Sue (my client, name and details changed) was having a bad time in a crohn's disease "flare".  For the first time, she couldn't get to work reliably.  Luckily,  she had a job that could be done "virtually" and company policy allowed this.   After a a few weeks of struggling to get to the office, she told her boss about her health problems and switched to working at home 4 out of 5 days each week.  Her boss sent out an email saying she wasn't feeling well and would be back in the office when she was better.

After a few months,  the "flare" calmed down  and Sue returned to her regular office schedule.  She wasn't worried.  Her work output had stayed the same and her lack of physical presence hadn't made any  difference in team performance.

But the people on her team had changed dramatically.  Back in the office, she felt cut off and isolated from everyone.  She'd never felt like an 'outcast' before and now she felt stuck and even paranoid.

Instead of feeling relieved to be back in the office, Sue was increasingly worried that she'd get sick  and need to work at home again.   For the first time in her career, she felt unmotivated and resentful at work.

She sought out her closest friend on the team, Dave, to see if she could learn what was really going on.

Dave told her.  He said that before she went "virtual",  she'd been tense and withdrawn for weeks, sometimes making mistakes but never acknowledging it. Then one day she stopped showing up, without an explanation from her.  Dave said that when she came into the office each week, she seemed preoccupied and even a little angry.   They knew she was sick but they resented her.  She was getting the "special treatment" by working at home but she was still being difficult with them.  When she finally returned,  people were angry that she hadn't bothered to explain what had happened.  And she didn't seem to notice that she had been acting differently.

Sue felt relieved to know all this.  But she was deeply angry and hurt because she didn't think she should have to explain herself.  She felt her health was a private matter and they should understand that.

What do you think?

(For my thoughts on talking about illness, check out my Career Thrive Guidebook series).

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Since becoming chronically ill over 30 years ago, I've held  the idea that wishing for better health wasn't a good place to go.  It seemed like a slippery slope that could land me face down in the self-pity mud.  Instead, I've put my energy toward using distraction to keep me out of the pit and acceptance to create balance.  Lovely when it works.

According to family lore, my first words were "more".  I was always in a state of wanting.  If and when I'd get "it", I'd be onto the next thing.  If I didn't get it, I mourned big time, drama queen that I was. In 3rd grade, it was a blue, straw purse with a plastic yellow flower. It was class secretary in junior high school and the cheer leading squad in high school.   I remember each event clearly, which is more than I can say for the things I wished for and got!

This wouldn't seem to indicate that I'd manage well when faced with real loss, my health. But at age 29,  blind in one eye and unable to get out of bed (diagnosis: multiple sclerosis),  I experienced a different me.  I accepted disease without a struggle.  I didn't find myself wishing it weren't so.

For several years, I'd been doing Vipassana meditation several hours daily, working hard to "let go".  According to new research, meditating can change your brain.   Hard to say if that was what did it for me.  But clearly a major shift  in my approach to life was occurring.

Of course, I'm human and I've had my times of envy, anger, guilt, fear and loneliness over the years.  Yet, I've always been able to talk myself back from that space.  Maybe it took my body's dis-integration to allow me to integrate all the parts of who I was more fully.  I could put my mind on what I had rather than what I didn't.  Over the years, I became very ill and then, fortunately, much better.

But a bad fall last August set off new chronic pain.  A few weeks later, I happened to develop a new chronic condition in my eye.  It became harder to maintain my balance and resilience.  Distraction and acceptance, my go-to places, weren't working as they had.  I  sensed my deep frustration that I was healing so slowly, anger that new health issues were cropping up and deep disappointment that I couldn't get back to the health baseline I'd finally achieved.

Then a few weeks ago, while  "Focusing" (a practice I'm trained in and do weekly with a partner), I noticed something.  I sensed a wishing and it felt good.   "I wish I could do ..."    felt very different from wishing that things were different. It felt expansive and freeing.

So I thought I'd share my list of " some of the things I wish I could do" with you.  I wish I could:

• dance at parties without worry that I'll fall,
• take a jazz dance class and have my feet move as they should,
• exercise  hard enough I could sweat,
• ski, golf and snow shoe,
• cook for more than an hour at a time without needing a rest,
• garden on a hot summer day,
• walk more than two miles,
• carry babies without pain.

Do you have a "wish I could" list?  Try it out.

