What Coaches and Mentors Can Learn from Blackout
Coaching and mentoring rest on a specific kind of trust: someone believes you are steady enough, and honest enough with yourself, to help them see something clearly. Sarah Hepola's memoir Blackout is about a long stretch of years when she could not always be honest with herself about her own drinking, even while she was capable, articulate, and successful by most outside measures. She was not writing about mentorship, but her account of the gap between how put-together she appeared and how unmoored she actually felt is exactly the kind of gap a good mentor helps other people close.
That makes Blackout worth reading for anyone who guides others: not because coaches drink more or less than anyone else, but because the work depends on a self-honesty that alcohol can quietly erode long before it becomes obvious to the people watching.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
What a blackout actually is
Hepola describes blackout drinking as distinct from ordinary drunkenness: a person can keep functioning, talking, even offering advice, while no new memories are being formed at all. She argues this is more common and more serious than a "rough night" framing suggests. For a coach, that means guidance given to a client or colleague during a blacked-out evening might not exist in your own memory the way it existed for them.
When a mentor cannot recall specific advice or a commitment made during an evening involving drinking, and must trust someone else's account of it.
Notice a foggy morning after a client dinner as information worth sitting with honestly, not something to wave away.
The wisdom you perform versus the wisdom you have
Hepola writes about using alcohol to quiet self-doubt and appear more assured than she felt, mistaking that quiet for real insight. Coaching rewards exactly that kind of calm authority, which can make a drink feel like it sharpens the wisdom a session requires, rather than just numbing the doubt underneath it.
When a coach believes their best insight only surfaces with a drink involved, rather than trusting the insight built from real experience.
Before a session that feels demanding, name the specific self-doubt underneath it rather than reaching for something to blunt it.
Rebuilding trust in your own steadiness
Hepola describes facing ordinary life sober as disorienting at first, arguing real self-trust rebuilds slowly, through the evidence of showing up sober again and again, not one insight. For a mentor, that mirrors what good guidance is actually built from: consistent presence, not one brilliant session.
When a mentor assumes their calm, wise presence depends on something other than their own accumulated experience.
After a session you handled well sober, note it as real evidence your steadiness holds up without help.
A pattern Hepola names, not a verdict on coaches
Hepola argues that women's heavy drinking is often publicly framed as confident and empowered in a way that can delay recognizing a real problem, a pattern she experienced in her own career. This is her observation about one cultural current, not a claim about all women, and mentors of any gender face pressure to appear unshakably composed in ways that can hide a private struggle just as easily.
For a coach, the expectation of steady, wise composure can conflict with honestly noticing a pattern worth questioning, and the private work of rebuilding self-trust rarely fits into a role built around always having something useful to offer someone else.
Name one thing, honestly
- Can you clearly recall the advice or commitments you gave during your last client dinner or retreat? - Who mentors you, and when did you last let them see an honest struggle of your own? - What would change about your practice if every session were guaranteed to be remembered clearly the next day?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
After a session you handled well sober, note it as real evidence your steadiness holds up without help.