Exclusive Interview With Author "Stephanie Peirolo"

Stephanie Peirolo is a board-certified executive coach and writer. She is an Associate of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, a community of Catholic Sisters who work for peace through justice. She has a BA from Stanford University in Creative Writing and an MA in Transformational Leadership from Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry.

Her new book, The Saint and the Drunk: A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life, asks the question: “What if we could build an internal compass for our lives that provides direction at every turning point?” The insight in its pages will show readers how to develop a practice of intentional decision making.

Stephanie sat down with Writer’s Life, here’s what she shared with us.

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Tell us a bit about your background and career. 

I started out as a journalist, but as a single mother of two, I decided a sales career offered more financial stability as well as the flexibility to make it to my kids’ soccer games. I worked in various business development roles in technology and advertising and experienced quite a bit of sexism and sexual harassment, so I went to grad school in my forties to learn about organizational development and became a consultant and executive coach to help people be better bosses. I’m an alcoholic, and I got sober in my twenties and developed a spiritual practice that built upon my Italian-American Catholic upbringing and interest in the Catholic mystics. 

As a writer, I focused on fiction. But when I was invited to tell the story of my teenaged son’s accident and death at the Moth Mainstage I realized that a true story has a different impact, and I started writing short non-fiction. 

Tell us about your upcoming book, The Saint and the Drunk: A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life.

The book shows how to build a practice of intentional decision making that can serve as a compass for the rest of your life. 

Using the ancient spiritual tools of St. Ignatius of Loyola through the lens of the 12 Step "Higher Power" concept, this book is for anyone who wants to discover or reconnect to their authentic calling by developing a practice of discernment. Exercises and writing prompts help identify cultural and familial narratives that can support or limit, clarify values and dreams, demonstrate how to honor resistance and deal with the impact of grief and trauma on decision making. It’s a kind of workbook. 

Since the whole point of this book is to help people tune into their own inner wisdom, I invite them to listen to their intuition about which parts to read and which to skip, and how to follow the Jesuit recommendation to “rest where you find fruit.” You are the expert on you, you already have access to something greater, my hope is that this book will help you clear out anything that blocks you from tapping into that wisdom. 

What was your impetus for writing your book?

Many of my executive coaching clients were facing turning points in their lives and their careers. Some of them were values-based leaders looking for a way of making decisions that took their ethics and intentions into consideration. 

I wanted to tell them about the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which I went through in my thirties in a process that lasted almost a year. Ignatius came up with a spiritual practice called discernment that is meant to help us decide what kind of work we are meant to do in the world. But I didn’t feel comfortable using the very specifically Catholic Bible-based approach of the traditional Exercises with clients who were spiritual but not religious, atheist or agnostic. 

Then I thought of the 12 Step idea of a Higher Power. Alcoholics Anonymous started out as a Christian organization, but early members who were agnostic or atheist got the phrase “Higher Power” adopted. Basically, the Higher Power concept invites each individual to choose their own understanding of something greater. It could be the Divine by any name, nature, ancestors, our higher self, a collective unconscious. Each person gets to decide what works for them, and there is no authority saying what is or isn’t a valid Higher Power. Atheists and agnostics can have effective spiritual experiences which help them get and stay sober. 

When I took the message of the Saint, Ignatius of Loyola, and used the filter of the Higher Power as described by Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA, I found that the practice of discernment was available to anyone, regardless of their beliefs. I used it with my clients, family and friends and they found it to be helpful. 

Finally, two young friends, both women in their early twenties, said this content was especially useful to them. They are both artists who have day jobs, and are looking for new models of work that are different than what they saw their parents and older siblings do. They were hungry for tools to craft their own authentic, intentional way of working, and I love the idea of helping this younger generation. 

What are the messages you want readers to take away from reading your work?

The intellect is only one tool for making decisions, and not always the best one. Our culture is so focused on pros and cons, reason, logic, experienced advice from “experts”, that we ignore other ways of making decisions. The genius of the body, the importance of both attraction and aversion, the power of the imagination and intuition are all important channels for understanding that are available to us. 

