Annie Grace is singularly one of the most powerful voices in the alcohol-free space and I am thrilled she gave time to Hola Sober this month by completing the Q + A I submitted for her kind perusal. I am also grateful to Janet Gourand of TRIBE SOBER for talking about Hola Sober in her podcast interview with the Naked Mind author thus shining a light on the high- impact volunteer platform that is Hola Sober and our monthly magazine that empowers women in their alcohol-free lives. So many of our readers consider Annie's book to be the bible of choice on your journey into empowerment that I felt it was important to feature Annie Grace in our magazine. You have all read that Annie grew up in a one-room cabin without running water or electricity in Colorado and then, at age 26, became the youngest vice president in a multinational corporation. Success, however, led to excessive drinking and the possibility of losing everything. Annie recognized her problem but chose to approach it in an entirely new way. Annie's methodology has now expanded beyond alcohol to the broader conversation around habit change, including Nicotine. Annie's program has been featured in Forbes, the New York Daily News, and the Chicago Tribune. Annie is living with her husband and three children in the Colorado mountains.
drinking, but that it was about networking. In fact, he explained that this was actually a very important part of my career because these outside-of-the-office conversations were where all the ideas were shared and where relationships were formed for the progression of my career. So, I very intentionally started drinking. I came up with the strategy to drink a glass of wine and then a pint of water to make sure I never got too drunk. There were even times that I would go into the bathroom and throw up the last glass of wine so that I could keep drinking without ever getting tipsy or drunk. I continued this all throughout my career until I stopped drinking. At some point, that carried over into drinking at home to relieve stress, but I honestly don't remember when that line was crossed. At some point, I reached a time when I couldn’t look back and remember a day when I hadn’t had a drink. You moved to New York and, at just 26, became the youngest vice president of a multinational company. You said you thought that drinking was ‘the key to success in your career’, why? That conversation I mentioned with my boss was so pivotal. It was very blatantly told to me that it was important for my career. And then my own experiences continued to confirm that for me. Every meeting and every opportunity to network with someone above me in a company was always over drinks or during Happy Hour. Every work event was very boozy. By the end of my career, I was managing 28 countries and every country seemed boozier than the last. It is often said, it takes five years for a woman to ask herself does she have an issue with alcohol and actually doing something, how long do you think you had a problem before she took the decision to make the changes? I think it probably was around four or five years before I started to think that something wasn’t right and then it was six or seven years before I started actively trying to make decisions to drink less. In an interview in 2017, you wrote “I needed alcohol to relax, socialise, network, have a good time even have sex.
What date did you go alcohol-free, Annie? I had my last drink over seven years ago.
We have all read about you growing up in a one- room log cabin in Aspen, without running water and electricity – can you tell me a little about your childhood years including something we may not have read before? An interesting thing about my childhood years is that there were no roads to access the cabin that I grew up in during the wintertime. So, we had to put on all our snow clothes and get on a snowmobile to get to an actual road that a car could drive on. So, that is how I went to and from school for my entire childhood. When did your drinking career start and can you tell me a little about how it looked? I drank very little in high school and college. It really started for me when I was in New York City and my boss asked me why I wasn’t showing up at Happy Hours. When I explained to him that I didn’t really drink, he told me that it wasn’t really about the
HOLA SOBER | MADRID
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker