What is kava? Where does it come from and how does it affect the body? My guest today shares more about the plant Pacific Islanders have been sharing in ceremony for thousands of years to relax and socialize with.

I sat down with Virginia Cherie, co-founder of Kavayn, a kava extract brand. Her co-founder Brad Tabone was invited to a farewell kava circle in a village in the Pacific Islands, woke up the next morning after the best night's sleep and no hangover, and called Virginia to build the go-to-market plan. Along the way, Virginia and her husband both stopped drinking.

We get into what kava actually is, how it interacts with your GABA receptors, why the traditional brew tastes like earthy mud water, and why Kavayn works directly with subsistence farmers in Fiji and Vanuatu instead of middlemen. If you've been curious about alcohol alternatives that still give you the ritual, the calm and the connection, this one's for you.

Find Virginia and Kavayn at kavayn.com.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• How a farewell kava circle in the Pacific Islands inspired a new brand, and why Virginia and her husband both stopped drinking along the way
• What kava actually is: the roots of a pepper plant, the kavalactones inside them, and how they connect with your GABA receptors to calm your mind
• Why Virginia describes kava as "a deep sigh" for anyone who has ever needed a drink to feel less socially anxious
• How Kavayn turns an earthy, bitter traditional brew into spirits, snap packs and gummies, and why coconut makes kava work better
• Why Kavayn refuses to buy from middlemen, and how micro loans support subsistence farmers in Fiji and Vanuatu
• The three pillars of calmness, connectivity and community, and how to reclaim the moments alcohol marketing has claimed for decades

Join over 20,000 souls who tune into weekly newsletters on the competitive advantage you get alcohol-free. Get on the Euphoric newsletter.

Join me on Substack for deeper essays on psychology, success, and business.

Apply to be our next Thought Leader to master premium selling and thought leader positioning to publish your book and deliver your keynote onstage. Few spots remain.

If you know you're meant to help other people change their relationship with alcohol and create a profitable online brand, get on the waitlist for the Empowered AF Coach 5x Certification – and get 5x certified as a world class alcohol-free empowerment coach, subconscious change coach, success coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnosis practitioner and implement our 0 to $100k Coach Method™ as you build a profitable brand.

Euphoric the Club is the premier space to lose the desire for alcohol as you surround yourself with successful women who don't drink (and the women who are becoming them). Euphoric the Club includes full access to all of my alcohol-free programs to make alcohol meaningless as your dreams take center stage, meaningful monthly challenges, weekly coaching and more.

Profiling successful people who don't drink and where the alcohol-free lifestyle and entrepreneurship collide. Subscribe to the Euphoric AF YouTube channel.

Read Euphoric: my HarperCollins bestseller on losing the desire for alcohol while getting high on your dream life. Be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today or grab your free chapter here.

Follow @euphoric.af on Instagram.

Please do rate, review, and subscribe so we can continue spreading our message far and wide!

Gen Z has a new way to party, and the older generations are furious about it. It's called the wellness darty: ice baths on the fraternity lawn, matcha, yoga and workouts where the beer pong table used to be.

While the comment sections fill up with people lamenting what college kids are missing out on, I had a very different reaction. I'm jealous.

In this episode, I look back at the blurry Facebook albums of millennial party culture, my UCLA days, and the wine and craft beer era that followed, and ask a bigger question. How much of what we do was ever really our choice? I share how alcohol programming teaches the subconscious mind that drinking brings love, belonging, status and popularity long before your first drink, and how that same indoctrination shapes the career, the lifestyle and the mold we think we're supposed to fit.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• What a wellness darty is, and why I wish it had been the cool thing to do when I was in college
• How alcohol programming tied drinking to love, belonging and popularity in my subconscious mind, from watching adults at dinner parties to making friends at UCLA
• The medieval twin thought experiment I share with my certification students, and what it reveals about how much of who you are was shaped by indoctrination
• Carl Jung's idea of the unlived life, and why so many of us are being called to live it now instead of waiting for a midlife crisis
• Why willpower and mocktails can only take you so far, and how to reprogram the meaning your subconscious mind made about drinking
• What Gallup's latest numbers say about how fast drinking culture is changing, and why being alcohol-free makes you the wolf

If you know you're meant to help other people change their relationship with alcohol and create a profitable online brand, apply now for the Empowered AF Coach 5x Certification – and get 5x certified as a world class alcohol-free empowerment coach, subconscious change coach, success coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnosis practitioner and implement our 0 to $100k Coach Method™ as you build a profitable brand. Our next class starts October 30.

