Alcohol Safe Workplace UK - Interview with founder of Choose Sunrise: Janet Hadley

Host, DeAnn Knighton, and Janet Hadley, founder of Choose Sunrise (UK organization), review considerations for employers in building alcohol safety into their organizations 

Stigma and workplace. 7:37

• Reaching out to the gray area drinkers in the workplace
• Stigma is a result of our evolution to put people into groups, which is useful, but creates blind spots for gray areas.
• "Drink Responsibly" is a powerful slogan that enforces stigma 

Who has a bigger problem with alcohol? 13:22

• Alcohol is the number one risk factor for premature death of individuals ages 25 to 49, according to the US and the UK.
  • The UK and the US are both above the global average of 4.9% for prevalence of alcohol use disorder
  • In the UK Alcohol use disorder is not specifically called out in the discrimination act, but it is not a protected characteristic in the same way that depression is.
  • The Americans with disabilities act ensures that people with disabilities, including people with addiction to alcohol, have the same rights and opportunities.    Link: https://adata.org/factsheet/ada-addiction-recovery-and-employment
•  Alcohol Safe Workplace Accreditation (UK) 24:40 
  • The accreditation standards cover policy, culture, education, and support for individuals.
  • 40% of all workplace accidents are alcohol-related, and 50% of sexual harassment claims in the workplace involve alcohol. 
  • The head of Lloyd's of London is a big insurance underwriter in London and has recently banned all daytime workplace drinking, which is a huge indication of how things are changing and culturally saying that this isn't inclusive.
• Setting up a sober curious society. 30:11
  • Janet started a sober curious society while working at the Co-op in her corporate job. 
  • The importance of engaging people from the community to be a part of the organization and being out loud about who they are.

Janet Hadley - Link
https://choosesunrise.co.uk

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Transcript

DeAnn Knighton: 0:06

Oh, hello. This is the sober positive workplace series brought to you by show up and stay. I'm your host Deann Knighton. Oh, hello, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're here. This is our second episode in our sober positive workplace series officially. I'm really excited to introduce you to my guests today. But before I do that, I'm actually going to bring in a little bit of a throwback clip from an episode of the shelf and a podcast I did a couple of months ago. I feel like it really frames up the conversation I'm about to have with our guests. So take a listen. And then when we come back, you'll get a chance to meet Janet

Mad Men Clip: 1:00

Daily friendship with that bottle attracts more people to advertising than any salary you could dream up. That's why I got in.

DeAnn Knighton: 1:07

This is a clip from madmen, which aired on AMC from the year 2007 to 2015.

Mad Men Clip: 1:14

So enjoy it. Do my best here. Not only had a drink your whole generation drink for the wrong reasons.

DeAnn Knighton: 1:22

You're listening to Roger Sterling, played by John Slattery. As he is educating his younger counterpart on Draper, played by Jon Hamm.

Mad Men Clip: 1:35

My generation we drink because it's good. Because it feels better than unbuttoning your collar. Because we deserve it

DeAnn Knighton: 1:43

on why his generation drink because it's what mento seems to understand something better. And Don's What about shaky hands, I see a lot of that too, with your boys.

Mad Men Clip: 1:52

No joke. You're kind with your gloomy thoughts and your worries. You're all busy licking some imaginary wound. Not all imaginary.

DeAnn Knighton: 2:02

I watched madmen at the height of my drinking career. And I remember placing a lot of glorification around what I saw on the screen, portraying the 1960s and showing us that, like crap, what we do now as it relates to alcohol in the workplace, is nothing compared to what they did in 1960. Then, on the same note, as someone who's struggling at the time, with substance use disorder, finding some sort of refuge in this understanding, some sort of Hall Pass for the way that I drink. A lot of my drinking was tied to my work, and I took a lot of pride in my ability to drink often and drink a lot. Too much pride, I'm afraid. According to an article in The Atlantic, called drinking too much is an American problem. They describe the fact that from 1999 to 2017, the number of alcohol related deaths has doubled to more than 70,000 a year. And when I hear Roger Sterling lecturing Don, on the softness of his generation feels a little too familiar to conversations I hear floating in the air these days. America's relationship with alcohol is extreme. We overcompensate and make drastic adjustments. But then in these drastic adjustments, we somehow seem to see the same problems cycling back, but worse.