There is no gate to God. Everyone can have a personal connection to the divine. Many people have been told they don’t belong in a religious tradition, or they must believe certain things to be in community. Or they’ve been told that their yearning for something larger, that kind of spiritual homesickness, is foolish or childish. It’s not. Often that restless craving is our Higher Power’s way of getting our attention. 

The stories we tell ourselves matter. One section of the book goes through nine cultural narratives that can hinder or support us as we make decisions, examining stories about who gets to have money or who gets to quit something and why. Each chapter invites us to unpack a theme with examples, stories and prompts for reflection and journalling. Think you can’t move across country to take your dream job because you must take care of an aging parent? What family stories are at play there and are they still valid? The answers may be different for an only child raised by a single mom as opposed to a woman with four brothers who live nearby but think it’s her job to take care of Dad because she’s a woman. 

What would you tell someone who is struggling with finding a higher power?

Not to worry. The higher power exists, just like daylight. You may not be able to see it through the window right now but it’s there. You might need to clear off the metaphorical window, remove old curtains and clean the glass. Emotional weather may block the full sun. But it is there. You don’t need to understand it intellectually. I don’t understand how gravity works, but it still keeps me attached to the ground. Often, helping others and trying to be of service to the world can lead us to finding a higher power, almost accidentally. 

How do you personally define spirituality?

Spirituality for me is anything that has to do with the sacred, the numinous. Ideally, it calls me to help others, to grow in maturity and compassion. The religious scholar Karen Armstrong talks about a talent for spirituality, and I like that idea, that some of us have a talent for it. Only unlike talents like math or sports, it isn’t always recognized or named in our culture, so we don’t know we have that ability. It’s like the person who can read a musical score and hear a symphony in their head who realizes as an adult that not everyone has that ability. 

You're an associate of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace - tell us about that.

The Sisters of St Joseph of Peace is a community of Catholic nuns in the US and UK whose charism, or work in the world, is peace through justice. Many religious communities accept lay people who are drawn to their charism and culture. They are called associates or sometimes oblates. We like the term nun-adjacent. After my son died, I was isolated and yearning for community and I found this wonderful group of nuns, many of whom are in their 80s and 90s. I felt connected to them. After a two-year discernment process, I became an associate in 2018. While the nuns take vows, associates make “covenants” or commitments about how we are going to work for peace through justice. These women have revolutionized my understanding of aging, non-violence and radical hospitality, while showing me the support loving community can offer. They suggested I write this book, helped financially and gave me space to write. I would write all morning in a beautiful office looking over Lake Washington, then go down and have lunch with the nuns and be restored.

Your book draws from Bill Wilson's concepts of the 12 steps in Alcoholics Anonymous. How will this relate to those who don't struggle with addiction?

As an active alcoholic, I had to change. I had to learn how to go from being a blackout drunk who couldn’t go a day without drinking to living life sober. That was hard. But any transformation is difficult. Ignatius went from being a mercenary to becoming a priest, going to seminary with men who were a decade younger than he was. He made all sorts of mistakes along the way. And then he wrote down what he did so others could try it as well. 

Many of us want to transform our lives even though we might not be addicts or alcoholics. We get to a point where we want to live, be or make something different. Change is hard, especially when people around you don’t want you to change. Ignatius talks about “inordinate attachments”” which can refer, of course, to addictions, but it can also refer to work, social media usage, even narratives about who we are allowed to be or what we are allowed to do. Many of us have inordinate attachments we want to let go of that stubbornly persist and this books offers powerful tools for change. 

What are you working on now and what can we expect from you next?

I have a newsletter, The Consigliera Papers, on Substack, that covers topics like work, grief and big feelings. It’s free, and I’ve been doing it for two and a half years. I also do a podcast called the Bad Boss Brief with my old friend Eugene S. Robinson. For my next book I’m interested in writing about grief and the Dark Night of the Soul.

Where can people find out more about you and your work?

I’m on social media in many of the usual places @speirolo and at www.speirolo.com.