About Michelle Irving
I didn’t expect chronic illness to become the defining context of my working life.
I was in my mid-thirties, established in my career, and moving forward when I was diagnosed with a life-threatening autoimmune condition. What followed was not a single disruption, but a long unfolding. Capacity changed. Identity shifted. The assumptions I had about work, ambition, and leadership no longer held.
What surprised me most was not the illness itself, but how little language existed for navigating work alongside it.
Learning to Work Without Certainty
Over the years that followed, I continued to work, sometimes at full pace, sometimes with sharply reduced capacity. There were periods of stepping back, periods of returning, and periods of renegotiating what leadership and contribution looked like when health could not be taken for granted.
I learned, often through trial and error, how much effort went into managing work invisibly: deciding what to disclose, how to pace myself, how to communicate limits without being sidelined, and how to make decisions without clear timelines or guarantees.
These experiences shaped how I came to understand work itself not as a linear progression, but as something that must flex around bodies, seasons, and changing capacities.
From Lived Experience to Structured Work
Over time, colleagues began to come to me quietly. They were navigating their own health issues, or managing team members who were, and they didn’t know how to have the conversations they sensed were necessary.
They were asking for permission to disclose, reassurance that they could ask for support and clarity about how to manage capacity.
That is where my work began to take form. I started developing language, frameworks, and ways of thinking that made it possible to talk about capacity, ambition, and leadership without collapsing into either silence or overextension.
This work was shaped not only by lived experience, but by formal training across somatic approaches, cancer survivorship, and women’s leadership, and by years of working alongside professionals and organisations navigating complex realities.
The Work Today
Today, my work sits across two platforms.
Through Career & Chronic, I work with professional women navigating chronic illness across the arc of a career, supporting them to make decisions about work and leadership that are grounded, self-directed, and sustainable over time.
Through Chronic Illness At Work, I partner with organisations to address chronic illness as a core workforce reality, shaping leadership capability, people strategy, and organisational practice.
Both are expressions of the same underlying commitment: to bring clarity where chronic illness and work intersect, and that optimise work design for career and capacity.
Public and Advisory Work
Alongside this work, I contribute to public conversations through speaking, media, and advisory roles focused on chronic illness, women’s health, work, and leadership.
I am particularly interested in long time horizons, in how careers evolve when certainty is not available, and in how leadership changes when capacity is understood as variable rather than fixed.