Janet Hadley: 3:45

When I first stopped drinking, we were in lockdown in 2020. Actually, I think I was quite lucky in a way because I didn't have to tell anyone for a little while. One of my big big fears was telling people that I wasn't drinking anymore

DeAnn Knighton: 4:00

This is Janet Hadley,

Janet Hadley: 4:01

it was so wrapped up with my identity. I was the party girl. I was the life and soul of the party, the last person to go home on every night out. I even had an award from my team at work. I'm their boss, and they gave me an award for being the most drunk person at the Christmas party. What do you know, that was me.

DeAnn Knighton: 4:20

Janet lives in northern England in the town of Leeds. She is a mom of three teenagers, and successful business person and amateur pianist. In her words, she had a family, a career, a nice house, good schools and all the outward signs of success. Yet she regularly used to ache at 3am Dry mouth head banging and promising herself she'd learned to moderate her drinking. And luckily, she was able to build a new path and started where I feel like the best thing start by telling her story.

Janet Hadley: 4:58

I was described as a happy drunk and no one ever seemed to think of it as being any kind of issue. I knew it was an issue. And when I stopped, I was actually really scared of telling my work team that I'd stopped. And it was quite a while that was when things started to open up again, I went back into the office, and we had this kind of all day session with the team because we hadn't seen each other for months. And I told them then, and I ended up telling them like a much longer story than I was intending to, they were just captivated by it, and just sort of going, Wow, thank you for sharing that. And, yeah, of course, we'll support you. And we won't try and cajole you into drinking. And, you know, it was so different to the fear that I'd had, it really kind of empowered me, it made me think, well, you know, if I can tell that story and get support, like maybe I can help other people in this workplace by talking more widely about it, and I sort of started with the people immediately around me. And then being in quite a senior job, I got, like bigger and bigger audiences within the organization. I mean, it's a huge organization. And that's how it started, really. And I started getting emails, the bits that they relate to the term gray area drinking, I think, is really helpful for people. So we all have this black and white thinking of normal drinkers and alcoholics until we stop and question it. And then of course, you realize that it's not like that. There's a huge gray area, and it really helps people. And I think the reason why that really helps people is because the stigma that surrounds alcoholism, means that it's so hard to put your hand up and say I've got a problem. But it's a lot easier to put your hand up and say, I might be in the gray area. I think that's one of the things that actually probably, nearly everyone I speak to relates to. And the other bit that's always relatable is the mummy wine culture. Not sure what it's like where you are, but in the UK, and I know in Australia as well, from people I know over there, it's just rife, and all over the internet, the memes, the sort of big wine glass that says small glass, medium, glass, mom's glass, all that stuff, people really relate to that. And so many people find that they're big drinkers, they go out, they party, and then they have children, and suddenly they sort of bring the party home. And it's like getting drunk in the evenings after the kids have gone to bed to feel a bit more like your old self. And that's how it can start to kind of feel like a problem. Well, I guess it's getting woken up at four in the morning by screaming baby, when you've got hungover as no one talks about that.

DeAnn Knighton: 7:37

Yeah, then, you know, how can you even be present for anything in that capacity? And, yeah, it's just kind of surviving from one state of being to the next state of being instead of actually living,

Janet Hadley: 7:51

I try to live without regrets. But I do sometimes look back on when my children were very young, and think I really wish I'd done this sooner. Because I would rush through bedtime stories to get down, I could almost hear the cork coming out of the wine, like, there would be one parent reading to the children and the other one drinking wine, and you always want it to be the other one. And that's not right. You know, that was really precious time, though, to be spending with them. And I think if I'd stopped drinking sooner, I would have really cherished that time instead of rushing through it, and been a lot more present. And I feel that that would have benefited all of us. And it's something that you know, if anyone's listening who has young children, like really do consider what life might be like, if you just remove alcohol from the equation, you probably don't believe me, but you will find more joy in normal things. That's the big difference.