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Building on her experience living with chronic illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, Rosalind Joffe founded the executive career coaching practice, cicoach.com. Dedicated to helping others with chronic illness develop the skills they need to succeed in their careers, Rosalind firmly believes that living with chronic illness does not preclude living a full and successful life.

Does this sound like you? Living with chronic illness and thinking about changing your career.  But haven't a clue how or where to start.

Then my article,  "Career planning when you live with chronic illness",  is what you need to get started. ( No surprise here - I outline  a strategic approach.)  It's published  in this week's  Job-hunt.org, where I'm delighted to be a monthly columnist.

Maybe you're in a different spot. Maybe you're currently employed but  wondering if this is the time to bail out of the workforce.  Are you managing people, reading about Steve Jobs and thinking, "Hey, why can't I cut back the way he can?"  Vickie Elmer, columnist at glassdoor.com and The Washington Post, asked me my thoughts,  How to Know When Time Off Is a Good Thing".   As usual, I had a lot to say.

I wrote more on this subject in my own post, Keep Filling the Bank. You don't have to be a world class conductor to get the support you need but it helps to be liked and to add value!

All of this - - career strategy, when and how to talk about illness - - and more  in my career guidebook series, Career Thrive When You Live With Chronic Illness and my workbook, Keep Working With Chronic illness .  Check out these resources as well before you make any big moves.

Have you noticed how big chunks of time, weeks and even months, become a blur because of chronic illness?  It's easy to see how living with pain, severe fatigue or body parts that don't work is draining.  Even healthy people can understand that.

But there's another aspect of living this life that gets overlooked and that has just as high an impact.  I'm referring to the time that's eaten up by health care appointments, tests and  treatment.  Just like your bad health, time spent this way wears you down.  Worse,  it increases the sense that your life is out of control.

Last August, I fell.  Although I tried to limit the diagnostic tests and appointments,  doctor's appointments, X rays and MRI's became a necessity. Broken ribs, rotator cuff tears and a slightly fractured elbow.

These breaks created a lot of pain and  limited what I could do.  Diagnosis and treatment was  complicated -- and required more appointments and tests  -- because  my multiple sclerosis nervous system goes haywire with pain.

The next month, increasing blurriness in my left eye was diagnosed as extraordinarily high pressure (glaucoma) with  Posner-Scholssman cornea syndrome.

I know this sounds like a lot.  But the funny thing is that looking back on the past four months, it was the time spent in diagnostic tests, medical appointments and treatments that really rocked my balance. 

I've developed mental tools that allow me to continue living my life when I have to integrate new body problems. But facing how little influence I had over time spent traveling, waiting and seeing doctors or taking tests would make me boil.  I had to block off an entire half day of work for a 15 minute medical appointment or risk missing client calls or other work commitments. Over the past four months, I've spent about 60 hours in doctors offices, having tests and getting treatment for just these two issues.

When I complained about this to my husband, he said,  "You couldn't possibly have a job with this schedule."  He didn't mean it to be a momentous statement but it really sank in.  What he meant to say is, "You wouldn't be able to do this if you had an employer."    And that's when I saw how my frustration must be so much greater for anyone who is employed.

I'm not trashing or blaming doctors or any one part of the health care system.  I don't have any ideas on how to improve this.

But we, patients, owe it to ourselves to recognize this aspect of living with illness.  The time spent managing our health places a greater burden on an already over-taxed situation.  We need to be aware of this because it impacts our relationships and our performance.  Just as much as our taxed bodies.

What about you?  How do you manage work and frequent health care appointments?  Do you collide with competing needs, find yourself stretching the truth or outright lying?   Have you given up altogether and quit?  These are all responses.  Which one is yours?

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Building on her experience living with chronic illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, Rosalind Joffe founded the executive career coaching practice, cicoach.com. Dedicated to helping others with chronic illness develop the skills they need to succeed in their careers, Rosalind firmly believes that living with chronic illness does not preclude living a full and successful life.

We have an expression in New England:  Don't like the weather?  Wait a minute and it'll change. As the number of New Years pile on in my life, I've seen how that wisdom applies to more than just the weather.   And that a wise person learns to stay flexible, resilient and prepared for the weather, bad job markets and chronic illness.

