Bee Sober with Alex and Lisa

Meet Alex and Lisa founders of Bee Sober CIC. Alex and Lisa are two women from Northern England, starting a new revolution and on a mission to remove stigmas associated with binning the booze and showing everyone the huge benefits sobriety brings. Tune into this episode to hear their sober story, and how they created a global sober community that's taking the world by storm!

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Find Alex and Lisa at www.beesoberofficial.com. Follow me on Instagram @alexmcrobs and check out my offerings in yoga, meditation and coaching at http://themindfullifepractice.com/live-schedule.

Full episode

TRANSCRIPT

Intro

Welcome to the Sober Yoga Girl podcast with Alex McRobs, international yoga teacher and sober coach. I broke up with booze for good in 2019 and now I'm here to help others do the same. You're not alone and a sober life can be fun and fulfilling. Let me show you how.

Alex

All right. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Sober Yoga Girl. I am super excited for this episode. This is actually the first time I've ever had two guests on at once. But they come as a duo, Alex and Lisa. They are the co-hosts of Bee Sober and they are based in the U.K. And I am super happy to have you here and hear more about your sober journey. Both of your sober journey. So welcome to the show.

Alex Walker

Well, thank you for having us on. Yeah.

Alex

How's it going?

Alex Walker

It's good. Yeah, we're all so excited, but also a little bit nervous as well, because it's been a while since we've been interviewed and want to say that we were interviewed last week. But it's been a while since you've been interviewed by somebody we don't know very well. So--

Alex

Okay.

Alex Walker

It's exciting for us as well. It's a nice change.

Lisa

We interviewed just last week?

Alex Walker

Shayna.

Lisa

Oh. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I forgot we've done that. And it's like, what is she talking about? Oh yeah. This is the first one we've done in ages, but she is one of our ambassadors by quite close friends as well. So it didn't it-- didn't feel like interview--

Alex Walker

It felt like a chat. Like a zoom--

Alex

Great. Friend hangout.

Alex Walker

Yeah.

Alex

Cool. Well, I'm super excited to have you here and I was wondering if we could start off if you could just give us a bit of context into who you are? Kind of what your sort of life story, I guess, per se has been.

Alex Walker

We've got a few hours.

Lisa

You're going to need it.

Alex Walker

So I guess the thing is, at least when I have been best friends for over 30 years. We've met as children. Our parents were drinking friends and friends from the pub industry with they both from pubs at the time. And we were just kind of thrown together as teenagers. Having never met and said, there you go, if you go make friends with each other, which was awkward anyway as a teenager, but more awkward because Lisa is quite socially or sorry Lisa was socially awkward. Lisa was quite socially awkward. Not anymore. She's an amazing sober baby now. But yeah, it was quite socially awkward. It had social anxiety. And looking back, I think we both had a bit of that. Yeah, we were thrown together. We had a pretty much what we considered normal teenage friendship. It was very close very quickly, wasn't it Lis?

Lisa

Yeah, definitely. And I think the drinking started pretty much as soon as we met.

Alex Walker

Yeah.

Lisa

I think because we were thrown together through them kind of circumstances it was just so normal to was drinking was absolutely normal. It's what everybody did that we knew. So when we met through our parents drinking. It was just kind of an obvious thing that we would eventually do together anyway. Experimenting as teenagers meant that we have been drunk together a lot.

Alex Walker

A heck of a lot. Yeah. We kind of started smoking together. Drink together. We kind of discovered boys around the same time. And so, yeah, it was normal for girls like Lisa said. I don't think they knew anyone that was fully sober because our parents worked in pubs. Well, it's in an owned pub. So everybody we ever spoke to was probably quite drunk. So it didn't seem abnormal for us to join in at all. But we had to join in secret because we would have been absolutely so much trouble if our parents had found out.

Lisa

Well. You're saying that. My parents actually told me, they said if I was going to drink, then I should do it properly.

Alex Walker

Yeah.

Lisa

So from a really early age. I was like 40 and I got dropped off at home and with another friend. And like, got told how to walk into it. How to to confidently ask for a drink. So I didn't ask for. I know, I'm not. I could see your face like, wow, that was so normal. Good to me as a teenager. I remember going in thinking. Right? I'll ask for a half lager like going two halves lager please. I've practiced and practiced and then sat down and had like conversations pretending that we had our own house and stuff. You know, I sat at the table as if we was older. So I think even looking back, drinking was normal to my parents as well. So I didn't see that as wrong because they saw it as teaching me how to do it in a sensible way.

Alex Walker

Well I can say it didn't work. So, yeah. I mean, similarly, I suppose I was allowed to have red wine with a meal. And if you're going to drink, drink in the house. I think the kind of drinking that we did that was like bottles. They had something called white light inside of an-- oh yeah. And Thunderbirds blue. And it was just the most disgusting. It was disgusting anyway. The taste of alcohol when you first try, it takes you, makes you 'ehh', doesn't it? But this was really disgusting. This was like petrol. And so we became really good at being allowed to socialize in and being confident and thinking we could dance and all of those things. By the time we were 18, we were really experts at it. Complete experts at it. And then kind of life goes on. And we got married not to each other. We got married. And--

Lisa

People often think that the--

Alex Walker

I would say-- It happens a lot.

Lisa

We got asked we was at an event the other week. One of the "Bee Sober" events. As we sat there, one of the girls that came she was like swear you to a couple. And were like. "Oh, no."

Alex Walker

As much as we have our domestic and as much as we plot each other's lives and shopping lists. No were not.

Lisa

Friends.

Alex Walker

But yeah, we kind of we got married. We had children. We move separately. And then we were finally settled in our lives. So our drinking then would be kind of, you know, the kids in bed, few bottles of wine at night. And it would be normal, separate lives going on. And I guess really for me and I think for Lisa as well, the turning point for both of us was in a very late 20s, early 30s. Where we kind of the children were old enough to get babysitters. Both of our marriages were on the rocks at the same time. And we kind of took off exactly where we left off with a vengeance. And we partied really hard all the way through our breakups.

Alex

Wow.

Alex Walker

And I don't remember the first five years of my 30s really. And that's genuine. It's like a bit of a blur of drinking and going out and partying and then being a mom in the week, working and living this kind of double life, you know.

Alex

Right.

Alex Walker

And you were the same. Weren't you Lisa, with your double life?

Lisa

Yeah. It's giving me anxiety, thinking about it. I actually-- honestly. It really, really is. Because like how they said, when like, I had my first car when I was 19. So drinking pretty much stopped for me then. I just became a moment was all I ever wanted to do. When I was growing up, I wanted a family and children. And so I was just in my element of like living this family life. So then at 30, when that kind of ended. It shocks me to the core of my colleagues has just went right back to before I took my daughter and thought I was 18 again which was wild.

Alex Walker

And so it went for about ten years.

Lisa

Yeah.

Alex

Wow.

Alex Walker

And I think this not-- there's not much kind of high and low in there. That was various dramas in our own lives. We both got remarried. We-- I had another baby. So I had a baby quite late at 37.

Lisa

We just pop in. I actually-- we married an alcoholic. I met him--

Alex Walker

That's not a big point.

Lisa

Because I was kind a-- and become single and the week is when the kids were where the dads that I saw that was my free time and I felt like I deserve this free time and I deserved my friends and get drunk. And I ended up kind of meeting my second husband in a poverty situation.

Alex

Right.