DeAnn Knighton: 8:54

I am interested in what you were saying around gray area drinking and I think we are very similar in a lot of ways work was my life. I invested everything into a sales career very much party girl party culture, and work hard, play hard, but I had all kinds of other underlying things going on along the way. Everything always felt harder for me. I struggled with compartmentalizing work from the rest of my life, it kind of became everything. And then alcohol got wrapped up into kind of the sadness of all of that. And it just became a problem more and more over a 20 year period. I also share with you that I just could not imagine living the life I was living at that time without alcohol being a part of it. It was just always a part of who I was I had over identified with it. What I think is interesting, as we look at this shift, there's two things going on. It's reaching out to the gray area drinkers that are in the workplace that are thinking who maybe it's once in a while they're asking themselves is my drinking problem, you know, or like going in taking the quiz in secret, but then it all feels so scary and overwhelming because I went through that. But I never knew that there was any sort of middle road, I always felt that the road was extreme, right. And in my case, it actually ended up being extreme, I had to do treatment and the whole thing, which I don't regret for a second, it's changed my life. But I think about this problem constantly in terms of that divide between all of these people who may be in a space where it feels uncomfortable, but then not sure what that other identity looks like the work that you're doing is so powerful, in the sense that it can help show people that you can have a full life. And whether or not you want to identify as somebody with alcoholism or not, it really doesn't matter at the end of the day. Where do you feel like when we look at this divide that exists, one of the things I heard you speak about that I thought was really powerful was that slogan of drink responsibly, which I feel like definitely sums up this issue in terms of that shame and stigma creation. And I'd love for you to talk about how that type of messaging the type of damage that it has on a trickle down.

Janet Hadley: 11:12

I've spent a lot of time thinking about stigma, and researching stigma and why it exists. And what I've learned is stigma is a result of our evolution. So we have evolved to put people into groups because that's really useful. So if we put people into groups of the tribe we belong to, and the tribe we don't belong to, then we know who will help us care for our children. And we know who will look after us when we're sick. And over the millennia of human evolution. Stigma has actually evolved from this, authoring this grouping of people. And obviously, it does help us because you can't know everybody. And so you do bunch people up into groups, you divide them. And that's really, really useful. But a really on useful, almost like unintended consequence of it, it creates blind spots for gray areas. So as we said earlier, this kind of black and white thinking about people who have a problem with alcohol, and people who don't, we know that we're not waking up in a skip, we know that we don't drink vodka in the mornings, we know that we're not a tramp on a park bench. So therefore, we know that we're not an alcoholic. That's kind of how a lot of people feel. So they're like, I'm not an alcoholic, I just, I just have this constant worry that I might be drinking too much. And you don't identify them with the services, a lot of the services are developed for people who've really become like physically dependent upon alcohol, or like have developed what in the UK is now being called an alcohol use disorder. Whereas I think that we can prevent a lot of harm by reaching people who are in this gray area in between. And I think that this stigma needs to be reduced in order to help people to put their hand up a little bit sooner and say, I might need a bit of help. At the end of the day. If you develop an issue, becoming addicted to an addictive substance that's been marketed to you through your whole life, you know, how is that something to be ashamed of.

DeAnn Knighton: 13:22

Although there's some competing data around who has a bigger problem with alcohol, the US or the UK, depending on how you look at the equation. One thing is for sure that both countries fall well above the global average of 4.9%. For prevalence of alcohol use disorder. For both countries, alcohol is considered the number one risk factor for premature death of individuals ages 25 to 49. Both of us have seen notable and upsetting increases in the amount of problematic drinking amongst women.

