On today’s podcast, I’m interviewing Sarah Walsh, a Spooniepreneur with a portfolio career. She has a coaching business, works a PT job as a teaching assistant in a secondary school, and provide marketing support for a business coaching startup. All while living with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.
Here’s what we discussed in today’s episode
- How to show up for other people when you’re having a bad day
- Difficulties in promoting your business with chronic illness
- Dangers in comparing yourself to others
- Importance of having a support network
Connect with Sarah
Website: https://www.sarahwalsh.london/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachsezza/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coachsezza
Twitter: https://twitter.com/coachsezza
Connect with Nicole
Website: http://www.theresilientva.com
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/theresilientva
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/spooniepreneurcommunity
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wnicoleneer/
Nicole: 00:02 Hey everybody, and welcome to The Spooniepreneur Podcast. I’m Nicole Neer an online business manager living with fibromyalgia and bipolar disorder. On this podcast, I’m going behind the scenes in my business and talking to other Spooniepreneurs to get real about what it looks like to be an entrepreneur living with chronic illness, to inspire you to start the business of your dreams no matter what life throws your way.
Nicole: 00:29 Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Spooniepreneur Podcast. Today we are diving into something that I think that every entrepreneur deals with at one point or another. And that is the stress of showing up fully as the face of your business. So especially if you’re a solo entrepreneur, there’s definitely this need to be consistent in your business, in your marketing, to be networking, to be helping people to connect with you so they know, like, and trust you so that they will buy from you, right? But when you have a chronic illness, this is 10 times harder because not only are you balancing all of the normal things that a business owner does, but you’re also not feeling super ready. Most days you may be stressed just trying to get the work done, let alone looking pretty for an Instagram photo or writing some pitchy comment on social media.
Nicole: 01:27 It just seems like it’s a lot. And so I love today’s interview because we’re going to dive into that and I hope that you walk away with some insight of not feeling like you’re alone in that knowing that we all struggle with it. And seeing how Sarah deals with it today I think is really powerful. So as always, I fully recognize that what works for one person doesn’t work for others. So the information that we’re sharing on today’s podcast isn’t meant as medical advice and it doesn’t take the place of the important relationships that you have with your doctors or your therapist. On today’s podcast, I am chatting with Sarah Walsh, who is a Spooniepreneur with a portfolio career. She has a coaching business. She works a part-time job as a teaching assistant in a secondary school and she provides marketing support for a business coaching startup. In other words, she is a busy lady and she’s doing all of this while living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and POTS. I cannot wait for you to hear what she has to say about all the things on her plate. So let’s just dive right in.
Hey everybody, I am here with Sarah Walsh. How are you today, Sarah?
Sarah: 02:43 I’m good. I’m pretty warm. Thank
Nicole: 02:43 So I love starting out these interviews with just a little bit about you, your business and your health journey.
Sarah: 02:50 Yeah. Cool. Okay. So I am a coach for women in business. One of my niches is women with chronic health conditions like myself, so I mostly coach women who have something to give. There’s something they want to do, but they feel held back through self-criticism, doubt, fear and the reached the point where they know they have to do something, they have to make a jump because whatever life they’re on at the moment, it’s just enough. And then specializing further into that is women with chronic health conditions who feel that way and have the added complexity of having a chronic health condition. So, of course, this adds a whole new layer of stuff. And an extra layer of how I tend to say its complexity and precariousness in a life that is already pretty complex and precarious.
Sarah: 03:59 So that’s what I do. In terms of my health journey. So I have a condition called Ehlers-Danlos hypermobility syndrome. I also have with that something called postural orthostatic tachycardia, which is why I’m really feeling the heat today. So it’s about, it feels like 33 degrees outside. I know what it feels like inside and it’s really humid. So for anyone who isn’t familiar with either of those conditions, it basically chronic pain, and postural tachycardia. So pots for short, I’ll call it pots from now, basically means my blood vessels are very stretchy, so my blood pools and my legs.
Sarah: 04:52 So on a day like today, the heat makes it a lot worse because it makes you even more stretchy. It slows you down and gives you brain fog. You just feel like you’ve got nothing. In terms of my journey, I only found out I had EDS in 2012. I count myself as lucky because I understand it takes most people about 10 years to be diagnosed properly. I had various unexplainable, inexplicably health complaints on and off throughout my childhood and teenage years as a lot of people with chronic conditions do. But it was only about eight months from what I would call it, like a serious onset of problems, which was fatigue, which just seemed to come out nowhere. And the tachycardia which now I know is POTS.
