Sober Positive Workplace Series: Kick Off | Host Bio
Sep 05, 2023Season 3Episode 1
DeAnn Knighton
Welcome to the first official episode of the Sober Positive Workplace Series brought to you by Show Up and Stay and hosted by President and Co-Founder, DeAnn Knighton. This week is a quick background on the host and some general information about the Sober Positive Workplace project.
When we use the power of normalization to change the narrative.1:46
Historically when we talk about drug epidemics like the one we find ourselves in now, we create a discourse that builds stigma and distance.
What is a Sober Positive Workplace.
"Before we talk about what it is, I want to talk about what it is not. It is not a call for the return of prohibition. It's not virtue signaling or a plan to encourage additional exclusionary practices or judgments about an individual's choice."
DeAnn is president and co-founder of Show up and Stay, a nonprofit focused on finding ways to bridge recovery gaps between healing from substance use disorder and starting the process of healing
Welcome to the first official episode of the Sober Positive Workplace Series brought to you by Show Up and Stay and hosted by President and Co-Founder, DeAnn Knighton. This week is a quick background on the host and some general information about the Sober Positive Workplace project.
When we use the power of normalization to change the narrative.1:46
Historically when we talk about drug epidemics like the one we find ourselves in now, we create a discourse that builds stigma and distance.
What is a Sober Positive Workplace.
"Before we talk about what it is, I want to talk about what it is not. It is not a call for the return of prohibition. It's not virtue signaling or a plan to encourage additional exclusionary practices or judgments about an individual's choice."
DeAnn is president and co-founder of Show up and Stay, a nonprofit focused on finding ways to bridge recovery gaps between healing from substance use disorder and starting the process of healing
Oh hello, this is the sober positive workplace series brought to you by Show Up and Stay. I'm your host Deann Knighton. Normalization has become one of my favorite words recently. It has working definitions that reaches biology, data science and the social sciences. But most simply, it's a process that makes something more normal or regular. It it's a word we should use more often to describe individuals, organizations institutions that are using the power of normalization. To contribute. I like to consider myself a normalizer. It was a conscious choice I made when I decided to talk about my issues with substance use and mental health. It gets me out of bed each day to think that maybe just one person will listen to a podcast episode, read a blog post, and hopefully feel seen and understood. Even just a little. And maybe it will be just enough to propel them forward to what they really want. Normalization as a tool has the power for healing both the individual and the collective. It may not seem like a big deal to be an organization that has happy hours that are more inclusive for those who don't drink or who encourages pure advocacy. But it is it is the butterfly effect that shines light into neglected corners and slowly shifts the conversations that we are having. When we use the power of normalization to change the narrative about complex and often taboo subjects, we are doing important work. Substance Use Disorder impacts all of us in an August 4 2023 article published by Fortune Magazine, journalist Erica Frye lays out important details surrounding the realities of the deep reaching implications of substance use as it relates to work. Begin quote of the 46 million Americans who struggle with at least one substance use disorder. Most some 60% of those over the age of 12 have a job according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. That is an uncomfortably and largely unacknowledged reality in American business. We're talking about addiction to alcohol or drugs has traditionally been taboo. And, quote, I'm yet to meet an individual that cannot in some way relate to this issue. It's everywhere yet simultaneously, it seems to be nowhere. Especially not in our workplace conversations, especially not in our wellness conversations. Great strides have been made in building a deeper understanding of mental health and its impact on overall wellbeing. Meanwhile, substance misuse although impacting at least one in 10, humans directly is monitored and relegated to the conversations about screening for the illegal versions, while overlooking potentially damaging causes of the legal ones. Historically, when we talk about drug epidemics, like the one we find ourselves in now, we create a discourse that builds stigma and distance. A previous guest on our show, Dr. Carl Eric Fisher outlines the cycle of social response. To this day, our inconsistent drug policy responses reflect distorted and different understandings of addiction. certain substances are illegal, others are tolerated, and alcohol and tobacco are barely considered drugs at all. What is a sober positive workplace and where do we start? Before we talk