Janet Hadley: 14:07

I've got a mate who tells he always says alcohol is 4% ethanol and 96% marketing. I love that because it's this sense that the responsibility is on us to drink responsibly, is just feeding into that ordering. So oh, there's a few poor people who can't handle them. And they have to always take it too far. And they're over there in an other category that you'll never be in there. The alcoholics, you're fine, you're over here, we can keep southern our alcohol. And that drink responsibly message from the industry is feeding of the stigma. And what I really want to do is to talk more openly about what it feels like to be on the way into a proper full on full blown alcohol issue. And help people identify that they may be starting to see some of those warning signs and And to help them realize that it is okay to ask for help. And that if we could reach more people in that area, and I'm not even saying you need to stop drinking forever, have a break, or become a flexi drinker, where you have one glass of wine, and then you have a glass of alcohol free wine for the rest of the evening. There's other ways than just having to stop completely. For me, nothing is so much easier than a little bit of alcohol. But maybe if I'd addressed it sooner, that might not be the case. I don't know.

DeAnn Knighton: 15:31

You mentioned regret earlier and thinking on that a little bit as it relates to this topic. Because everything feels divisive in the sense that it's like one bucket or the other, we miss this opportunity to catch people or help people sooner in the cycle. And so I think it's really key that we're creating workplace environments that feel like they're accepting of whatever that choice might be. And then I think the benefit of that is then for people who are really struggling with this issue, or who maybe are dealing with comorbidity with other issues, that it provides also a haven for them when they come back to work, and they're trying to rebuild their lives and recover. That's the other beautiful result of doing all of this work at the gray area and corporate level is that trickles down. And I've talked with people who are on the spectrum of alcohol use disorder that I am, what I can share with them or relate to them on is that so many of my choices and things that led me to where I was were the same as theirs, you know, I was living in the same culture. But you can throw in some genetics, some other comorbidity, things that are going on in my life put me in exactly the same situation that they were in. But for me, it ended up over here. And for other people, maybe on the spectrum, they end up over here. But to your point, these aren't as far away as we think, right in terms of being able to work together and move things forward. Be interested in hearing about UK trends in general, I know, there's a few things you talked about that I was really drawn to, in particular this protected class idea that is brewing.

Janet Hadley: 17:20

It's interesting. I mean, I'm not an employment lawyer, just put it out there. So I can't give any legal advice times are definitely changing. And obviously, we have protected characteristics, as I'm sure you do in the states that employers are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of so everyone knows there's race, there's gender, there's age, there's a number of them. And alcohol use disorder is not is actually specifically called out in the Discrimination Act, or whatever it's called as not being included. I'm not tiring all employers with this brush by any means. But there's certainly been a tendency to brush alcohol abuse issues under the carpet. And say, if somebody fails an alcohol test at work, it's just straight to dismissal. Or if somebody everyone knows they've got an alcohol issue, so we'll just get rid of them. We'll just wait for them to be late enough times and then we'll get rid of them for lateness. There's no protection there for the person who has the alcohol use issue under the discrimination act and alcohol change UK are campaigning to change that. And to make alcohol use disorder a protected characteristic in the same way that like depression is classed as a disability. But employers do need to be really careful because although alcohol use disorder isn't a protected category, things that might result from having an alcohol use disorder are so depression for example, and anxiety could be classed as disabilities and could be protected. And there's a bit of a chicken and egg there isn't there which one cause the other so you just need to be careful,

DeAnn Knighton: 18:53

quick and important distinction. The American with Disabilities Act ensures that people with disabilities including people with addiction to alcohol have the same rights and opportunities as everyone else. These protections also apply to people who experience prescription drug use disorder and opioid use disorder. Sober positive workplace a division of show up and stay is a nonprofit on a mission to help organizations bridge the recovery gap, a space that exists for individuals between healing from a substance and healing their lives. We partner with organizations to build more inclusive environments that reflect an investment in sober positivity and awareness. These organizations are normalized errs, pushing back against stigma and doing their part to change the social consciousness. For more information, please visit our website. Sober positive workplace that work now back to the show.

