever point like thinking that that's what fun looks like and we never gave ourselves the opportunity to experiment with something else that could excite you and make you feel joy in the same way. So accepting that it's okay that your preferences have changed and also that the people you used to party with they might have just been party friends and you then go ahead and go out and see them in the daylight, and you're like, Oh, I actually, this person just, it's not a bad thing, they just don't need to be a part of my life anymore.

Gabriella: Being boring is relative. What I think is boring right now in my life. Or what I used to think is boring, when I was still drinking, what I thought was boring in life is now what I find very fun. And I have built up a community of new friends, my family, like, around me, and we've all kind of evolved on this path together.

Gabriella: So now, do I book a house in the Highlands with friends and we all go read the same book for the weekend? Did I ever think at 18 years old that was going to be what fun looked like? No. But let me tell you, we're going in February, and I could not be more excited for me and five of my friends to go sit in front of a fireplace and read a book and discuss it at a dinner table after we've all cooked dinner together. It changes.

Mike: What's the book?

Gabriella: We are reading a fantasy book. It's called Iron Flame. It's quite the big kind of fantasy release this year from Rebecca Yarros. It's the sequel to Fourth Wing, which has taken TikTok book talk to a... It's great. Highly recommend it for anyone who's trying to get into reading.

Gabriella: Also a great thing if you are experiencing burnout. I love recommending fantasy books because it gives you a healthy dose of disassociation. It allows your mind to just wander in a totally different realm, different from anything we know here on earth. And just give yourself a little bit of escapism and let your brain kind of render this other reality that is so different.

Gabriella: Like it's actually incredibly healing to have those moments of detachment.

Mike: I've used it for, that's funny you should say, I've used it forever, sci fi and fantasy. I listen to most of them on audiobooks and if I'm doing a long drive or a boring drive, you're right, it takes you away. I want to also ask you, I love the phrase you use.

" Play the tape forward".

Gabriella: Yes.

Mike: Play the tape forward. Talk about that.

Gabriella: So playing the tape forward, let's actually, let's do an example of it. Let's just show how it works. So we're approaching the holiday season. Lots of parties and social commitments are coming up. And for anyone who is new to alcohol free living or dabbling even with just a night or week off here and there, approaching those parties or social commitments, it can be intimidating.

Gabriella: The mental gymnastics of moderation or tiring, if you say, I'm only going to have two drinks tonight. I found myself going, okay, well I had my first drink at 8pm, and the party's gonna go till 11. When is the appropriate time in that span to have drink number two? And I was having those conversations with myself.

Gabriella: Not listening to what the person across from you was saying. Gymnastics. So, if that sounds like you, I invite you to do the exercise called playing the tape forward. So let's say you're at this party and someone offers you a drink. Before reacting, do a really quick mental picture. Just imagine the next 20 minutes.

Gabriella: What would happen if you said yes to the drink? You might feel a little bit better, you might feel less anxious, a little bit more social perhaps if you find that the glass of wine is a social lubricant, you're a little bit more chatty. And then ask yourself, how will I feel after an hour? Maybe you know that at that point that you'll want another drink now that that warm initial fuzziness of the first glass has worn off.

Gabriella: And then ask yourself, how will I feel tomorrow morning if I continue down this path? For me, I would envision myself hungover in bed, feeling a little bit nauseous, cancelling plans that I had for brunch with my friends, because I want to stay in bed, and I was someone who one glass of red wine was enough to do that to me.

Gabriella: I was very, very sensitive and reactive to it. And the last question you ask yourself is, now that I've seen the future, am I happy with the outcome? If the answer is no, back yourself to politely decline the drink. And if the answer is yes, you can proceed with the drink, but with the understanding that you've accepted the outcome before it even happens.

Gabriella: That helps actually to remove any of the shame or stigma of the outcome. You knew what was going to happen. And you're like, okay, I accept it. So that when tomorrow comes, it doesn't have to be a morality thing of you going, Oh, I shouldn't have drank. I can't believe I didn't do that. Well, you had the conversation with yourself first, and you accepted it, so let's just take this one as it is, and we move on.

Gabriella: Tomorrow's a new day. So, it's a tip I, I love, and to slide another little thing that you can also do after playing the tape forward, is plan what I call an expander activity for the morning after. An expander activity is anything that makes you feel expansive. That can be a walk with a friend. It can be going to a workout class.