Join over 20,000 souls who tune into weekly newsletters on the competitive advantage you get alcohol-free. Get on the Euphoric newsletter.

Join me on Substack for deeper essays on psychology, success, and business.

Apply to be our next Thought Leader to master premium selling and thought leader positioning to publish your book and deliver your keynote onstage. Few spots remain.

Euphoric the Club is the premier space to lose the desire for alcohol as you surround yourself with successful women who don't drink (and the women who are becoming them). Euphoric the Club includes full access to all of my alcohol-free programs to make alcohol meaningless as your dreams take center stage, meaningful monthly challenges, weekly coaching and more.

Profiling successful people who don't drink and where the alcohol-free lifestyle and entrepreneurship collide. Subscribe to the Euphoric AF YouTube channel.

Read Euphoric: my HarperCollins bestseller on losing the desire for alcohol while getting high on your dream life. Be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today or grab your free chapter here.

Follow @euphoric.af on Instagram.

Please do rate, review, and subscribe so we can continue spreading our message far and wide!

Eight years in, and I've been having some of the most honest conversations with my clients lately. The kind where you realize the things that held you back the longest were the things nobody ever just said plainly at the beginning.

So that's what this episode is. Six truths I learned the hard way, some in year one, some embarrassingly recently, that I'm handing to you now so you don't have to go through them the same way I did.

This one is for anyone building a coaching business, a wellness practice, an alcohol-free brand, or any kind of service-based business. The specifics will vary but the truths are universal.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• The thing most coaches confuse for expertise when they're starting out, and why it will always hit a ceiling
• Why selling might actually be the most loving thing you can do for someone and how to immediately get better at it
• What I've noticed about the coaches who go viral and why it tells you almost nothing about their actual success
• The pattern I've seen play out every single year in my own business without fail, and what it always predicts
• Why your business being unrecognizable in five years might be the best thing that ever happens to it
• How I got a six-figure book deal with fewer than 5000 followers, and what that actually means for where you are right now

Join over 20,000 souls who tune into weekly newsletters on the competitive advantage you get alcohol-free. Get on the Euphoric newsletter.

Join me on Substack for deeper essays on psychology, success, and business.

Apply to be our next Thought Leader to master premium selling and thought leader positioning to publish your book and deliver your keynote onstage. Few spots remain.

If you know you're meant to help other people change their relationship with alcohol and create a profitable online brand, apply now for the Empowered AF Coach 5x Certification – and get 5x certified as a world class alcohol-free empowerment coach, subconscious change coach, success coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnosis practitioner and implement our 0 to $100k Coach Method™ as your build a profitable brand. Our next class starts in October.

Euphoric the Club is the premier space to lose the desire for alcohol as you surround yourself with successful women who don't drink (and the women who are becoming them). Euphoric the Club includes full access to all of my alcohol-free programs to make alcohol meaningless as your dreams take center stage, meaningful monthly challenges, weekly coaching and more.

Profiling successful people who don't drink and where the alcohol-free lifestyle and entrepreneurship collide. Subscribe to the Euphoric AF YouTube channel.

Read Euphoric: my HarperCollins bestseller on losing the desire for alcohol while getting high on your dream life. Be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today or grab your free chapter here.

Follow @euphoric.af on Instagram.

Please do rate, review, and subscribe so we can continue spreading our message far and wide!