Sarah: 05:52 It took me about eight months to get diagnosed, but that was actually because I got a bit lucky. I used to train university students. I used to tutor them and I was tutoring a physiotherapy student and we were looking through some of her textbooks. I was teaching how to scan them into a computer and it just opened, it fell open to a page on high mobility. Oh yeah. I know. I was like, Ooh I’m high for mobile. And she looked at me, she said, do you get tired easily? And I went, yeah, I’ve actually been seeing my doctors because I’ve been feeling something really wrong lately. Like I’m completely exhausted all the time. She was like, look into that. Cause not many doctors know about it. And if it hadn’t been for that, I doubt it would have come up because the doctor’s route just kind of went, Oh, we think you’ve got chronic fatigue syndrome.
Sarah: 06:43 We’ve done all the tests, everything’s come back as normal. That’s what it is. So that’s kind of my journey. So I’ve gone from not knowing what was going on to getting a diagnosis, which was really powerful because then at least you know what you’re playing within that sense, and you know what treatments you can at least look at rather than trying everything under the sun and in vain, hope it will work. Getting back into work, working part-time and doing some retraining. I got my master’s in psychology, but three years ago I graduated and training as a coach and starting my own coaching business. So it’s slowly moving. I think for most people it can be a quite slow process getting trained up and start your own business.
Sarah: 07:33 And of course if you have a chronic health condition it can be about three times as long, but everything’s about three times as long. But yes, that is about where I am today.
Nicole: So I’m really interested. When you have a business where you’re really showing up in serving others and you feel like you’re struggling yourself, I can imagine that that is really difficult. So how do you navigate that?
Sarah: That is hard and it’s something that I guess on an instance-by-instance basis, I still navigate. So I have had coaching as part of my training so I have my own coach. That was definitely helpful and I think just reminding myself that no one ever would, regardless of whether you’ve got a chronic health condition or not, I think people rarely get to a place where at the top of the mountain and they stay there and they go, yay, this is amazing.
Sarah: 08:33 I’m here now. I don’t have to do anything else. Cause life is not like that. Everyone, life can throw you off that mountain and then you’re back at the bottom. You have to start again. So I do try to remind myself of that. It’s really hard if you have anxiety as well. A lot of people, or the vast majority of people with chronic health conditions have anxiety as well. I don’t know the percentage and won’t give a number. But I know huge amount of people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome do. That can be really hard, especially when you’re waking up in the morning and you’ve got that feeling of, yeah, I’m supposed to show up and helps someone today and I don’t feel I match that face on my leaflet, on my website or, my slogan is I’m coaching for women who want to sore because that’s the feeling I had.
Sarah: 09:24 The first time I had coaching I did something I thought was impossible and I thought, wow, that was amazing. And that’s great when you’re having a great day, but when you’re having that bad day and you wake up thinking, I’m not sure I can do this today. I read my slogan to think, “I’m not that woman, who is she?” What I think really helps is speaking to people, speaking to my friend, my friends are really supportive. They don’t have the first-hand understanding of having a chronic health condition, but I think they’ve been around me enough and they’ve spoken to me enough, that they’re able to give me great pep talks. Speaking to other friends and social media who do have chronic health conditions and that are going through the same thing. I’m promoting putting into practice my strategies that I’ve learned. I mean one of the great things about training and psychology is I do have a bit of psychological knowledge.
Sarah: 10:21 I try and remind myself of things like state-dependent memory. So if I’m feeling rubbish, I will remember the rough mess. I’m not gonna remember the good thing. So I’m writing down things, I guess some people might call it journaling. I don’t think I follow a strict journaling practice, but just lists of things, gratitude lists, little notes to myself, you’ve been here before, it well pass and also doing little exercises like thought challenging, I think probably comes under chronic behavior, cognitive-behavioral techniques. So thought challenging, acceptance and commitment is one that I’ve learned in the last couple of years as well, which is looking at my values. I might not feel like this person today, but this is what I want for the long game. You know, these, my values, my values are kindness, a connection.
Sarah: 11:15 I’ll just keep plugging along and I have spoken to, so you know, I do have anxiety problems, so I’ve had therapy and my therapist said, you can abort mission at any time. It is okay, you don’t have to suffer through this. It’s great to want to do this, but if it gets to the point where you’re suffering and there’s not much joy coming out of that, you can’t hit the button and say a flat, no, I’m out. And that is okay. And actually that has really, really helped because there’s a lot less pressure on myself. I’m a lot less pressure. So yeah. So she said there’s a tax on anything. So look at it this way. If you’re running your business, sometimes that tax might be that you have a few bad days like this.