Gabriella: It can be calling your mom on FaceTime. Anything that's going to just light you up inside. Book it in for the morning so you have that to look forward to. And it's something that you know is going to make you feel good. So as part of that play the tape forward exercise, you actually can envision yourself picking up the phone and calling your mom.

Gabriella: You're like, oh, that's going to be so exciting when I get to do that. And I'm going to be chipper because I got to sleep, you know, and I had a great night of sleep because I didn't end up taking the drink in the end.

Mike: How do you handle it if, because you have friends who drink, what if your, what, you know, your fiancé drinks?

Mike: How do you handle the relationships then?

Gabriella: Yeah, so this is a great question. It is going to look different person on person. I can speak to my experience in that I'm engaged and my fiancé does drink, and it has been a process of lots of conversations of What do we both need when one person is drinking, and what does, and the other isn't?

Gabriella: And, really, almost setting a few ground rules, and this is specific to being in a relationship, it's maybe a bit different with friends, but, you know, if we are out together at an event, and I turn to him and say, Hey, I'm starting to feel either tired or uncomfortable, especially as the night progresses, sometimes I do get to a point where I just can't keep up.

Gabriella: I don't have the energy to keep going. And as the kind of conversations start diving into slightly more drunken affairs, like, I don't have it within me to participate. We have a rule between the two of us that when that moment happens, it's time for the two of us to leave. It's a supportive back and forth of, Hey, I've done my time, I think it's time for me to go home, and the other person to go, Okay, I respect that decision, let's do that together.

Gabriella: Now, with friends, it can be a little bit different, and for me, I did tell my friends up front, when I got, probably within the first, like, month or so of not drinking, and I started to build the confidence around it, I just sent out a blanket text message. And I did this as a blanket to everyone, not individually.

Gabriella: Which, served me because I basically said to a group of people, I'm making a decision to not drink anymore. I still love you all. I'm gonna come to all the things. But just know that I might be a little bit different as I navigate this and figure it out. Everyone's response was, can't wait to have you there.

Gabriella: We're gonna have all alcohol free options. Like, it was, I was incredibly fortunate to have a very positive response to that. I do encourage people to be upfront with friends, with partners, with family members if they're going to events. Of just making the note that you're not going to be drinking. And if you're going into a big event, just to the host, perhaps.

Gabriella: I was at a wedding recently, and I remember letting, not the groom and the bride know, but the maid of honour and saying, Hey, there's going to be toasts and everything, and just, I'm not planning to drink, and so if champagne and things are being passed around, like, I'm just not going to take it. Because I've had other experiences where people got weird about it, like, take the glass and do the cheers, and people are a lot more receptive, actually, as I've found, when you give them information to help you.

Gabriella: But if we exist in the dark and we're not coming out with those things, that's where we start to get into our heads of, well, I didn't accept the drink, are they thinking less of me? Are they thinking I'm weird? If we're just up front with it, it can minimize a lot of that anxiety.

Mike: Well, and all of this must have led then to your stress reduction work.

Gabriella: Yes.

Mike: Talk about that.

Gabriella: Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that, you know, going alcohol free and becoming a sober person, it really inspired me to take action in my career. You know, one of the best things, I think actually the biggest benefit that I came from my process of going sober was the ability to get radically honest with myself and build self trust.

Gabriella: You know, we talk a lot about sleep and increased energy and feeling like, you know, you have hangover free mornings now, and all of those things have been dramatic improvements to my life. However, drinking kept me in this cycle of complacency in terms of my career. That hid the fact I was living in complete unalignment from the things I cared about the most.

Gabriella: I'd been a competitive athlete growing up. I played sports in university. But I'd adopted a lifestyle that ignored athleticism. I'd loved painting and writing. I was a very creative kid. I grew up on weekends at Home Depot. The number of plywood and nails and screws my dad has bought me to build tables and, you know, that they had to smile and say, yeah, that's beautiful, when it was really... You know, I couldn't tell you at that point the last time I'd created anything, and I was passionate about mental health, I had actually been a peer counselor at my school from the 7th grade. At that point it was really just being like a friendship buddy to someone all the way through college and I could not tell you the last time, you know, I was doing a bit of mentorship in my work, but my life revolved around building software. I was a product manager.