Eight years ago, two women who had just gone alcohol-free pointed themselves at opposite walls of an apartment, clipped on lapel mics they could barely hear themselves through, and recorded the first episode of Euphoric the podcast.

I couldn't have told you then what this show would become.

348 episodes later, I wanted to sit down and talk about what all of these conversations have actually taught me about transformation. Because when you've watched hundreds of women go from one version of themselves to another, patterns start to emerge, and they're not what most people expect.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• The cringe origin story of episode one, and why I'm grateful it exists
• What I've noticed about the guests who create the biggest shifts in the people listening
• Why being alcohol-free might make you the most powerful force in the room, and what happens when you're surrounded by other women who are too
• The neurological window that opens when you go alcohol-free and why most people don't know it's closing
• What Carl Jung's concept of individuation has to do with why some people feel truly fulfilled by their work and others don't
• Why the most fulfilling work on the planet might be the same work, no matter what industry you're in
• An honest reflection on a year that has been both the hardest and most clarifying of my career
• What's changing at Euphoric, and what's coming next

Do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?

An actress? An astronaut? A teacher?

As kids, we don't understand the career landscape.

We build our first sense of "what I want to be when I grow up" out of a small handful of visible or memorable options, because that's all we've ever seen.

But we do subconsciously understand archetypes.

When a five-year-old says she wants to be an astronaut, it doesn't necessarily mean she wants to go to space. The real clue is underneath it: a love of adventure, discovery, being the one who goes first. The job title is a placeholder for a deeper desire we don't know how to express yet.

Once I understood that, I went back through my own list of what I REALLY WANTED to be when I grew up to see how it measured up to what I do today.

I was shocked.

Your childhood dreams are not naive. They're clues.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• Why what we wanted to be as children is more revealing than we think, even when the career itself makes no sense anymore
• The four childhood dreams I had and what the deeper archetype underneath each one was pointing toward
• The four childhood dreams I had and what closed the door for each one at the time
• What my sister told me at 7 that made me give up on this love
• Why picking a career at 18 with almost no understanding of what's possible is one of the strangest things we ask young people to do
• How the career I have today didn't exist when I was a teenager trying to decide what to do with my life
• How to look at your own childhood dreams for the deeper archetypes underneath

Join over 20,000 souls who tune into weekly newsletters on the competitive advantage you get alcohol-free. Get on the Euphoric newsletter.

Join me on Substack for deeper essays on psychology, success, and business.

Apply to be our next Thought Leader to master premium selling and thought leader positioning to publish your book and deliver your keynote onstage. Few spots remain.

If you know you're meant to help other people change their relationship with alcohol and create a profitable online brand, apply now for the Empowered AF Coach 5x Certification – and get 5x certified as a world class alcohol-free empowerment coach, subconscious change coach, success coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnosis practitioner and implement our 0 to $100k Coach Method™ as your build a profitable brand. Our next class starts in October.

Euphoric the Club is the premier space to lose the desire for alcohol as you surround yourself with successful women who don't drink (and the women who are becoming them). Euphoric the Club includes full access to all of my alcohol-free programs to make alcohol meaningless as your dreams take center stage, meaningful monthly challenges, weekly coaching and more.

Profiling successful people who don't drink and where the alcohol-free lifestyle and entrepreneurship collide. Subscribe to the Euphoric AF YouTube channel.

Read Euphoric: my HarperCollins bestseller on losing the desire for alcohol while getting high on your dream life. Be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today or grab your free chapter here.

Follow @euphoric.af on Instagram.

Please do rate, review, and subscribe so we can continue spreading our message far and wide!

My mind has been completely consumed with book writing lately, and I wanted to sit down and share something I keep seeing over and over again in my community: so many women who have gone alcohol-free, suddenly feel this surge of creativity and a pull toward writing.

If that's you, this episode is for you.

I'm sharing five telltale signs that you have a bestselling book inside of you, and they might not be what you expect. This isn't about whether you think you're a writer, whether you've written anything since college, or whether you have time.

