September is Pain Awareness Month, and it made me think about something I don't often write about: I have lived with pain, in different forms and to different degrees, since I was a child. It has accompanied me through school, university, my corporate career, executive roles, motherhood, international moves, entrepreneurship, teaching, and now my work as a career coach. Sometimes it has been in the background. At other times, it has dictated far more of my life than I would have liked.
If you have met me professionally, you may never have known. I have learned, as many people with chronic pain do, how to work around it. You become very good at calculating what you can do, what you should probably avoid, how much energy something will require, and whether doing it today will mean paying for it tomorrow. You learn that other people can see you teaching, speaking, recording a podcast, meeting clients, or traveling and have no idea about the calculations happening behind the scenes.
That experience is far more common than we might imagine. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, almost one in five Australians aged 45 and over live with chronic pain. This is particularly relevant to the people who read this newsletter because many of us are reaching the stages of our careers when our professional experience is at its greatest, while our bodies may be asking us to work differently.
Being understood matters
One of the things I have learned over many years of managing pain is how important it is to feel understood. I have been incredibly fortunate in this respect. My husband has supported me from the first day we met, not only caring for me when I have needed it, but helping me find and access the right care. When you are dealing with something that can be exhausting, frustrating, and difficult to explain, having someone beside you who believes you and understands what you are dealing with makes an enormous difference.
I have also been fortunate professionally. Some of the best employers and managers I have had made adjustments that allowed me to continue doing my job well. At different times, that meant flexibility around my working hours, adjustments to working conditions, or simply having people who trusted me enough to let me work in the way that allowed me to perform at my best. Some of this happened many years ago, when workplace flexibility was considerably less common than it is today.
We have made progress since then. Hybrid work, flexible hours, greater awareness of disability and invisible conditions, and better conversations about workplace accommodations have given many people options they did not have before. But those options are still far from universally available, and even when they are available, people do not necessarily feel comfortable asking for them.
I see this in my coaching work. I have spoken with many clients over the years who are managing chronic pain, illness, or other health issues while simultaneously trying to manage demanding careers. What continually strikes me is how many of them tell almost nobody. Sometimes they don't even think of themselves as someone who needs support. They have simply become accustomed to managing.
There is a difficult balance
There is another lesson I have learned, though, and this one is more complicated. Feeling understood is important, but I also don't want chronic pain to become the core of every relationship I have. When something is chronic, there may never be a moment when you announce that the problem has finally been solved. It may improve, worsen, disappear for periods, or require different forms of management over time.
For me, part of living well with pain has therefore been learning when to talk about it and when not to. The people closest to me need to understand what is happening. Sometimes colleagues, clients, or employers need information because it affects what I can reasonably do. But I don't want every conversation to begin with how I am feeling physically, and I don't want the people around me to feel responsible for something they cannot fix.
That balance has taken me years to understand. There is a difference between asking for the support you need and allowing a health condition to take up more space in your identity than you want to give it. I am a career coach, teacher, business owner, podcaster, wife, mother, friend, and many other things. I am also someone who has lived with chronic pain. All of those things can be true at the same time.
Pain changes career decisions
What we don't discuss enough is how chronic pain can influence career decisions. A job might look wonderful on paper, but require a commute that your body cannot sustain. An opportunity might involve extensive travel that would have been exciting ten years ago but now comes with a physical cost. A promotion might offer more money and status while requiring a level of availability that simply doesn't work for you anymore.
Sometimes the decisions are smaller. You may choose which conference to attend, which dinner to decline, whether to take an early flight, or how many meetings you can reasonably put into one day. None of these choices necessarily mean you are less ambitious. They mean you have learned that energy, like time, is a resource that needs to be allocated.
Research on chronic pain and employment also reminds us that the impact isn't always visible through absenteeism. Many people continue showing up and doing their jobs while managing pain. Researchers use the term "presenteeism" to describe situations where someone is at work but a health condition affects their capacity or productivity. In studies of some chronic pain conditions, presenteeism has been found to be considerably more common than absence from work.
That makes sense to me because people with chronic conditions often become extremely skilled at appearing fine. We see the presentation, not what happened afterward. We see someone attend the meeting, not the recovery required that evening. We see the person arrive at work, not the decisions they made about everything else in their life so that they would have enough energy to get there.