Gabriella: So the decision to stop drinking afforded me the clarity to answer the question. Now what? I started seeing actually that the job I was in was not lighting me up in the way that I wanted my career to do. We talked about earlier, I started making my Instagram account and then I started the TikTok account of just documenting the experiences that I had gone through going alcohol free, that I had in terms of my burnout recovery process.

Gabriella: And I'd actually already started coaching individuals, family members, friends, people at my last job on the side. Because I was finding a lot of people asking me, You're radically different from how you were last year. What's changed? And I never had intended even for it to become a business, but I just started working with people and really enjoying coaching them through what it was like to stop drinking, through what it was like to incorporate fitness, doing the mindset work around perfectionism in the workplace. So much so that I went back and got my coaching certifications and really dove into the science behind stress, behind alcohol, so that I could pair what I went through with the science side to actually create a comprehensive coaching program to help people beat burnout, overcome overwhelm. And that's what turned into the RPP method.

Gabriella: It stands for resilient, primed, and purposeful, and as a burnout coach, that is how I help individuals grappling with burnout create a life and career that lights them up, not one that leaves them feeling disconnected, depleted, chaotic. And it's really a process of identifying the root causes of stress.

Gabriella: We have to know why we're stressed out, where it is coming from. And having a coach to really prod into the different areas of your life is a super helpful exercise because people come to me and say, It's just my boss. I have a micromanaging, overbearing boss. And the more and more we dig into it, the boss is not actually the main source of stress.

Gabriella: And so we figure what those are. We recognize that burnout often comes from a combination of environmental, societal, personal factors, and we explore those learned beliefs, pinpoint the counterproductive tendencies, people pleasing, perfectionism, all the things. So that we can understand what's contributing to the burnout, look at your lifestyle choices in terms of how you're coping with it right now, like alcohol for me, and for many I work with, and then create an action plan to start taking steps forward.

Gabriella: And making sure that all of the different pieces of your career, your home life, your passions are working together to not only prevent burnout from coming back, but that's really where that purposeful piece comes in to make sure that you feel like when you're waking up every day, how you're investing your energy is in alignment with the person that you want to be.

Mike: Fantastic. You know, you have so many different niches online, and we'll put the link at the bottom of the podcast, as we always do, but what is the best way for people to learn more?

Gabriella: Definitely. So, social media is a great one. I post daily on TikTok. It's very much my journal for all things burnout, fitness, alcohol free living.

Gabriella: I love bringing actionable steps to people. I love storytelling, but I love even more telling you, now what? So what? How do we put the next foot in front of the other? And that's really the essence of what I try and do there. I'm also on Instagram as a great place to connect and my website as well, which will put in the notes, if anyone's interested to learn more about the coaching program, what it's like to work one on one with a coach, and even just to ask questions, you know, I'm an open book.

Gabriella: I don't, you know, coaching is one thing, but for anyone who just has questions of. I want to stop drinking, or I've stopped drinking and I want to now get into fitness, or I've stopped drinking and all of these thoughts are now coming up, how do I start making sense of them? Send me a DM. I'm, love nothing more than helping people and talking to people going through this, because I know what can happen once you start to make sense of those things, and if I can be of service or just advice or a cheerleader, if nothing else, to anyone out there.

Mike: And that's how you started, by wondering yourself, right?

Gabriella: Exactly.

Mike: When do you go back to England?

Gabriella: I'm heading back second week of January. So, enjoying a bit of warm weather first.

Mike: And did you say fiancé? So when's your marriage?

Gabriella: Yes, we're getting married October of 24.

Mike: Well, congratulations on all of that and the business as well.

Gabriella: Thank you so much!

Mike: There are, of course, you know, links to Gabriella's stuff at the bottom of the podcast. This has been delightful. It's terrific. You know, I, I loved one of the comments. I'll do this as a takeaway. Somebody said, Oh, how, how can I learn something from someone who's younger than me? I thought, wow, that's really interesting, right?

Mike: Cause the older we get, sometimes the less we connect with the intelligence of those around us then. This has been just terrific, Gabriella. Thanks so much.

Mike: Those of you who are listening, we're here next time. Until next time, stay safe and play the tape forward.