Janet Hadley: 19:55

There's other issues that arise around inclusion. So I think there'll be He sensed that there will be a big case at some point. Because a lot of the employers that I go into when I do this work, I'm approached by predominantly Muslim women who were in the workplace, and they've never drunk. And they tell me that they are so glad that I'm here doing this work, because they have always felt excluded. And they felt that promotions go to the in crowd who are down the pub drinking with the managers, that they even haven't been told about certain announcements in smaller organizations. So everyone will be talking about some change. And they'll say, when did that get announced? I didn't hear about it. And I go, Oh, you weren't there. Yeah, it was when we're in the pub. And, you know, the boss told us and yeah, and they just feel this real sense of having to pedal that little bit harder, because they're not in that drinking culture. And it's just another strand in the, in the overall picture of how certain groups of people are finding it much harder to get into the most senior jobs, I think that's a really important angle for employers to consider. And at some point, someone is going to win a case where they say, I was discriminated against, because every single social event included alcohol, which is against my religious beliefs, and therefore I could never go. And that's discrimination. It will happen. I'm sure,

DeAnn Knighton: 21:23

it will happen. Yeah, so I'm actually from Salt Lake City, Utah. And I don't know if you're familiar with Utah, but we are predominantly Mormon part of the US. So I can relate to what you're saying, from the standpoint of Mormon culture here. And people in my life, people I know, in my family, that are Mormon, who have actually experienced a very similar thing at work, in the sense that they don't drink for religious reasons. But then it does change the scope of how they have to approach their job and same experience of feeling left out it can exist in that regard as well. I think that's an important distinction. We've been talking alcohol use disorder. But is it specifically only alcohol use disorder? Or would it contain substance use?

Janet Hadley: 22:08

Basically, question, actually, and I'm not sure because the campaign is being run by alcohol change UK who specifically campaign around alcohol issues. So I think that that's the campaign that they're getting after, but I would not be surprised if they are successful. I would not be at all surprised if it's bundled in together. I guess the big difference is that alcohol is legal and it's marketed to you, isn't it? That's the that's the biggest difference. To become addicted to alcohol, you could just be following the adverts prescription

DeAnn Knighton: 22:38

drug and alcohol abuse, they kind of end up oftentimes, mashing together. So the medication and then you're drinking on top of that

Janet Hadley: 22:47

so many people drink and on medication that's recommended to not drink on and all that sort of stuff. Yeah.

DeAnn Knighton: 22:54

Janet is not only someone who knows a lot about this subject. She is also someone who has committed her work to it. She is the founder of choose sunrise. She is also an accredited sober club coach with over 20 years experience in senior management positions in the UK. Janet recognizes that there are millions of gray area drinkers in every workplace who are afraid to ask for support, they need to help them reset their relationship with alcohol. That's why Janet created the alcohol safe workplace accreditation program and works with organizations in the UK to get this program off the ground.

Janet Hadley: 23:37

I'm so excited about this. So I've taken all the learnings from working with employers over the last couple of years and put them into a set of 12 standards that an employer would need to meet in order to achieve the status of alcohol safe workplaces. No, it does not. Yeah, it does not.

DeAnn Knighton: 23:57

And that DOES not mean alcohol free!