Speaking of employment, aren't we all feeling desperate for good news? Many pundits say that this horrible job market seems finally to be loosening.  I've seen it among my clients.  A physician told me last week that in the past month, she's gotten two phone calls due to networking she'd done over a year ago.  Another client who has been unemployed for more than two years has three interviews lined up in January for administrative assistant positions.  That's one more than she's had in the last 6 months!

Some say it's only the white collar jobs that are expanding.  Others say the opposite.  I'm no job market expert and my perspective comes from a small sample.   But a new year is a good time for optimism,  so let's consider what you can do while living with chronic illness and thinking about finding a job in 2011.  This stuff isn't based on any new information.

Nope -- it's just the basics that are always worth reviewing because they allow you to  be flexible, resilient and prepared.

1. Create  an "elevator" message - - a  few sentences about what kind of job you're looking for and where.  With this, you've got a clear and memorable message when your best friend's spouse or brother  (who happens to have awesome job connections) asks what you're looking for. With this you'll be prepared.
2. Review  your list of the chronic illness issues to think about when applying for that next job. Some examples might be scheduling needs, job redesign, disclosure.  For more on this see the Keep Working With Chronic Illness Workbook.  With this knowledge you can be more flexible in your decision making.
3. Dig deep  into your network and reconnect to see what you might shake loose. Start with your advocates and then reach out to your prospects.  For more details,   The Keep Working With Chronic Illness Workbook. With these actions, you will increase your ability to respond with resilience.

I didn't say anything here that I haven't written many times before.  Actually,  the most important lesson I've learned after all these new years is that we need to hear the same things many times to create real change in our selves.

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Building on her experience living with chronic illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, Rosalind Joffe founded the executive career coaching practice, cicoach.com. Dedicated to helping others with chronic illness develop the skills they need to succeed in their careers, Rosalind firmly believes that living with chronic illness does not preclude living a full and successful life.

Bullies are not news.  Nor is it news that children or adults get bullied.  But, of course, now that it looks like this behavior can lead to suicide, those in charge feel moved to legislate it.

Who are they kidding? Do they really think that's the way to change behavior?

Now I found this interesting:  According to European researchers,  " Kids with chronic illness, disability are more likely to be bullied".

Hmm.  I'm wondering what would provoke researchers to look at workplace bullying and chronic illness.

I can hear it now: Adults with chronic illness are more likely to be bullied by co-workers and bosses.  All bullies must be reported and those who are found guilty will be fired.

It doesn't take a PhD in psychology to understand why bullying happens. Two factors have to be present:

1. There's  no one around to stop the bully and he or she has free rein.
2. The person being bullied is vulnerable for one reason or another.

Let's look at the second reason. What can make you more vulnerable at work than living with chronic illness?

• No one can predict when they're going to get a cold or flu.  But if you live with chronic illness,  you know you're going to get sick frequently, for longer periods of time and often, in surprising ways.  That kind of unpredictability leads to feeling vulnerable and off balance.
• When you're not feeling physically or mentally healthy and strong,  you can easily feel dull witted and weaker than those around you.  Sometimes you actually are  -- though sometimes it's just how you feel.  This type of weakness increases a sense of vulnerability.
• Chronic illness - pain or fatigue symptoms - can consume your energy and your time, leaving you with little left over.  This makes it hard to get things done and others have to pick up the slack.  This leads you to feeling vulnerable to how others respond to you.

There have been times that I've felt like crying when I hear what some people endure to keep working -- to stay at a job.  I don't blame others for feeling resentful that chronic illness can mean that a person can't always be the top worker.  But when this is your story, when you're living with illness, you don't have to listen to the complaints, snide comments or unasked for advice.

And that brings me to point #1, why people bully.  Bullies are almost always vulnerable people themselves.  No matter how much you need your job, you don't have to put up with abuse.  Your challenge, should you be up to it,  is to not allow the bully to bully you.

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Building on her experience living with chronic illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, Rosalind Joffe founded the executive career coaching practice, cicoach.com. Dedicated to helping others with chronic illness develop the skills they need to succeed in their careers, Rosalind firmly believes that living with chronic illness does not preclude living a full and successful life.

Who would argue that exercise makes you healthier?  This seems obvious, especially if you live with chronic illness.  So, too, there aren't many who would say that smoking is not harmful  to your health (other than tobacco executives)?

Yet,  most smokers say that they've tried to stop but can't.  And I've heard many people tell me that they wish they exercised but they don't.  It seems to be just as hard to delete a bad habit as it is add a positive one into our life.

