The Lie About Wellness & How It’s Impacting Your Sales

We’ve been sold a very convincing idea about wellness.

Take care of your body. Prioritize your health. Get enough sleep. Eat the right foods. Manage your stress. Build routines that support your energy.

Do all of that, and you’ll feel better, perform better, and ultimately live better.

And for the most part, that’s pretty solid advice.

But there’s a problem with this narrative, especially for those of us living with what some call “invisible” illnesses.

It assumes that if you do everything right, your body will cooperate.

But living with a chronic condition, that’s not always how it goes.

You can follow every recommendation, protect your energy, honor your boundaries, and build an entire lifestyle around supporting your health.

Then one morning, you wake up and feel like you’ve been hit by a truck.

If you also happen to be a chronic boss and run a business? Well, that just makes the pressure even greater. An entire business, clients, and your team may be depending on you to show up at whatever your version of “well” looks like. And she’s not always a delightful mug of productive energy, is she?

So, I guess wellness culture doesn’t always translate well into a chronic boss lifestyle.

For us, feeling good is not often the goal. It’s more centered on building a life and business that can accommodate the days when you just don’t have it.

What happens when systems inevitably fail?

As a chronic boss, you’ve probably read your fair share of articles about building systems. How to automate your business, batch content, protect your calendar, and outsource when possible.

I’m a huge believer in systems.

In fact, much of my work as a same-day sales strategist is helping entrepreneurs build repeatable sales processes that make running their businesses easier.

But what happens when you’ve built the systems, and you still can’t function the way you planned?

What happens when the flare lasts longer than expected? When the energy you budgeted for a client call disappears before lunch? When you’ve done everything you’re supposed to do, and your body doesn’t seem to want to cooperate?

You can have the most beautifully organized business in the world and still have days when everything feels broken. That’s not necessarily a failure of your systems.

Our bodies will fail us.

Instead of pretending like that’s okay or everything’s “normal” for us, I’ve found it easier to accept that our lives can feel hard. And that’s okay too.

It’s the reality of living with a condition that doesn’t operate according to your Google Calendar. It doesn’t care what you want to do. It doesn’t work like the body of a “healthy” person.

So let’s just stop pretending it does, or worse, expecting it to. Let’s appreciate our bodies for how miraculous they are. Celebrate the days it keeps pushing through pain. And grieve the ones where it breaks down in anguish.

Let us spend less time pretending we can eliminate those days and more time preparing ourselves mentally to navigate them.

Because sometimes the most valuable thing you can do for your business isn’t finding another productivity hack. It’s changing what you expect from yourself.

This rule changed how I run my business.

One of the biggest mental shifts I’ve made in navigating entrepreneurship alongside my chronic illness was accepting a simple reality.

About 80% of my time is going to be good.
And 20% of it is going to be less than ideal.

Not necessarily terrible. Not always debilitating. Sometimes, dare I say, just as good as the 80%. But usually, not the version of myself I’d prefer to be operating as that day. And that is okay.

I am okay.

Some days, I’ll feel fantastic—sharp, creative, energetic, and excited about everything I’m doing. Other days, you can find me pushing through with whatever capacity I have available and calling it “my best.”

Those days are no longer unexpected interruptions, they’re part of my holistic plan. Part of living my life as a chronic boss. Dare I say, a personal framework that helps me make peace with uncertainty.

Because the goal isn’t to guarantee that I’ll feel good 80% of the time. The goal is to stop being surprised, disappointed, or defeated when I don’t.

When you’re living in remission or experiencing a stretch of good health, it’s easy to start believing you’ve finally figured everything out. You’ve cracked the code! Yes!

Then a flare happens. Or, in my case, an emergency surgery last fall that totally threw me for a loop and killed my momentum. Simply because I told myself I was “out of the woods” and would be fine forevermore.

The result? Questioning what I did wrong. Telling myself my business would never become a life-changing conduit for feel-good sales. That I was broken. Weak. Less deserving. Less capable. Less worthy.

It didn’t make the symptoms disappear. It didn’t make the pill easier to swallow. It just…was. And that was hard.

Toxic positivity isn’t a sales strategy.

What I’ve noticed is that the wellness movement has made me feel bad about feeling bad. It’s fostered guilt for not caring for myself better in times of stress or pressure, undue or otherwise. It’s developed a form of positivity that feels toxic because it isn’t always true for me.

The expectation that we’re supposed to be okay. To find the positive in everything. Look for the lesson. Be grateful. Remember everything happens for a reason.

But what about the part of us chronic bosses who sometimes, I think rightfully, wonder, “why me?”

It doesn’t feel like a gift all the time to have to struggle more than my loved ones, my friends, my peers. It feels hard. It feels unfair. It feels unmotivating.

Nobody wants to feel consumed by the difficult parts of their circumstances. And frankly, I don’t believe I am. Most people will never know I’m unwell. That I feel more pain in a single year than some humans will experience in their lifetime. And I love that because I am grateful. I do have a joyful life. I am privileged in many ways. And my body does push through a lot of pain.

I just don’t feel a need to turn every difficult experience into an inspirational story.

And as someone who has been teaching sales for 20 years to thousands of people with struggles like mine, I see how our energy impacts our results.

When you believe you have to feel confident, motivated, energetic, and optimistic to sell effectively, you start making your revenue dependent on your emotional and physical state.