about what it is, I first want to talk about what it is not. It is not a call for the return of prohibition. It's not virtue signaling or a plan to encourage additional exclusionary practices or judgments about an individual's choice. This is an important distinction. This is about bringing people together without building additional walls, or any sort of shaming practices. What a sober positive workplace is, is a thoughtful bespoke approach that's considerate of the nuance involved. It's complex and necessary. It incorporates awareness, policy, inclusion, and safe networks. We'll talk about each of these more specifically. Over the course of the series I'll be bringing in different guests to help formulate what it looks like to be an individual or a group of individuals who brings this idea to your workplace. Being a corporate normalizer around building more sober positive workplaces is a powerful and needed example of how small changes can make big waves. In addition to the social impact, it also has a far reaching benefit to the organization itself. These benefits include increased productivity, reduced liability, improved retention, impact on recruiting, building a culture of inclusion, it benefits the employees work life balance, safety, inclusion, work satisfaction. And for the bigger picture, normalizing the alcohol free lifestyle choice, reduces damaging stigma, and supports community based recovery advocacy. So thank you for joining us for this journey. This month. As we explore this topic further in conjunction with national recovery. There will be a great deal of content that we will be sharing and distributing through our
LinkedIn page:
Sober Positive Workplace , I will make sure there's a link in the show notes. For anyone who's listening to these episodes, and it has interest in being involved, please follow that page. That's where the meat will be. And that's where we'll be able to begin to show we have the types of numbers that we need to justify and look at these changes within our organizational structures, I can't do it without you. So please take a moment to follow. For many adults work can account for the majority of social interaction. companies that build teams with meaningful connections to one another can improve retention rates, workforce productivity and job satisfaction. And there is a reason to create community building outside of the workplace, for those that work together. But unfortunately, culturally, this has typically always been alcohol centered. Nothing that I'm saying today is meant to be a lecture. I very much fear that the distance that is created between those who drink and those who don't, is part of the reason that we have so many issues around it. How do we figure out how to bridge that a little bit? How do I somehow figure out how to make the fact that I don't drink not mean something to you about you? Because it doesn't. But I remember when I was drinking, when I would encounter people who didn't drink. It said something to me, I didn't necessarily want to drink around them, because I feared their judgement of me. And I would make bad jokes like, don't trust a person you can't have a drink with. Yeah. I recently had a job, where I was one of the oldest across the company, we were working with people, typically between the ages of 24 to 29, and a very high stress sales environment. And drinking was a big part of it. I started there, after I got sober, I was still not really in a place of fully embracing my sobriety, or really being ready to talk to anybody about it, let alone a stranger. But I also knew that as I moved to a new state, and took on this new role, that I was going to have to figure out ways to navigate conversations around drinking, because it was sales. And this is what we do was also a tool that I had used as a sales leader many times to connect with my younger employees. Being able to buy them a drink was a kind of personal touch that I could put on the relationship that helped create some loyalty and just some sense of, hey, we know each other and I got you and I see you as a human. And I know now that there's other ways to do that, but at the time, I didn't really think there was. I did my best to navigate it. But it was tough. There was a level of acceptance, though, that surprised me in other ways. And actually, the more open I got about it, the more acceptance I found. And during the course of my time with the organization, I became more and more comfortable with myself as a sober person. I did a lot of work on myself. And so I was able to kind of come into my identity and just be more comfortable talking about The fact that I'm a person who shouldn't drink alcohol, and not really worrying too much about it. So, it's hard for people sometimes. And it did play into my feelings of outside sadness and potential that maybe this was something that was holding me back from being able to really integrate into this new company. But I learned something really big. Over time, as I sought therapy, and did more work on myself, and came to understand my incredibly codependent relationship, not only with people in my past, but also with my identity as a working