It's about something much more fundamental than any of that.

Be sure to join me for a three-part workshop, The Story Only You Can Tell, happening September 16, 17, and 18, where I'll be sharing the path from "someday I'll write a book" to published author. It's only $1 to join.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• The 5 signs you have a bestselling book inside you
• The surprising connection between going alcohol-free and creativity
• Why the most important thing you have to say is probably the thing that scares you most to say out loud
• The past life vs present life tension that needs to be expressed
• The one question to ask yourself when you keep putting the book off
• What Elizabeth Gilbert believes happens to an idea when you ignore it long enough
• What your algorithm fatigue is actually trying to tell you
• What we're doing together inside The Story Only You Can Tell, and why it starts at $1

Join over 20,000 souls who tune into weekly newsletters on the competitive advantage you get alcohol-free. Get on the Euphoric newsletter.

Apply to be our next Thought Leader to master premium selling and thought leader positioning to publish your book and deliver your keynote onstage.

If you know you're meant to help other people change their relationship with alcohol and create a profitable online brand, apply now for the Empowered AF Coach 5x Certification – and get 5x certified as a world class alcohol-free empowerment coach, subconscious change coach, success coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnosis practitioner and implement our 0 to $100k Coach Method™ as your build a profitable brand.

Euphoric the Club is the premier space to lose the desire for alcohol as you surround yourself with successful women who don't drink (and the women who are becoming them). Euphoric the Club includes full access to all of my alcohol-free programs to make alcohol meaningless as your dreams take center stage, meaningful monthly challenges, weekly coaching and more.

Profiling successful people who don't drink and where the alcohol-free lifestyle and entrepreneurship collide. Subscribe to the Euphoric AF YouTube channel.

Read Euphoric: my HarperCollins bestseller on losing the desire for alcohol while getting high on your dream life. Be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today or grab your free chapter here.

Follow @euphoric.af on Instagram.

Please do rate, review, and subscribe so we can continue spreading our message far and wide!

I submitted my second book proposal to my agent yesterday, and I am on cloud nine.

This book has been living in my head for years. But the truth is, I didn't make real traction on it until this summer, which also happened to be the hardest summer I've had in a long time.

Huxley passed at the end of May. The ocean swells in Southern California were so dangerous I couldn't even get in the water, which is my favorite thing in the world. My house felt empty in a way it never had before. And so, I found myself in cafes facing the ocean, writing for days on end.

Writing this book became the salvation I didn't know I needed.

Why is it that so many of us who step away from alcohol feel pulled toward writing? 82% of Americans want to write a book. If you're one of them, this episode is for you.

I'm also inviting you to a three-part workshop, The Story Only You Can Tell, happening September 16, 17, and 18, where I'm going to help you take your idea and lay the foundation for a bestseller. I'll be sharing all my know-how of becoming a published author.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• The moment I hit send on my book proposal and what came up that I completely didn't expect
• Why the worst thing that happened to me this summer became the reason this book finally got written
• The strange chain of events that kept me out of the ocean and put me exactly where I needed to be
• What most people get completely wrong about writing a book before they even start
• The one deadline I missed on purpose, and what I chose instead
• The real reason 82% of people want to write a book, and why it has nothing to do with being an author
• What a book can open for your career that years of content never will
• The package that arrived at my door this week that got me teary-eyed
• What a book proposal actually is versus a book and why you need one
• What Emboldened is actually about, and why I couldn't have written it even three years ago

Join me at THE STORY ONLY YOU CAN TELL so you can uncover your bestselling story and take the path from "one day I'll write a book" to published author.

I'm celebrating my client's published book! Pick up a copy of Life Beyond The Binge: A Commercial Fisherwoman's Journey Home by Colleen Clifford

Join over 20,000 souls who tune into weekly newsletters on the competitive advantage you get alcohol-free. Get on the Euphoric newsletter.

Apply to be our next Thought Leader to master premium selling and thought leader positioning to publish your book and deliver your keynote onstage.

