As a program focused on decentering work mentally and emotionally, you may wonder why we're applying a recovery lens.

It's true that 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous are focused on supporting people with an addiction to substances. But the program also teaches that substance abuse is a symptom of larger problems and treats them. These include:

• A mental obsession

• Avoidance of discomfort, particularly fear, resentment, and guilt/shame

• Restlessness, irritability, and discontent

• A need for control

• Thinking in terms of "me" instead of "we" (for example, the "I have to figure this out myself" mindset)

These are not limited to alcoholics or drug addicts. In fact, I believe they are rational responses to conditioning and to our broken social, political, and economic systems.

As I went through my own recovery journey, I applied recovery tools and principles to both alcohol and work.

Those same tools inspired this coaching program, but are adapted to remove the dogma and paired with systems thinking.

*The Recovering Human is not endorsed by or affiliated with Alcoholics Anonymous or any other 12-step program.

Recovery is one half of this work. Systems thinking is the other.

Most of us are taught to explain our lives one person at a time: I'm behind because I didn't try hard enough, my manager is impossible because he's an impossible person, I can't get ahead because I'm bad with money. Systems thinking is the practice of stepping back and asking a different question. What are the structures, incentives, and histories that make this outcome so common for so many people? When you look, you often find that what you've carried as personal failure is actually a predictable result of the system you're standing in: the way work is organized, the way the economy hands out security and risk, the stories we've all absorbed about what a worthy life requires.

That shift does two things. First, it's a relief, because you stop spending your energy blaming yourself for a problem you didn't design. Second, it's where change becomes possible. Once you can see the structure, you can start to find the places where it actually gives (what change-makers call leverage points) instead of exhausting yourself pushing on the parts that don't move.

In this program, systems thinking is woven into the personal work rather than bolted on. We start close to home, mapping your own world and looking at your patterns for their systemic causes and not just the personal ones, then build outward toward how larger systems work and where they can be changed. Recovery gives you the steadiness to stay with hard truths. Systems thinking gives you somewhere to aim once you can.

No. This work isn't about quitting, downshifting, or walking away from the income your life depends on, unless that's what you choose. Most of the people I work with are the breadwinners in their households. Leaving isn't always on the table, and I'm not asking anyone to put their security at risk.

When I say "decenter work," I mean mentally and emotionally: taking work out of the center of your identity and your inner life, not off your calendar. The job can stay exactly where it is. What changes is your relationship to it, and what you get back is the invisible second shift that work runs in your head long after you've logged off. The after-hours rumination, the replaying of conversations, the constant proving, the Sunday-night dread, and coping with it all. That interior life is what we reclaim.

The reason that matters is what becomes possible with the time and energy you get back. This program is for people who want to be part of building something better for society but feel too stretched and depleted to begin. Once work is no longer quietly consuming your whole inner life, that reclaimed capacity can go toward what you actually care about: building community, and imagining and creating real alternatives to the systems wearing us all down.

Staying in your job can be part of how that happens. Change from within is possible and important, just not in the way we've been taught. Leaning in, playing by the rules, and waiting for permission to fix things hasn't worked, and too often it just turned us into a comfortable part of what we hoped to change. The different way starts from steadier ground: clearer about your values, and the system you are working within.

You don't have to know exactly what you'll build or change yet. That is part of what we work out together.

Yes. I believe that evolving our relationship with work and reforming our global economy is key to individual and collective liberation. Civil Rights leaders and activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Grace Lee Boggs believed the same. Still, in mainstream narratives, the social and political are often separated from a huge driver of oppression like white supremacy and misogyny: economics. This has led to a lot of efforts being incomplete and unsustainable, because it ignores a root cause of many of these issues.

In the U.S., capitalism and corporate interests influence all of our systems, from education to our elected officials. The consequences are human and need to be addressed. But many of us are stuck in survival mode due to the pressures and demands of systems driven by profit. To drive real change, we have to pull ourselves out of survival mode and leverage systems knowledge to act strategically.

No. I'm a certified coach, not a licensed therapist, and nothing offered here is therapy, counseling, addiction treatment, or medical care.

Coaching is future-focused work. It supports clarity, growth, and the practices that move you from where you are to where you want to go. Therapy is different. It treats mental health conditions and processes past trauma, work that requires clinical training I don't have.

To be clear about who this is for: feeling the weight of all this (exhausted, stretched thin, quietly disillusioned) is exactly what this work is for. That isn't a clinical condition. It's a sane response to a lot, and you belong here. What this isn't is treatment for something in crisis. If you're dealing with active addiction, an acute mental health concern, or significant past trauma, please seek the support of a qualified mental health professional. My own recovery has included therapy and medication right alongside the practices I teach. That pairing is normal, and I recommend it.

The work here is one set of tools, not a complete solution, and it works best next to other forms of support.