person, that there was something wrong. And some of the things that I had experienced, leading up to my sobriety and my past work reflected that when I looked closely at it, I had built too much around my work life, I had not set boundaries, I had not taken care of myself at all. Because I hated myself. I valued everyone else's experience over mine. And I hadn't really built up appropriate skills of how to connect with people. With the exception of that one easy neutralizing tool of alcohol, I became more and more embodied during the years there. And I became more and more specific about my own need. And every single time that I spoke up for myself, despite my absolute horror in doing so, I was amazed at how responsive people were. I was amazed at how much more confident I felt because I wasn't devaluing myself. I wasn't feeling like I had to create unrealistic ways to connect with people. Because this was just work, I finally had an appropriate relationship with the idea of work. For those who have not followed this show up and say a podcast, I think it's important for me to introduce myself a little bit. It's funny, I did an episode of the show up and say a podcast called Meet your hosts, the very first one I did. And it was a reflection of a lot of the work that I had done to that point as it related to my own recovery from substance use disorder. And as the show has progressed, a lot has changed for me along the way, including how I'm spending my time and my focus. I won't spend a lot of time here talking about my own story. I really want this to be about moving forward, not rehashing my past too much. However, if you were to go back and listen, you would hear that by the time I got to the second season, I was dealing with my own issues surrounding my recovery, trying to figure out how to sustain the momentum a few years in and dealing with some pretty big life changes, a lot of which connected to my work, and how I wanted to move forward in the world. My own story involves treatment, therapy, and a lot of personal development. It also involved a fairly significant period of self reflection, while I lived alone during COVID, and a great deal of dependency on so many of the burgeoning resources and ways to recover, that felt and looked so different from what I had even experienced. In the first couple of years of recovery, the shift has been significant. Another important factor to note that has contributed to getting me to this project of sober positive workplace here and now. It is my own personal desire to understand as much about the issue of addiction as possible, not only because of the impact that it had for me, but for others in my life that I care about deeply. It's an issue that no one group of people or person can solve. It's endless work. It's a lot more questions than answers. And it's a lot more ambiguity than concrete solutions. But after 20 years in a corporate environment, working my way up as a sales leader. I've decided to officially make the shift in my life. The beautiful thing about it is that nothing changes the experiences that I've had up until now. I learned so much in that first act. A lot of things I wish I could take back. But what I've learned in recovery, is that the best way is to integrate these things into the human I am now so I'm attempting to bring together my past and my brethren into hopefully a future that provides the right type of generativity to my life, that I can feel good about how I spend these final years as a working human. That was a long introduction leading up to my bio as it stands today, in this moment, here is what it is. My name is Deann Knighton, I am a human in recovery. I have a loving supporting partner, also in recovery. And I have the gift of being a bonus parent to two amazing little humans, age 10 and seven. I have found a path to recovery from my issues with addiction. But I still struggle with anxiety and depression. Life is still hard sometimes, but at least I show up for it. And for the most part, I like myself these days. I care deeply for the community that struggles with substance use disorder. I have met the most amazing people in my life through the process of recovery. I'm an experienced sales leader who is now a graduate student at Hazelden Betty Ford Graduate School of Addiction Atudies, where I will be completing a master arts in addiction counseling, inclusive of integrated recovery for co-occurring disorders. I am president and co founder of Show Up and Stay a nonprofit focused on finding ways to bridge recovery gaps. Those spaces that exist between healing from a substance and starting the process of healing our lives. Were a mix of science and technology, but mostly storytelling and heart. Sober Positive Workplace is our newest area of focus. I'm drawing on past experience, expertise and knowledge from the amazing people who are already doing work in this space and also leaning on the support from very talented team of individuals. For more information, please visit our website. Sober positive workplace.org show up and stay.org This podcast is written Created and produced by DeAnn featuring music from the wickedly talented Katie Hare