If you know you're meant to help other people change their relationship with alcohol and create a profitable online brand, apply now for the Empowered AF Coach 5x Certification – and get 5x certified as a world class alcohol-free empowerment coach, subconscious change coach, success coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnosis practitioner and implement our 0 to $100k Coach Method™ as your build a profitable brand.

Euphoric the Club is the premier space to lose the desire for alcohol as you surround yourself with successful women who don't drink (and the women who are becoming them). Euphoric the Club includes full access to all of my alcohol-free programs to make alcohol meaningless as your dreams take center stage, meaningful monthly challenges, weekly coaching and more.

Profiling successful people who don't drink and where the alcohol-free lifestyle and entrepreneurship collide. Subscribe to the Euphoric AF YouTube channel.

Read Euphoric: my HarperCollins bestseller on losing the desire for alcohol while getting high on your dream life. Be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today or grab your free chapter here.

Follow @euphoric.af on Instagram.

Please do rate, review, and subscribe so we can continue spreading our message far and wide!

I just got back from five weeks in Europe with my parents, and I want to take you behind the scenes.

My parents are in their 80s. My dad has been through two bouts of stage four cancer and is in remission. My mom, knock on wood, is healthy. How long will that last? How much longer can I see the world with them?

This trip happened in the shadow of losing Huxley, my soul dog, which meant I went into it already cracked open, already thinking about mortality and time and what we do with the moments we have. And it turned out to be one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.

We started in Warsaw, flew to Madrid, drove through Costa Brava and the French Riviera and the Italian Riviera in an SUV packed with carry-on luggage only, watched Spain win the World Cup in a medieval town on the Catalan coast, swam in alpine lakes in Slovenia, and ended back in Warsaw where my dad told me stories I'd never heard and my mom said it was all a fairy tale.

This episode is more than just a travel diary. It's about ancestry, about what we inherit from the people who came before us, about why now is the time to go do the things you've always wanted to do, and about what grief and presence and awe have been teaching me this year.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• How losing Huxley made me show up completely different this summer
• The hidden gem coastlines of Costa Brava and the Italian Riviera that barely any Americans know about
• What it was like to watch Spain's World Cup Victory from the streets of a medieval Catalan town
• The celebrity sighting we had in a sleepy Spanish fishing village while leaving our phones behind for an evening swim
• What my parents said at the end of the trip that made every exhausting, hot, logistically complicated moment completely worth it
• Living in the same Warsaw apartment building where my great-grandparents lived until 1970
• The stories my parents told me about their lives and upbringings
• Why being in Warsaw every year makes me feel the thin veil between the life I have and the parallel one I could have had
• How this trip fed directly into the second book I'm writing, Emboldened

Join over 20,000 souls who tune into weekly newsletters on the competitive advantage you get alcohol-free. Get on the Euphoric newsletter.

Apply to be our next Thought Leader to master premium selling and thought leader positioning to publish your book and deliver your keynote onstage.

If you know you're meant to help other people change their relationship with alcohol and create a profitable online brand, apply now for the Empowered AF Coach 5x Certification – and get 5x certified as a world class alcohol-free empowerment coach, subconscious change coach, success coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnosis practitioner and implement our 0 to $100k Coach Method™ as your build a profitable brand.

Euphoric the Club is the premier space to lose the desire for alcohol as you surround yourself with successful women who don't drink (and the women who are becoming them). Euphoric the Club includes full access to all of my alcohol-free programs to make alcohol meaningless as your dreams take center stage, meaningful monthly challenges, weekly coaching and more.

Profiling successful people who don't drink and where the alcohol-free lifestyle and entrepreneurship collide. Subscribe to the Euphoric AF YouTube channel.

Read Euphoric: my HarperCollins bestseller on losing the desire for alcohol while getting high on your dream life. Be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today or grab your free chapter here.

Follow @euphoric.af on Instagram.

Please do rate, review, and subscribe so we can continue spreading our message far and wide!