This is why I think we need to separate physical capacity from professional capability. They are not the same thing. Someone may need to work fewer hours, avoid unnecessary travel, work from home more frequently, sit instead of stand, or structure their day differently and still have enormous professional value to contribute. Good job design can help experienced people remain in the workforce and continue doing excellent work.
Career planning cannot happen in isolation
As a career coach, this is probably the lesson I think about most. We often approach career planning as if the only variables were our skills, interests, experience, and ambitions. But a career exists inside a life, and career planning and design cannot be done in isolation from everything else happening in that life.
Health is one of those variables. So are caring responsibilities, relationships, finances, geography, grief, aging, family circumstances, and countless other things that change over the decades. A career that lasts 40 or 50 years was never going to follow one neat upward trajectory.
I sometimes think about careers as having a fast lane and a slow lane. There are periods when we have the capacity and desire to accelerate. We take the promotion, build the business, accept the difficult assignment, study for another qualification, relocate, travel, or throw ourselves wholeheartedly into something ambitious. Those periods can be exciting and deeply fulfilling.
But there are also times when life requires us to move into the slow lane. It might be because of chronic pain or illness. It might be because you have young children, aging parents, a relationship that needs your attention, a bereavement, burnout, or simply because after years of pushing hard, you need a different pace. Moving into the slow lane does not mean pulling off the road.
I think ambitious people can find this particularly difficult. We become accustomed to measuring ourselves through progress, output, responsibility, and achievement, and slowing down can feel suspiciously like falling behind. But when you consider that many of us will work for four or five decades, the expectation that every year should represent acceleration makes very little sense.
There have been times in my own career when I have been able to move very quickly, and there have been times when my health has forced me to reconsider what I was asking of myself. I am still learning how to do this. Sometimes I am sensible about my limits, and sometimes I am reminded of them because I have ignored them.
What has changed is that I no longer see adjusting my pace as abandoning ambition. Sometimes protecting your ability to contribute over the long term requires doing less in the short term. A sustainable career needs enough flexibility to accommodate the fact that the person living it is human.
What I wish more people understood
If you manage chronic pain, I hope you give yourself permission to consider it when you make career decisions. You don't have to disclose everything to everyone, and you don't have to define yourself by what hurts. But you also don't have to design your working life as if your physical needs don't exist.
If you manage someone who lives with chronic pain or another invisible condition, remember that flexibility can make an enormous difference. Some of the people who supported me most throughout my career did not lower their expectations of me. They helped create conditions in which I could meet them.
And if you are currently in a slower period of your career, for whatever reason, try not to mistake a change in pace for a change in your worth. Careers are long. There will be seasons when you can give more to work and seasons when your energy needs to go somewhere else.
September may be Pain Awareness Month, but the lesson I take from living with chronic pain is much broader than pain itself. Our careers have to be designed around real lives, not idealized versions of ourselves who have unlimited energy, perfect health, and no responsibilities beyond work.
Sometimes we will be in the fast lane. Sometimes we will need the slow lane. What matters is building a career that gives us enough room to move between the two.
Want to talk this through?
If this has raised questions or reflections about your career, health, workload, or how you want to work in the years ahead, you may find it helpful to talk them through privately. You can book a one-hour consultation with me, and we can use that time to brainstorm practical ideas, explore your options, and think about how to make your career and life work better together.
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Time Out
- The song "Golden" from K-Pop Demon Hunters is exceptionally hard to sing because it spans nearly three octaves and demands a powerful chest-mix belt on an ultra-high A5 note. It was originally recorded in a studio, and the consensus was that no human could sing it live. But Kelly Clarkson proved everyone wrong, singing it at the finale of her TV show. She sang the song in its demanding original key, nailing the three-octave range from C3 to A5. I have watched it a million times already!
- Trust me to find the best nepo babies out there in the wild! Here is Violet Grohl, daughter of my favorite singer-rocker dude, Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters and Nirvana, singing a Gen X anthem, The Cure's "High". A great acoustic cover I didn't know I needed.
- All my heroes are dying, and I guess that shows my age. The most recent being Gloria Steinem. This was the first article I've ever read from her, when I was at uni 30 years ago. I'll never forget the impact it had on me. Have fun reading it; it hasn't aged a day (unfortunately, I guess).
The lesson I keep coming back to is that a good career needs room for real life. Sometimes we can move quickly; other times we need to slow down and conserve our energy. Neither says anything about how ambitious, capable, or valuable we are.
If you are in a slower season right now, I hope you give yourself permission to be there.
Until next week
RBX