Sarah: 12:10 But if the joy outweighs that, if the service you’re able to give to others outweighs that, keep going with it. But if that flips and it started to become a tax on your life, then maybe hit that button and you can restart a mission at any time or change it. So it’s kind of having a toolkit actually. It’s just basically having loads of things in the box and whenever you need to dip into it, take out all the different bits that you think might help and just kind of chuck them at a wall and see which one sticks.
Nicole: 12:42 Absolutely.
Sarah: 12:47 Cause sometimes one will miss and you might need to go for another one. But that’s how I’m dealing with it for the moment.
Nicole: 12:54 And so being a solopreneur, one of the things that I struggle with is being the face of my business. Even when I’m not feeling well, like when I’m not feeling like showing up for my friends and family, you know, hopping on and promoting my business can be a struggle. Do you experience the same thing?
Sarah: 13:13 Oh yeah, massively. Massively. I think I’ve been thinking about it a lot actually because I know a lot of people, I mean you do a lot of Instagram. I actually think it’s how we, we connected with Instagram and I definitely want to use that as a channel to promote my business and connect with others. I’ve been thinking about maybe doing some lives or some
Sarah: 13:40 stories. I haven’t done any of that yet. Cause then my brain goes Really? What are you going to talk about?
Sarah: 13:50 The fear comes down, but, I’m going to make a plan. I’m gonna a little, or maybe just like a week, two weeks, three weeks, we’ll see to give myself that kind of exposure. And then on days when I’m feeling great and on days when I’m not, cause I think that’s really important, especially if I am also serving other women who’ve got chronic health conditions to learn to stop and say, do you know what, today’s not going so well. I’m not feeling it. This is what I looked like when I’m not feeling it. This is what happens. But yeah, it’s difficult. I think I would say planning ahead is key. But even that, when you’ve got a chronic health condition, it’s hard because you have to build in redundancies and you have to build in a way for that.
Sarah: 14:45 You need to swipe the board, scratch it all and start again. I haven’t found the magic solution yet. I don’t think there is one because as I said before, this is life. So I don’t think there is a solution, but that’s how I’m planning to go for it. I think the danger of, obviously you want to be kind of an advocate and part of that is vulnerability, but not making yourself too exposed. At the same time, I don’t want to put on that face of, Hey, I’m the coach of the chronic health condition and here I am in all my makeup and my hair and my earrings and whatever because of that. Because then I think that creates too much of a gap between how you’re feeling and how you’re presenting yourself and that’s when you start feeling not so good about it. It’s when there’s that incongruence, I think that’s when it feels even worse.
Nicole: 15:44 And I think the way that I’ve kind of done it in my business is if I’m going to be vulnerable, I’m going to do it in service. So if I’m going to share about how I’m struggling, I want it just to be about more than, I’m really struggling right now, but I’m struggling and you know, yes. Or this is what I’m feeling. Do you feel the same way? How can we support each other? And I think that makes all the difference.
Sarah: 16:10 Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah: It’s giving a reason to it or having like a lesson attached to it. Not just a, Oh well things are so rubbish at the moment and like I can’t deal. Or then just kind of going on for 20 minutes and your Facebook life about how rubbish things are. If that can help someone else, because I think it will, I think as you said, being in business for yourself, it can be really isolating.
And also we’ve all got that thing, especially on social media of, um, what is it comparisonitis, we only judge what we see. We don’t know that behind that. Or even if we think we know because our brains are perceiving it. Again, coming back to psychology, we might think, Oh, we know that person suffer because we can’t see it. Our brain is not really picking that up. So having someone else go, Hey, do you know what? Yeah, this is how things are today and I hope you can take something from this as well. I think yeah, is really powerful
Sarah: 17:12 and I think especially when you’re struggling with an invisible illness because I think a lot of the time we feel like it’s easy to put on the makeup and it’s easy to make ourselves look like we feel well even when we don’t. And I think at least for me, finding that community on Instagram has been really, really helpful and understanding all the ways that we act when we’re not feeling well. Even if we look like we’re fine.
Sarah: 17:41 I mean I have had people say to me, Oh, you’re wearing hair and makeup today, so I know you’re feeling good. And I’m like, actually it’s the complete opposite. This is the mask. This is protection. Yes. Is the protection to the outside world.
Nicole: Yeah, yeah, definitely. So what advice would you give to somebody with a chronic illness who is wanting to become an entrepreneur?
Sarah: Wow, that’s a big question. Make sure you have a support network.
Nicole: Definitely.
Sarah: I mean, I couldn’t do this if I didn’t. Before I got diagnosed, basically long story, I went traveling about 10 years ago, came back, moved back in with my parents and said, okay, I give myself, cause I didn’t know what I wanted to do job-wise. I’ll give myself 12 months, figure out what I want to do and then I have to have a job, I have money to move out, go rent somewhere, blah, blah, blah.