You postpone conversations when you’re not feeling particularly charismatic. You avoid following up because you don’t have the energy to “chase.” You convince yourself you’ll get back to selling when you’re feeling more like you.

And sometimes, postponing is absolutely the right decision.

But most times, you’re perfectly capable of having a thoughtful, productive conversation. You simply don’t feel like the high-energy version of yourself you’ve decided is necessary to close the sale.

Your sales process should work on hard days, too.

One of the systems I’ve built into my own business, and something I teach my clients, is a framework for leading sales conversations.

Not a memorized script. Not a collection of clever objection-handling lines (you should not hear objections often on sales calls). And definitely not a process that requires you to manufacture enthusiasm, especially when you’re running on empty.

It’s a clear, repeatable structure for guiding a potential client through a conversation.

You know what questions to ask. You know how to understand what someone needs. You know how to help them evaluate whether your offer is the right solution. And you know how to guide them toward a decision without pressure, manipulation, or unnecessary back-and-forth.

The framework does the heavy lifting so you can focus on you and the person in front of you.

I’ve had clients tell me how grateful they were to have that structure on days when they simply weren’t feeling their best. Because, ultimately, you will feel better and be genuinely excited to support that new client.

That, to me, is what a genuinely supportive business system looks like.

It makes your expertise accessible even when your energy isn’t at its peak.

Of course, there will be days when you need to reschedule, rest, or step away entirely. A framework isn’t a substitute for respecting your health. But on the days when you have enough capacity to work, just not enough to reinvent the wheel, structure can make all the difference.

And that’s how you start creating more consistency in your sales without demanding consistency from your body.

Stop building systems for your best self.

It’s very easy to build a system based on what looks successful for someone else, perhaps without the same health conditions as you. One that works for your best self, not for your true self.

If you struggle to keep up with the business you’ve built, this is likely why.

Chances are, instead of questioning the plan, you’ll question yourself. Your capacity. Your ability. Your work ethic. Your skill.

But I like to think about it like a diet.

If you hate yogurt and oatmeal, why create a meal plan that requires you to eat yogurt and oatmeal every morning?

You might stick with it for a few days. You might even convince yourself that it’s what healthy people do. But eventually, you’re going to get tired of forcing yourself into a routine you never enjoyed in the first place.

Business systems work the same way.

If you hate creating video content, or rarely feel like showing up to record a video because you don’t feel well enough to, building your marketing strategy around daily reels probably isn’t sustainable.

If your symptoms tend to be worse in the morning, scheduling your most important sales calls at 8 a.m. doesn’t make much sense.

If you know your energy fluctuates throughout the month, committing to an aggressive launch schedule without room for adjustments is setting yourself up for unnecessary stress.

The answer isn’t to abandon structure. It’s to create one that works for your worst-case scenario, not the version of a life you fantasize about or know won’t always be your reality.

The best business system isn’t the one that produces the biggest results on your best day. It’s the one you can realistically return to on an ordinary day.

That might mean doing less, better. Having fewer sales conversations. Creating more flexible client delivery timelines. Hiring a part-time VA. Giving up things you enjoy but can’t commit to.

The consistency these create is far more valuable than an occasional burst of extraordinary productivity.

To find your version of this, ask yourself:

• What absolutely needs to happen for my business to keep moving?
• What’s worth keeping on the toughest of days, or what can I simplify?
• What can I put on pause when something needs to fall off the calendar?

And which activities are important enough that you want and can build a reliable framework to support you through them?

For me, sales conversations are one of those activities. That’s why I made a framework for it.

For you, it could be event-related. Maybe a blog you write. Maybe ads you run.

Whatever it is that helps you build a financially healthy business. Because, like it or not, money is our currency. It gives us options, flexibility, and support that can make living with chronic illness easier. A way to give back when our cup overflows.

I don’t want my ability to generate income to depend entirely on whether I woke up feeling my best.

I want my business to support me as much as I support it. To respect my capacity without unnecessarily limiting my opportunities. Perhaps you do, too.

That’s not lowering our standards. It’s building with ourselves in mind.

Maybe we got the “wellness movement” all wrong.

Maybe wellness isn’t the pursuit of feeling good but about embracing our whole selves, especially on tough days.

Knowing how to care for ourselves when we’re grieving a broken body. Knowing how to honor and celebrate how we feel on our most able-bodied days.

There will be seasons when things are harder for you.
There will be moments when your systems aren’t enough.
There will be times when gratitude is all you can see and feel.

What I’ve learned is that I don’t need to feel positive about every difficult season to navigate it well.

I don’t need to pretend a flare is an opportunity for personal growth. I don’t need to wait until I’m operating at 100% to make meaningful progress in my business.

And I certainly don’t need to feel like I am less than because my body isn’t always able to keep up with my ambition.

I simply need realistic expectations. Systems that fit the way I actually live. The ability to recognize that a difficult day doesn’t erase everything I’ve built.

Your body doesn’t have to be dependable for your business to thrive.

And you deserve a business that supports your life, in good times and in hard times. And that’s my vow. To my body, my business, and my heart.

So, cheers to us! I’m so glad we have each other, and that we can talk about this openly. To navigate this journey as chronic bosses together! To be in community with each other! To feel seen and understood by one another! I love that for us! 🥂