What Happens on the Free 15 Minute Call, Exactly

Most people spend three or four days deciding to click the link, then spend the first two minutes of the call apologizing for wasting my time. So here’s the whole fifteen minutes, written out, so there’s nothing left to be nervous about.

One thing before the rest of it. If you shake in the morning, sweat through the sheets, feel sick until the first drink, or have ever had a fit when you cut down, you don’t need this call first, you need a doctor. Alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures and it can kill you, and it’s treatable. Book the doctor, then book me if you still want to.

How do you book it?

You pick a slot on a calendar page and you get a link back. That’s the whole process. No card details, no intake form, no questionnaire about your childhood. Your first name and an email address for the calendar invite.

Video or voice, whichever you want. I’m in Bali, so the times you’ll see are the ones that work across Europe, the Americas and Asia, which mostly means my early mornings and my evenings.

Book it for a time when you can speak freely. That’s the only real requirement.

What happens in the first minute?

I say who I am and what I’m not.

I’m a peer coach. I’ve been sober ten years. I’m not a doctor, a therapist, a psychologist or a counselor, and I can’t diagnose you with anything. Then I stop talking and ask you to.

You don’t need to open with a summary. Most people have rehearsed one and it comes apart after about forty seconds, which is fine, and usually the moment the call starts being useful.

What do I actually ask?

Four things, roughly in this order.

What does a normal week look like? Not your worst week. A normal one. Monday to Sunday, what you actually drink and when. The shape matters more than the total.

What made you book, this week? Something happened. It’s almost never the drinking itself. It’s a look somebody gave you, a morning you can’t account for, a photo, a line on a bank statement, a question from a kid.

What have you already tried? Dry January, the two-drink rule, only at weekends, only beer, nothing before seven. Everybody has a list. The list tells me more than the amount does.

How are your mornings? That one isn’t curiosity. It’s the safety question and I ask everyone.

Do you have to call yourself anything?

No. You never have to use a word about yourself that you don’t believe, on this call or any other one. I’m not going to hand you a label and I’m not waiting for you to volunteer one.

Plenty of the people who book have never said any of this out loud to a single person. If the first sentence takes you a minute to get out, that’s normal and I’ll wait.

Do you have to want to stop?

No. A lot of people book while still hoping the answer is cutting down.

I’m not going to pretend I have no opinion, but the call isn’t a recruitment interview and you don’t have to arrive with a decision already made. The deciding is usually the real work, and it takes most people months.

If you’d rather run the same questions without a person on the other end first, the honest check is twelve questions, three minutes, private, and there’s no email box at the end.

What if you go blank, or cry, or can’t get it out?

Then we sit there for a bit and it’s fine. It happens often enough that it isn’t a thing.

Nobody has ever embarrassed themselves on one of these calls, largely because there’s nothing available to be embarrassed about that I haven’t done a worse version of.

Do I sell you something at the end?

There’s no pitch on the call. Here’s what actually happens in the last two minutes. I say one of three things.

1. I think I can help. Here’s roughly what a first month would look like for you. The prices are all on the site, go and read them when you’re not on a call with me.
2. Go and see a doctor first. Come back afterwards if you still want to.
3. I don’t think I’m the right person for this, and here’s what I’d do instead.

The third one happens maybe one call in five. Sometimes it’s because somebody needs a therapist rather than a coach. Sometimes because AA is genuinely the better fit and it’s free. Sometimes because what they’re describing isn’t really about drinking at all.

Nobody chases you afterwards. There’s no email sequence, no follow up call, no message asking whether you had any more thoughts. If you want to book something, you’ll book it.

What if you’ve had a drink before we talk?

Tell me, and we’ll still talk. I won’t lecture you about it, and I’ve had plenty of these conversations with people who had a couple in them.

What I’ll probably suggest is a second one in your morning, because you won’t remember much of this one, and the morning version is the one that’s actually about you.

Can somebody else book it for you?

A partner can book it and a lot of them do, and I’ll take that call. What I won’t do is take it without you knowing about it, and I won’t report back to whoever booked it afterwards. If somebody set this up for you and you’re only on it to keep the peace at home, say that in the first minute. It’s a completely normal reason to be sitting there and it doesn’t waste the fifteen minutes. It’s usually a more honest starting point than the version where you claim it was your idea.

If you’re the partner and you’re reading this to work out whether to send it, send the link and then leave it alone. The booking has to be his.

Is it confidential?

I don’t discuss the people I work with, I don’t publish testimonials, and there are no client names anywhere on this site. What I keep is a few lines of notes so I’m not asking you the same thing twice in a month.

Be clear about what that is and isn’t. I’m a coach, not a doctor, so this isn’t medical confidentiality with a legal structure behind it. It’s one person who doesn’t talk about people. If you want the version with legal weight around it, that’s a licensed therapist, and it’s a good reason to pick one.

Why is it free?

Two reasons, and one of them is self-interested.

The honest one: the alternative is a sales call, and I’ve sat through those from the other side. Fifteen free minutes means you can find out I’m no use to you at no cost, and I can find out the same thing.

The self-interested one: I can’t advertise. Google and Meta ban recovery advertising from anyone without LegitScript certification, and I don’t hold it. I can’t buy my way in front of you at any price. All I have is writing worth reading and a call worth taking, and if either of them is bad then I have nothing.

What the fifteen minutes is really for

It isn’t a commitment to stop drinking, or to buy anything, or to be a different person by Monday.

The worst thing that can happen is that you say the whole of it out loud to a stranger once, and then go back to exactly what you were doing. Almost nobody has ever done even that.