Carolina and I both did Josh Woll’s January reset. I still enjoy a glass of red wine from time to time, and I’m telling you that up front because it’s one of the reasons you can trust the rest of this. Josh gave me a month to examine my relationship with alcohol with curiosity instead of judgment, no pledge required, and what I saw that month still shapes how I think about my relationship with alcohol today. So before we get to his story, here’s the short version of where I stand. If you ever want to look at your own relationship with drinking, Josh is the person I’d send you to.
Josh has spent more than 20 years in video production and photography. Put a camera in his hand and he drops into a flow state, and if you’ve followed us for a while you’ve already seen his eye at work, because he was here in Brazil recently taking photos of Carolina and me. He also quit drinking five and a half years ago. In April of 2025 those two threads met, and The Sober Creative was born alongside a weekly podcast that records its 60th episode this week, a growing body of essays, a community he calls the Sober Creative Collective, and one-on-one coaching built around a 90-day arc.
The Sober Creative almost didn’t exist. When Josh first launched on Substack it was as Clear Lens, a coaching practice for people starting video businesses, and the passion wasn’t showing up on the page. On one of our calls we asked him a question about sobriety and something lit up. He sent back a ten-minute voice message, and somewhere inside it he accidentally said the words “the sober creative.” We told him to go buy the domain that day. He did, and everything he’s built since grew from that memo.
In this interview Josh explains why alcohol works so well. It’s fast. You can walk into a store, swipe your card, and feel the effect within minutes, which makes it the most available answer to a stressful day there is. And the same speed is the trap. Stress arrives, you drink, you spend the next day low on energy and motivation, things settle down, and then stress arrives again. The loop can run for years while it drains the exact things it promised to give back. Josh doesn’t shame anyone inside this loop, because he lived there himself. He tracked his drinks and tried to control them, and when none of that worked he committed to one full year without it. At 90 days he already knew it wasn’t coming back into his life.
If you only know Josh as the calm presence hosting a weekly show, the story he tells about visibility will do you good. Years ago, inside Leo Babauta’s Fearless Mastery group, going around the room to speak filled him with dread. His last name starts with W, so he usually went last, and the anxiety had the whole meeting to build up for him. He wanted to run out of the room. When Leo asked him to lead one of the groups, the answer in his head was no. Then something shifted, he said yes, and leading that small group of five to seven people opened up everything that followed, including the podcast, and including putting himself in front of the camera after two decades behind it. As he put it, facing the discomfort “is way more hard in your mind than is actually in reality.”
And if you’re building something of your own, there’s a thread here for you too. Josh talked about his first year without dressing it up. The money didn’t come fully the way he expected, and he’s okay saying so. His production work carries the new practice while it grows, and he holds that as support rather than as a problem to solve. Then he said the sentence I’d put on a sticky note for anyone building from a calling. “One year is really not that long.” It takes time for people to trust you. Slow and steady is the whole strategy, and 60 episodes into year one, Josh is what that strategy looks like in a person.
What makes him rare is the pairing. He work revolves around something often wrapped in shame, and he does it by going first, sharing what’s going on with him before he asks anything of you. Gary Allen, watching live, put it in the chat: vulnerability is “pure gold” around a subject this loaded. He’s right. A person who goes first makes it easier for everyone else to look at their own pattern without flinching.
If part of you has been wondering, even a little, what a month without alcohol would show you, this conversation was recorded for that part of you. Josh’s invitation is smaller and kinder than the one you’ve been bracing against. Try one month. Stay curious. Watch what day three, day seven, and day fourteen have to teach you. And if drinking isn’t your subject, watch it anyway for the year-one truth, because if your practice is asking for more patience than you budgeted, Josh will hand you back some steadiness.
A few other threads from the full episode:
What his old drinking friends decided his sobriety was (”just another phase he’s in”), and what actually changed between them instead
The spectrum he sees in this work, from one drink a week to a bottle of vodka a day, and why the reason matters more than the amount
The question he asks before anything else: what are you using it for?
His therapist’s stat about how many podcasters never make it past episode ten (he records number 60 the day after this conversation)
Wonder walks, the Collective’s first guest workshop, and the mini documentary series he wants to film with his podcast guests around the world
The moment Gary’s comment about Ireland had Josh booking an imaginary ticket mid-answer
If this stirred something, Josh’s world lives at The Sober Creative on Substack. His homepage holds his essays, a free assessment, and an open door to a conversation with him. Tell him we sent you.
One more thing before you go. Josh’s method starts with examining a pattern before trying to change it, and we built a tool that does the same job for your business. The Harmony Map is a free assessment that takes about eight minutes and shows you where you’re standing across the nine frequencies of Sacred Business. It won’t tell you what to decide. It shows you where to decide from. If you take it, bring the same curiosity Josh has been talking about for the last hour.
Thank you KarenC-Book Collector📚⚖️🗽🗳️🧿♒️, Cheri Seagraves, and many others for tuning into this episode of In Full Light with Josh Woll and Carolina Wilke!
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on July 8, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
