Getting sober is just the beginning. What happens when you start wondering what else your life could be?
Editor’s note: Janey Lee Grace founded The Sober Club and runs the coach training program discussed in this article. The four named individuals featured here completed her training.
Nobody tells you that getting sober is only the first chapter.
There’s plenty of conversation about the early days: the white-knuckling, the strange business of not knowing what to do with your hands at a party, the novelty of sleeping through the night without negotiating with yourself at 2 a.m.
And then, eventually, the fog lifts.
You have your energy back. Your head is clearer. You can remember conversations. You might even discover that you quite like yourself.
Which is wonderful. Until you look around at your life and think: Hang on a minute. Is this really it?
I hear this from so many people in The Sober Club community, and I’ve lived a version of it myself. Because sobriety doesn’t just remove something. It puts you back in the driving seat of your own life. And once you’re back behind the wheel, you might discover that you’re not particularly keen on taking the same old route.
Sometimes, the desire for change arrives quietly. Sometimes it arrives via a redundancy letter announcing a layoff, a retirement date or the dawning realization that the job you once loved now makes you want to hide under your desk.
And sometimes, it arrives with all the subtlety of a brick through the window.
What I’ve noticed is how often sobriety and career reinvention intersect. You stop drinking, gain a little clarity and start asking questions you might have been too busy, too tired or too distracted to ask before.
Then life throws something at you anyway.
A redundancy. A retirement you weren’t quite ready for. A career that no longer fits. Suddenly, all that clarity has somewhere to go.
When Redundancy Stops Being Just a Blow
Ali Payne had been sober for two years and working in PR when she found herself facing her second redundancy in as many years.
She’d enjoyed the work, but she was tired of feeling as though her livelihood was permanently at the mercy of someone else’s spreadsheet. So, rather than waiting to be made redundant and then wondering what on earth to do next, she got in touch with me to explore sober coach training.
There happened to be a space on The Sober Club Accredited Coach Training program. She started that April. She was made redundant, as expected, at the end of the same month.
Talk about timing! But this time, redundancy wasn’t simply something happening to her. She had somewhere she wanted to go.
Over the following months, Ali built her coaching business alongside freelance PR work. She navigated the less glamorous aspects of self-employment: becoming a sole trader, getting her head around tax and pensions, and learning how to run a business that was entirely her own.
A year on, she balances coaching with PR work and volunteering with a charity that helps women back into employment. She describes it as a combination that gives her something she’d been missing: work that draws on everything she’d built throughout her career, alongside work that genuinely means something to her.
The redundancy wasn’t part of her plan. But she was no longer starting from scratch. She was starting from experience.
When the Career You’ve Built Becomes the Foundation for Something New
Beth Hughes’ story begins in a completely different sector.
She stopped drinking eight years ago, and sobriety gave her the confidence to move from teaching into the apprenticeship sector, where she’s spent years working with managers and senior leaders. Along the way, she qualified as a counselor and became a coach.
Now, following recent government changes affecting her industry, she’s facing redundancy again. A reminder, perhaps, that careers rarely follow the neat, linear trajectory we imagine when we’re younger.
Beth also completed my Sober Club Accredited Coach Training and has been building her coaching business alongside her day job, supporting professionals who want to change their relationship with alcohol.
She didn’t choose the uncertainty that has come with this redundancy. But it has given her an opportunity to think more deliberately about what comes next and what she wants that next chapter to look like.
There is something liberating about reaching a point where the question isn’t simply, What job can I get? but What kind of life do I want to build?
Reinvention Doesn’t Have an Age Limit
We tend to talk about reinvention as though it’s a young person’s game. As though you have to launch the business by 35, discover your purpose by 40 and have everything neatly sorted by 50.
Thankfully, life doesn’t work like that.
Polly Lovell spent around 30 years working in education, taking on a range of leadership roles, including headteacher, executive headteacher and director of inclusion.
She loved her career. But as she moved into her late 50s, she started thinking more seriously about what she wanted the next part of her life to look like.
Becoming alcohol-free at 57 was part of that shift.
As Polly explains:
“I loved my career, but as I got into my late fifties, I started to think more about what I wanted the next part of my life to look like. Becoming alcohol-free at 57 was definitely part of that shift. I had more energy, more clarity and probably more confidence to ask myself, ‘What do I actually want to do now?’”
She became interested in helping other women who, like her, had been drinking to manage stress. In 2023, she trained with The Sober Club as a sober coach.
When she left education, people naturally assumed she was retiring. But that’s not how she saw it.
“I never really felt as though I was retiring. I was leaving one career and starting another. I didn’t want to stop working. I wanted a sense of purpose, to spend my time doing something I really loved and that felt meaningful to me.”
Now 62, Polly is continuing to learn, build her coaching business, meet new people and challenge herself.
As she puts it, she wants to keep her mind and body active, and she’s loving the connections she’s made along the way.
I particularly enjoy seeing Polly’s posts on LinkedIn, where she regularly shares her perspective on getting older. One of her recurring observations is that you know yourself so much better as you age. You have years of experience to draw on, and perhaps a little less interest in what you’re supposed to be doing.