Sarah: 18:44 And then it was about two years after that I started feeling unwell and then got diagnosed. So hadn’t actually reached that point where I could go, yeah, great. I can move out. I’m still living with my parents. But the upside of that is I could never in a million years have even thought about starting my business without them. And without that, because I have a roof over my head. If for any reason I haven’t got enough that month to cover my food bill, I know I’m not going to stop, but they wouldn’t do that to me. They’re really supportive. It can be difficult, but that has given me such an upside to that. It’s definitely have a support network. Um, I’d say be realistic as well.
Sarah: 19:49 Like we said, it will take longer. So avoid looking at, I’ll say use people’s journeys for inspiration, but be careful of comparisonitis, especially if you’re comparing yourself with people who don’t have a chronic health condition, who can guarantee they can work five days a week or six days a week. I mean, I know some people who work six, seven days a week. Personally, I don’t think that’s wise for anyone because sooner or later that will catch up with you. But you know, these people can work five, six, seven days, 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, and they can do that for X amount of time. That option is not open to us. So, you know, it will take you longer to build in rest time.
Speaker 3: 20:41 I mean everyone’s chronic condition is different, but know your body because mental health plays a huge part in this as well. And see you can get yourself a mentor class. I mean, I don’t try and do it on your own. I wouldn’t advise anyone tries to start up a business on their own. Especially if you have a chronic health condition, see if you can find someone to mentor you. Who can give you advice because there will be times that you fall off the mountain and you think is this worth it at all? Is any of this worth it? And they’ll be able to help you out. And don’t be worried about the bad days. I should listen to my advice more often cause this was me this morning.
Sarah: 21:32 So yeah. So even when you’re way down the line, like you know, I’ve been doing this for a couple of years, I definitely am still a fledgling business but it’s picking up, which is awesome. You will still have those days you wake up thinking what? So yeah, just know they will be there and just have a kit to deal with them and I feel like the more you face those bad days and get through them, the more your brain knows that you’ll be okay.
Nicole: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It’s all about retraining your brain. Like you said, the more you go through the alternative scenario, the more your brain to go. Okay. Actually this isn’t so bad. So is there anything that I should have asked you but I didn’t?
Sarah: Oh, good question. Um,
Sarah: 22:32 I probably should say that my business part-time because of having a chronic health condition, I’m one of these people that doesn’t like doing one thing for any half. So I do also have, I call it the day job but it’s not, it’s a job I like. I work as a learning support assistant in a secondary school. So I do coaching and mentoring there as well. I actually, one of the reasons I mentioned that is because I love that because I am a people person and as we said, doing business on your own, is really isolating really hard. So one of the things that I love about that job is I can switch the business brain off and I can just go to work. I can speak to my friends. I have that connection and then I’m really energized to get back to doing this.
Sarah: 23:22 So definitely to anyone who’s thinking about starting a business, you don’t have to go all in. You don’t have to jump off a, I’m going to quit my job and I’m going to, start slowly, go part-time, you know, get a job that lets you work maybe three days a week, then go down to two days a week. And then you might find it actually that you like having a split. You know, you have a small business some of the time and you have another thing that you do some of the time which gives you that image she’s completely different. It gives you that balance.
Nicole: 23:53 I think the idea of balance is really important because even though my business is basically full time, I mean I have a blog and I have different ways that I connect because I think it’s so important to have something outside of the business. Yes. That’s one of the things that I see so many entrepreneurs struggling with is they’ll work more and more and more time in their business and then they forget that there are things outside of being an entrepreneur. And I think that it’s really important for your business that you take some time away.
Sarah: 24:22 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Cause otherwise you just get, you get sucked into this kind of strange world and you, I think you can lose sight of your goals. You can lose sight of your values. And again it comes back to being isolated. And I think if you take that time out, you get so, so energized and it doesn’t make it effortless, but it does make the hard aspects of running a business. It does make them a lot easier, a lot, a lot easier.
Nicole: I completely agree. Yeah.
Nicole: 25:00 So Sarah, where can people find you on the Internet?
Sarah: 25:03 They can find me. My website is http://www.sarahwalsh.london. That’s Sarah with an H at the end if anyone’s wondering and my social media handle on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. It’s @coachsezza. So that’s coach S, E, Zed, Zed a, or if you’re in America, S E, Z. Z. A. I guess I should spell that. So that’s my handle on social media.
Nicole: 25:35 Amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. Very welcome. Thanks for having me. Yes,
Nicole: 25:42 Thank you so much for listening to The Spooniepreneur Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, recommend rate and review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. To find show notes and to get connected to our community of Spooniepreneurs. Go to http://www.theresilientva.com. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.