Janet Hadley: 23:59

Exactly. Yeah, you can still have alcohol. It's okay. I didn't want to stop people drinking. That'd be a bit. It's clear now that I've already time supply. Stop other people. Oh, that's fair, isn't it? So we define an alcohol safe workplace as a workplace where everybody is included as a drink or not. And that anyone who asks for help with alcohol use receives appropriate support. And to get to that there are 12 standards. I won't go through them all but they cover policy. They cover culture. They cover education, and they cover support for individuals. I'm just assembling at the moment my panel of experts so I'm announcing them one a week on LinkedIn at the moment and then I'll do like a big announcement of the full panel in September. But I'm really excited, I've got some great people signed up to support the standards. So they're putting their names to it. And they're going to be signing off the evidence that employers submit, in order to get the accredited status. If there's an annual review process for all employers make sure that they're delivering continuous improvement in this space. And I've also partnered with a third party called 10 Space who are like, they do employee engagement surveys, they really measure, they're going to be helping me with measuring the impact. So as part of the accreditation, you will get like a pre accreditation survey and a post accreditation survey. The results that we're really looking for, are how people within the organization feel that they are being looked after how psychologically safe they feel to talk about issues that they have. And even just simple questions like, I feel that my organization has a responsible attitude towards alcohol, those sorts of things. I'd like employers to look at some of the statistics around absence, productivity, which not, it's not always that easy to measure. But also lacking, especially in health and safety, critical industry is looking at rates of accidents and incidents, because it will lower the risk of those things happening. An estimate from I think it's the US organization, actually, the Institute of alcohol studies, that estimates that 40% of all workplace accidents are alcohol related, which, and it's not necessarily drinking on the job, it's the feeling tired and not on it with the hangovers can be obviously really, really dangerous.

DeAnn Knighton: 26:51

Yeah, I could definitely see that. And then there's also to just that ugly correlation with sexual assault or sexual harassment.

Janet Hadley: 27:00

50% of all sexual harassment claims in the workplace involve alcohol, it doesn't bring out the best in people.

DeAnn Knighton: 27:09

We have an organization here in the States called WeWork. I don't know if you've heard of WeWork. It was a company that basically grew up over the last 10 years that started in New York City, but space that was available and tried to create these sort of shared work environments. And part of that was centered around a shared community space that had taps to taps fit as a perk.

Janet Hadley: 27:32

Oh, yeah, yeah,

DeAnn Knighton: 27:33

trying to draw and younger entering the workforce crowd. It's just interesting that even that organization in the last couple of years has eliminated pulled those out as a benefit, because of what we just talked about, they had issues, that they just couldn't carry that liability anymore. They just couldn't have that be a reason that those types of behaviors were happening.

Janet Hadley: 27:58

You're the head of Lloyd's of London, I'm sure like a big insurance. Basically, underwriters in London, like huge, corporate, you know, financial, very traditional sort of boozy lunches and taking clients out. And I've got a mate who works there. And he, he actually had gout, which is quite incredible, like, in the 21st century, because eating so much rich food and drink so much wine, taking clients out, basically. And they've recently banned all daytime, workplace drinking, which is a huge move. I mean, I say recently, as a couple of years ago now, but it's a huge, huge indication of how things are changing. And culturally saying that, actually, this isn't inclusive, and it isn't okay to be doing your job, like half cut all afternoon. It's not okay anymore. I think things will change significantly in the banking and insurance sectors as a result of Lloyds kind of leading the way on that.

DeAnn Knighton: 28:54

Obviously, I think of the sales and marketing world, just that's my background. And I'm like, I think that there's probably going to be maybe more resistance. That's also a place where I think at least some types of shift would be really powerful.

Janet Hadley: 29:05

I mean, it depends on the organization, doesn't it? So not all organizations actually want a diverse workforce. So I was talking to an HR professional the other day who gave me this acronym, am I allowed to swear on your podcast? Oh, please? Yes. So yeah, she called it Feefo. Which means fit in or foot off? Fairness. Yeah. And they have like a Feefo culture where like, everyone here drinks, everyone is between 20 and 30. They're all good looking. They're all skinny. They all go out drinking. That's it. Like we don't recruit people who are not in that demographic. So, you know, it's not going to be for everyone, this alcohol save workplace accreditation. I wouldn't even think about knocking on their door and asking them if they want if they're interested in it. It's larger organizations who actually need to think about diversity and inclusion.