And why not?
Whether or not you’ve got a particular dream in mind, there’s something powerful about recognizing that your next chapter doesn’t have to be a winding down.
It can be a widening.
Purpose Has No Retirement Age
Tony Worsdall is another Sober Club Accredited Coach and the founder of Sober Sixty.
He was approaching retirement at 64, expecting the usual: more time with family, a slower pace and fewer demands on his time.
What he hadn’t expected was how much alcohol would feature in his vision of retirement. Tony wouldn’t have described himself as an alcoholic. He was, in his own words, a classic gray-area drinker: someone whose drinking was woven so tightly into everyday life that it didn’t necessarily look like a problem from the outside.
With retirement approaching, he decided to stop drinking in January 2020.
No rock bottom. No dramatic crisis. Just a growing sense that the path he was on wasn’t one he wanted to continue walking.
What happened next surprised him.
Quitting alcohol didn’t just change how he lived. It changed how he related to other people and to himself. He became more patient, more curious and better at listening.
He trained as a sobriety coach, and what began as a personal decision eventually became Sober Sixty, followed by The Sober Guys, a free community for men with members meeting every month across the U.K., Europe, Australia and the U.S.
He now works with people who are approaching retirement and wondering who they’ll be once work stops defining them.
One of his earliest clients is now training to become a coach himself, wanting to pass on what he found.
Tony has a simple way of describing what he’s learned: Purpose has no retirement age.
And perhaps that’s the point. Retirement might mean stepping away from a particular job. It doesn’t have to mean stepping away from curiosity, contribution or ambition.
It’s Not Always About Coaching
Now, I realize that several of these stories involve people becoming sober coaches. And given that I run sober coach training, you might reasonably wonder if there’s a slightly obvious agenda here.
Fair question.
But not everyone who finds a new purpose through sobriety needs to become a coach. Nor should they. The whole point is finding what fits you, not following a new template for how to live a meaningful life.
Inside The Sober Club community, I’ve watched people take reinvention in all sorts of directions. One member, well into her working life and with a career already behind her, returned to university to study for a master’s degree in creative writing. She says she wouldn’t have had the headspace, or the courage, to pursue it while she was drinking.
Another used the clarity sobriety gave her to finally establish a charity close to her heart, something she’d talked about for years but never quite got around to doing.
And that’s what makes these stories interesting.
The outcome isn’t always a business. It might be a degree, a charity, a creative project, a new relationship with work or simply the courage to try something you’ve been putting off for a very long time.
Brené Brown often speaks about choosing courage over comfort.
Reinvention requires a little courage. Not necessarily the dramatic, leap-off-a-cliff variety. Sometimes it’s the less dramatic kind: signing up for a course, making a phone call, admitting that the career you’ve built no longer feels right or giving yourself permission to want something different.
Sobriety can create the space for those decisions.
Why Coaching, for Some People?
Sober coaching does keep appearing in these stories. It’s not simply because it’s what I do.
If you’ve built an alcohol-free life, you already understand something that can’t easily be taught from a textbook. You may know what it’s like to lie awake at 3 a.m. wondering if you’re the only person who can’t seem to get a grip on their drinking.
You know how difficult it can be to change a habit that’s woven into your social life, your relationships and your sense of identity.
And you know what it feels like to come out the other side.
That lived experience matters. It’s part of what helps people feel understood and trust the person supporting them.
For many people at a career crossroads, that experience is sitting there, waiting to be used. Not wasted. Not filed away under Things I Used to Struggle With. Used.
Of course, sober coaching isn’t the right next step for everyone. But for some people, it offers a way to bring together their personal experience, professional skills and desire to make a difference.
And it doesn’t have to mean abandoning everything you’ve done before. Ali continues to use her PR experience. Beth draws on her background in teaching and leadership. Polly brings decades of experience in education. Tony brings his own experience of retirement and the changes that come with it.
Reinvention isn’t necessarily about becoming an entirely different person. Sometimes it’s about finally giving more room to the parts of yourself that have been waiting in the wings.
Your Next Chapter Doesn’t Need a Five-Year Plan
If any of this sounds familiar, here’s what I’d say. You don’t need to have it all figured out before you start exploring what’s next.
Ali didn’t. Beth didn’t. Polly certainly didn’t. And Tony, at 64, wasn’t expecting his retirement plans to turn into an entirely new chapter of working life.
They followed a thread. One conversation. One training pathway. One idea that wouldn’t quite go away. And gradually, something began to take shape.
Perhaps we don’t need to wait for the perfect moment. Perhaps we just need to be willing to take the next step.
Sobriety gives many people back their time, energy and clarity. What they do with those things is deeply personal.
For some, it’s a new career. For others, it’s a long-delayed ambition, a creative project or the simple decision to stop living according to someone else’s expectations.
And for some, sober coaching might be the next step.
If you’re curious about what sober coach training actually involves, or whether it might be a good fit for where you are right now, I’d love you to come and find out more.
Because getting sober might have changed your life.
But what you do with the life you’ve got back?
That’s where things can get really interesting.
Janey Lee Grace is the founder of The Sober Club and its Accredited Sober Coach Training program.
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