How I keep a Business and a Busy Life Growing When My Health and Energy Are Unpredictable

This used to be hard to admit, but I run two businesses, chair a board while sitting on a few others, and I do it with multiple autoimmune conditions.

A lot of it traces back to years of living in chronic stress, in a near-constant fight, flight, and fawn response and that amount of stress. After Long-COVID hit in 2021, my mental clarity changed in ways I'm still working with.

I'm sharing this because invisible chronic illnesses like burnout, fibromyalgia, long-covid, Lyme, etc look and feel different for everyone, and almost nobody talks about what it actually takes to keep something like a career or business running when your baseline is inconsistently moving.

If you know the spoons theory, it’s that you wake up with so many finite spoons of energy per day, and it can change from day to day. If I catch a cold or covid, it can take me 3+ weeks to get back to anything like reasonable executive functioning.

I still had big job offers in Tech coming my way in 2021 and 2022, but I actively made a choice to start working for myself because I knew I needed to build something that could work with my body instead of against it, which is the opposite of how my entire career in tech was set up.

Anyone who knew my work ethic back then watched me pull 80-hour+ weeks to make sure an SDK got the proper review so developers who depended on it could trust it, or a slide deck was ready for leadership during our quarterly business review.

When I realized that I could no longer operate in a system that was never built for someone like me to exist in it - I knew I needed to build something that didn't depend on me overriding my body to keep it alive.

Which leaves the real question, "How do you keep something moving forward when your energy, your brain capacity, your drive, and even your belief in yourself are all shifting underneath you?" Well, you figure out your minimums.

I borrow the focusing question from Gary Keller's The One Thing and make it smaller and more honest for a low day.

What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it, the business still moves today, even if I can't do much else?

Client outreach and delivery are the priority, but they're not the only priority, because if I only ever serve the clients in front of me, I stop growing the list of people who might become clients, and that catches up with you.

So I built my 3-2-1 method. This works for anyone who has varying energy, is dealing with burnout - or has a lot to contend with outside of work.

On a hard day, I ask myself what are the three people or messages I need to respond to? The two things I need to move forward for current clients? And the one prospective client to follow up with or one new lead to reach out to?

I can run the whole thing in about 15 minutes, or stretch it across the chunks of the day when I have something to give, which means the business keeps inching forward even when I don't have a full day in me.

You might be wondering about social media. On a day like that, I repost or repurpose old content, and let it do its work (or if I've worked ahead that month, it's already scheduled).

Revenue-generating actions are my highest priority on low-capacity days, but they're still not my only priority, because if all you ever do is deliver and you never feed the top of your funnel. Then you wake up one day with no prospects waiting and you're in the feast-or-famine cycle that wrecks most solo businesses. For a job - ask yourself the "one thing" question, that's where to focus your energy first.

You can adapt this for any career or business when the hours and energy are scarce.

I'll be honest, I still over-apologize sometimes for taking a while to get back to people.

What's helped more than the apology is setting the expectation up front. In networking and intro conversations I tell people I block two half-days a month to crank through the email introductions that come out of those conversations, since every good meeting tends to produce two or three intros worth making, it allows me to actually follow up on them.

If you're reading this because you're eyeing the exit from corporate and are thinking about starting something of your own, want to look for a different role, or because your body has started sending you signals and issues from years of sustained stress but don't even have the capacity to make any real progress or decisions that's the part I help people figure out.

We reduce the overwhelm, regulate your system, increase your leadership capacity, help you communicate the value of your experience, and build a roadmap towards success that honors your energy and your ambition.

If any of this is landing, my application for a free career coaching call is open: a short form about where you are and what's getting in the way, and if it's a fit, we'll connect for a 30-minute call. https://www.2122coaching.com/coaching-application