Dana Piscopo is a whole-self sobriety coach working with people who are sober-curious or coming out of treatment, and everyone in between. She helps clients looking to get their lives back on track and recover their moxie. She describes “moxie” as the little kid in you that’s free to dream uninhibitedly. “Some of us misplace it and some of us didn’t even know we had it,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to help people find: that innate spark within themselves.”

While working in sales operations at a large corporation, Piscopo was building a health coaching business on the side. However, she didn’t feel in alignment with her work as a health coach because of her own issues with alcohol. It wasn’t until she started her own recovery and finishing a recovery coaching certification program that she founded Color Your Life LLC to help others on their journeys.

Her own experiences with addiction and recovery have helped her relate to her clients. “I don’t know exactly what people are going through, but I can understand the space that they’re in and the struggles,” says Piscopo. She says realizing her own self-worth and what she had to offer started an “inferno” inside her that prompted her to start her whole-self sobriety coaching practice. “When you’re not drinking any more or abusing some sort of substance to numb, you’ve got to work on yourself and on those feelings. And when you do that, you find yourself,” she says.

Piscopo says she talks about her addiction so openly because she wants people to know that they’re not alone. “We’re just normal people. And we need help and support like everybody else when we’re not feeling a hundred percent,” she says. Women experienced increased rates of alcoholism during the pandemic, and she feels we need to release the shame and stigma surrounding addiction. She says messages equating breaks and self-care with alcohol can be a slippery slope for some people.

Piscopo works one on one with clients as well as in group sessions at corporations. While she gets a lot of engagement from her group clients, the response with one-on-one clients can be mixed. “Some people are ready to do the work and some aren’t,” she says. Overall, she has sensed that people really appreciate having a space where they can talk about things they may not be able to talk about anywhere else.

As a corporate employee herself, Piscopo acknowledges that corporations have a ways to go in supporting their employees through addiction. That’s why she’s starting a sobriety awareness program at her organization, with a weekly support group for employees, whether they’re sober, curious, or in recovery. As corporations begin to talk about mental health and well-being, she believes addiction and sobriety have to be part of the conversation.

Piscopo’s “Reclaiming Your Moxie” framework starts with evaluating where her clients are now in their journeys with addiction and deciding where they want to go. Then they identify priorities and create a list of the top three things they want to work on during their coaching. After that, she creates an X-factor plan to help them reclaim their moxie. Lastly, they implement tools and techniques to ensure that they can work through triggers and challenges. Tips she often recommends to her clients are to build time for themselves, utilize their support systems, and create boundaries. She says, “I want people to know that there are a lot of us out there going through the same thing and we’re all here to support one another.”