Why is this?  I have a hunch that most people have a hard time seeing how their actions impact what happens to them.

If you're wondering whether there's truth in the value of exercise,  there is solid research to support this:

• A recent study shows that Tai Chi can help the pain of Fibromyalgia
• Exercise has been shown to  reduce the risk of cancer.
• Regular exercise has been shown to decrease the effects of chronic illness.
• Exercise can improve mood and reduce depression.

Perhaps the barrier for you is finding the time to exercise, particularly if you hold a job .  And if chronic pain or fatigue wears you out,  it's easy to push everything  else aside.

Work Out While You Work" offers 10 ideas for exercising at your job.

You know the platitude:  where there's a will, there can be a way!  Have you been thinking about getting back to an exercise program?  Maybe for the past few months... or even the past year.    Why not start today?

And, if you've been successful in managing to work and exercise, what's worked for you?

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

A football game can teach us a lot about patience and small successes.  I'm  not a fan but family members are.  Watching a game recently, I saw a bunch of guys running around who looked like they didn't have a clue about what was going on.  But I was wrong.  They had a very clear idea of what they're doing.  And, more importantly, they knew what to do if things didn't turn out as they had planned.

What's even more interesting is that most of the time, football players are moving this ball, bit by bit, up a field only to find that someone gets in the way of their progress and the field changes completely!

I thought of this while working with a client who is getting in her own way, feeling depressed by looking for a job again now that her short term contract position is done.  She's unable to see what she has accomplished since she first tried to re-enter the workforce a few years ago.  She'd been a successful executive in a multi-national financial services firm before illness (severe chronic and life threatening asthma) led her to leave.

Going back to work meant reinventing herself on multiple levels.  Her former experience, resume and contacts weren't enough.

She learned to think about employment in new ways.   She had to identify what was possible  and how to go after it.  She learned to network rather than use job boards.  At age 55, she developed skills, knowledge and work experience in an arena she knew nothing about.

She has developed a rich and diverse network in a new field and increased her knowledge and experience through volunteer work.  Most importantly, she's learned what matters to her.  She'd rather keep testing her body,  as she said, to "live with fear", rather than choose not to leave her house. She's worked in jobs that have helped her see what she can do and learn more about her limits.

She has yet to reach her goal, a permanent, part-time job.  The economy is still lousy, her age doesn't help and she could use even more solid experience in her new field.  But these are just the Defense - the linebackers who can get in her way.   She has to think like Adrian Petersen, so she can keep moving the ball down the field.  That's how you reach the goal.

What keeps you moving toward your goals?  How is it going for you?

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Building on her experience living with chronic illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, Rosalind Joffe founded the executive career coaching practice, cicoach.com. Dedicated to helping others with chronic illness develop the skills they need to succeed in their careers, Rosalind firmly believes that living with chronic illness does not preclude living a full and successful life.

During  a  "check-in" with a client about his coaching engagement,  he told me things were going well after 3 months.  He described changes and how my coaching was helping.

But then he said that this wasn't what he'd expected.  "When we started, I assumed that within a few months, you'd do several career assessments, suggest a career path and give me a plan of action."

Delighted to hear honest feedback,  I didn't share my surprise.   We'd agreed on specific outcomes for the engagement based on his self-assessment and a conversation and I had written in a memo to him.   Nothing I'd said or written indicated that I'd suggest career paths and give him a plan.

His expectation --  that someone else would figure out what he needs and how to get there --   seems fairly typical of how most people choose a job or create a career path.

If this has been your approach, how is it going?  Do you think you're taking charge of your life?

By the time I turned 40, I'd held 6  jobs in 3 different industries.   I typically found jobs through the want ads. Once I developed multiple sclerosis, I changed jobs when I found my symptoms were getting in the way of high performance.

Over that 20 year period, I didn't have a clue  of what I liked to do or what I was good at.  Even after developing a disabling disease, I didn't have a good feel for what I could manage.  I never had a plan nor any ideas about what influenced my success.

But my 40th birthday was a "wake up" moment. Very sick with two autoimmune diseases,  I realized that I had to approach work differently if I was going to be able to continue.   Since that time, I've come to believe that living with illness and continuing to create a sense of success in your career  relies on resilience.

For most of us, developing resilience can take time and effort.  But the results make it worth it.  When you live with chronic illness, resilience is the foundation for developing a sustainable career path and a sustainable life.

