Managing Difficult Conversations - with Andrea Newton

Tribe Sober - inspiring an alcohol-free life!

My guest this week is Andrea Newton.

Andrea is a Corporate Consultant, Keynote Speaker,  Mental Health Advocate and a Podcast Host. 

Alcohol took Andrea to a dark place but thankfully she recovered and is now doing some very worthwhile work.

In this Episode

I found Andrea’s account of how alcohol made her feel suicidal as rather chilling – the fact that she actually had a plan to end her life – and her point that alcohol can provide that “Dutch Courage” to actually go through with it
These days Andrea works for the National Centre for Suicide Prevention Centre in the UK – she delivers a workshop that helps people to have crucial and difficult conversations – which can save lives.
She explained that the risk of suicide is 8 times higher if alcohol is involved and that 20% of suicides in young people in the UK are alcohol fuelled.
We discussed the “work hard play hard” culture that pervades in so many companies –and the fact that you are sometimes perceived as “boring” if you don’t go for the weekly drinks with your colleagues
It can even have career implications as well – when was in my 20’s I worked for the BBC and I remember being given a nudge by my boss to go to the BBC Club more often as it was valuable for “networking” – so I did and it was there I discovered that drinking was an essential part of the networking!
I mentioned the book (and TED talk) Quiet by Susan Cain about introverts/Extraverts
introverts often use alcohol as a coping mechanism to help them manage pressure of networking, entertaining clients – and of course socializing – if you are an introvert then please read this book – it will be very good for your self esteem – after all we live in a society that often seems to favour extraverts
We talked about the difficulty of socializing in early sobriety and how it’s actually the drunk people rather than the sober ones who are the “boring” ones – I shared the tip from our Tribe Sober toolkit that it helps to “be an anthropologist”
We talked about the pandemic and the fact that working from home may have encouraged more people to rely on alcohol – and the fact that managers may have to deal with this issue when employees return to work
Which led us to discuss her consulting work which is based around 7 conversations – “difficult conversations” that many managers may struggle with. Andrea helps them to structure these conversations and offers them some very valuable training.
It struck me that these “difficult conversations” are of course something that many of us have to deal within our personal lives as well– the kind of conversation we may need to have with a family member who is drinking too much. I’m planning on asking Andrea to write a guest blog for our website on this subject.
Do have a listen to Andrea’s podcast as there is so much helpful advice in there – advice about how to have difficult conversations in our work and our personal lives
To contact Andrea go to her website www.confidentconversations.co.uk and her podcast is Really Useful Conversations

If you are listening to this podcast and are really feeling low or you know someone who is suicidal then please contact Andrea  – or you can email me on janet@tribesober and we’ll connect you to someone who can help

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Till Next Week

Janet x

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