DeAnn Knighton: 29:54

That actually leads me to the next thing I wanted to ask you about the idea of organizations building peer groups within the organization I think is such a powerful tool. I know, Salesforce here in the US has sober force, that is their own group that is supportive of this idea. And I It sounds like you maybe spearheaded one yourself

Janet Hadley: 30:14

when I was working in the coop in my corporate job. And I decided to set up a sober curious society because I had been talking in my own workplace about my drinking. And I was getting a sense that there was more people who might be interested in this. And I set it up on Eventbrite, I put 15 places I thought that'd be about right, it had a certain side room, and someone emailed me about 10 minutes after I published it and said, it says that it's sold out. And I said, Oh, I must have set it up wrong. Let me have a look. And I was like, No 15 People have booked. So I changed it to 999, just to see how many people were booked in and 78 people booked in for the first meeting. So I had to move it to be on Zoom, I just didn't expect it to be anything like that number out of maybe a couple of 1000 people who work at that office, it's been brilliant. We've met monthly, and I started by sharing my story. And then I brought in a guest for the second month. And then every other month from then on has just been someone from the group sharing their story. And actually, just before I jumped on this call with you, I got an email from somebody from the coop saying, I'm six and a half months sober, all my aching joints have gone, I feel like I'm living my life the way I want it to thank you so much for being the inspiration to get me started. You know, and I actually I had a note from another colleague a few weeks ago, who said, I've been trying to get pregnant for three years, I knew that alcohol might be the missing link, but I didn't really know what to do about it, or how to approach it. And I started going to your sessions, and I'm sitting here, and I'm six months sober and three months pregnant. And thank you. And I just think, you know, what, what more do you need is evidence really, even if you can just help a handful of people, it might be a small number of people, but it's a huge impact for them. Absolutely huge, like that is life changing. It's such an easy thing to do, I do a service where I will come into your workplace and run it for you. And I'm also happy to hand it back over to you, if you've got somebody who wants to run it, you know, I'll come in and set it up for you. And then when you're up and running, I'll step away. It's not a money making thing for me, I just think it's so doable.

DeAnn Knighton: 32:26

There are so many amazing people in recovery, people who are really proud to be sober. For me, it's up there with my greatest accomplishments. In my mind, I love talking about it. I'll talk to people about this all day, I've actually learned how to temper that a little bit. Because not everybody wants to document and all that out Yeah, but that's the beautiful thing about engaging people from that community who who could be a part of building that up within the organization and are happy to do it, and are out loud about who

Janet Hadley: 32:57

they are. Exactly. It's really low cost, and it built its own momentum. And it can be yours for your workplace. I think it's a really big perk, actually, for a job. Most workplaces have the larger companies anyway, they will have organizations that you can join that are for parents or for women, or for just returning for money for lots of different groups. There's not that many who have like a sober Society of some kind, but I think there will be a lot more of them in the future. And I would really encourage you, if you're in a position to start one up, just go for it. Because it's been the most rewarding thing I've done at work in my whole career. It really is. That's awesome.

DeAnn Knighton: 33:37

I love it. Well, thank you so much for being here with us today. Let's go ahead and have you wrap us up and tell us where people can find out more about your work and anything else that you would want to share before we close up.

Janet Hadley: 33:51

Oh, thank you. Yes. So you can find me on LinkedIn, Janet Hadley, and you can find by website, choose sunrise.co.uk or just Google alcohol safe workplace actually, that'd be great Google our call safe workplace and then find me because I need to move up those rankings. You can find me online and on LinkedIn at the main places

DeAnn Knighton: 34:08

I have a term that I like to use for people like you, which is a positive term. And for anyone I think, who like does this type of work within their organization is normalizer. So I want to thank you for being a normalizer I think it is such a powerful thing, like I talked about earlier, even beyond that gray area drinking group, there is such a massive impact that it has on this broader issue of addiction. I appreciate all of the work that you're doing. And I just really appreciate you being with us today.

Janet Hadley: 34:41

Oh, and thank you so much for inviting me on to be your guest. It's so lovely that you reached out from all the way across the other side of the world. To find out more about what we're doing. So thank you for that.

DeAnn Knighton: 34:51

For more information, please visit our

website: 34:53

soberpositiveworkplace.org or showupandstay.org. This podcast is written created and produced by DeAnn Knighton, featuring music from the wickedly talented Katie Hare nice nicely done. How do you feel?

Janet Hadley: 35:23

Yeah, good. Really good.