I'll describe what I call the building blocks for Resilience.

• Chronic illness means frequent and unpredictable health changes.  This impacts the way you can be in the world which influences how others respond to you. You might have been hired for your engaging wit or your bubbly personality.  But at the end of the day, performance is what counts.  And your capacity to adapt to changing events will make a remarkable difference in your reliability.  This is one building block for resilience.

• Chronic illness takes up space in your life and it's easy to resent it. You have a choice about how much space it takes and what you want that to look like.  Ignoring  symptoms can lead you to misjudge what you can do.  You disappoint everyone - - and especially yourself.  If you let illness define you, you can become paralyzed with fear, consumed with narcissistic pity or just plain boring.  Living successfully with any of life's challenges requires creating a space for that challenge to exist reasonably without letting it take over.  Developing the capacity for living with illness is another building block in your foundation.

• Finally, it's too easy for any of us, healthy or not, to let things happen to us rather than create goals and set intentions for ourselves.  But chronic illness creates obstacles that can throw you when you don't know who you are.   Developing a clear idea of what matters to you, what you like doing and what you can do is a critical building block in your foundation.

Resilience relies on a strong and well-developed foundation.  It's necessary to do this before you can figure out what you want to do with your work-life and how to best apply our talents and skills.   With a solid foundation, you don't need someone else to tell you what you should do.  You have the tools to figure it out for yourself and the capacity to live with whatever happens along the way.

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Building on her experience living with chronic illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, Rosalind Joffe founded the executive career coaching practice, cicoach.com. Dedicated to helping others with chronic illness develop the skills they need to succeed in their careers, Rosalind firmly believes that living with chronic illness does not preclude living a full and successful life.

My clients primarily live with chronic illness.  For the most part, the challenges they face fall into the same "categories" that healthy people face.  The story and degree of difficulties might shift.  Over the years, I've developed some favorite "go to" places when I'm working with clients around career transition or career development.

1. Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes Strategies for coping with the difficult, painful, and confusing times in your life,  By William Bridges  - the 25th anniversary edition is out and that tells you how strong this book is. This is often the place I start when working with someone who is going through any kind of difficult shift or loss in their life, not just career.  Clients with illness find that this speaks to them on so many levels which is a great starting place for accepting and embracing what has to be done.  Bridges explores what makes change so difficult and offers concrete suggestions.   He has written subsequent books that are also quite good, including Making the Most of Transitions,with Susan Bridges.
2. New Job, New You: A guide to reinventing yourself in a right new career, Alexandra Levit.  This is timely because it speaks to where our society is right now regarding career dreams and the marketplace.  It offers examples and specifics but primarily serves as a motivator that this can be done.  Many of the folks with whom I work have to reinvent themselves (I did!) because their symptoms prevent them from being successful in their jobs.
3. The Right Job, Right Now, the complete toolkit for finding your perfect career, Susan D. Strayer.   It sounds too perfect and it is but there are some solid assessment tools that I use with clients.  This is helpful for the "do-it-yourselfer" who wants to figure it out.
4. I'd Rather Be Working, A Step by Step guide to Financial Self Support for People with Chronic illness, by Gayle Backstrom. Although it's written in 2002, a lot of the information is still very relevant.
5. Keep Working With Chronic Illness  Workbook, by Rosalind Joffe.  I've included this resource because healthy people have told me that they find it useful, too.  I developed this, though, because I couldn't find a career tool that reflected the challenges and needs of people living with disabling symptoms. Among other things, it includes tools for identifying how symptoms impact your needs and  jobs skills as well as career assessments and job search tools.
6. Resume Writers: I didn't know that this is a profession, separate from career professionals until recently (twitter actually).  I'd always written my own resume and didn't realize there were options that would make it more effective.  But more than ever, this is an absolute must.  With the increasing need for the right search terms in a resume, the of qualified people trying to get the same job, a resume is a critical tool to opening doors.   Anyone with an unusual background, such as career change, job gaps, degree/experience mismatch particularly needs to frame this strategically.  A good resume writer should be able to do this.

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Building on her experience living with chronic illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, Rosalind Joffe founded the executive career coaching practice, cicoach.com. Dedicated to helping others with chronic illness develop the skills they need to succeed in their careers, Rosalind firmly believes that living with chronic illness does not preclude living a full and successful life.