Marketing While Dealing With Medical Challenges

How to use traditional marketing, live events and relationship-based marketing when your health changes how you can show up.

Recently, I spoke at an event where a woman shared some of the medical challenges she has been facing. She wants to market her business more. She is interested in hosting events and getting herself in front of more people, but she also recognizes that some of the things happening with her health may make that difficult.

I understood exactly what

she meant.

There was a time when I could make a marketing decision based primarily on whether I thought it would work. If I wanted to attend an event, I went. If there was a room I needed to be in, I figured out how to get there. If an opportunity required travel, a long day or a particular environment, I mostly considered the business opportunity.

Living with tic disorder and OCD changed that.

Now there are marketing opportunities that may make perfect sense for my business and still not make sense for me. I have to think about travel differently. I have to think about sound, lighting, crowds, energy, unpredictability and how much recovery I may need afterward. There are days when something as ordinary as showing up can require considerably more from my body than anyone looking at me would know.

That has forced me to think differently about something I have spent years teaching other business owners:

Marketing has to work for the person responsible for doing it.

When you're living with a medical challenge, that becomes more than a marketing preference. It becomes part of how you build a business you can actually sustain.

1. Start With Your Capacity Before You Choose Your Marketing

We usually choose marketing strategies by asking what works.

Should I be on Instagram? Should I start speaking? Should I host events? Should I network more? Should I start a podcast? Should I send more emails?

When your health is part of the equation, there is another question worth asking first:

What can I consistently support?

That doesn't mean choosing the easiest marketing strategy or automatically ruling out something because it could be difficult. It means understanding what each strategy actually asks of you.

Hosting an event might require several weeks of planning, a full day of interacting with people and recovery time afterward. Creating daily social media content might require you to be visible and mentally available five days a week. Speaking may involve travel, unfamiliar environments and long periods without control over your schedule.

The best strategy on paper can become a terrible strategy when its execution repeatedly exceeds your capacity.

You don't need a marketing plan built for the amount of energy you have on your best day. You need one that can continue working when you aren't having your best day.

That may mean fewer marketing activities done consistently and well. It may mean choosing one strong event each quarter instead of attending something every week. It may mean relying more heavily on email, referrals, partnerships or speaking because those activities give you more return for the energy they require.

Your capacity isn't separate from the strategy.

It is one of the inputs you should use to design it.

2. Build Around What You Can Control

One of the things I have become much more aware of since developing tic disorder is how much uncertainty exists in marketing activities that happen in other people's environments.

I don't control the lights in someone else's conference room. I don't control whether a photographer uses flash. I don't control how loud the music is, how crowded a reception becomes or whether the schedule suddenly changes.

That doesn't mean I can never participate in those things. It means I need enough information to decide how I want to participate.

You can do the same thing with your marketing.

If you want to host events but know that certain environments are difficult for you, hosting your own may actually give you more control than attending everyone else's. You can choose the length of the event, number of attendees, venue, schedule, seating, sound and amount of interaction required from you.

If travel is difficult, perhaps you concentrate your speaking within driving distance or strategically choose fewer engagements with greater value.

If being online every day is difficult, you can build marketing around activities that have a longer life than a social media post. An email can nurture relationships with hundreds of people at once. A strong referral partnership can continue producing introductions. One well-chosen speaking engagement can put you in front of the right room without requiring months of daily content.

The question becomes less about doing everything available to you and more about designing a marketing ecosystem that gives you enough control to participate consistently.

3. Give Yourself More Than One Way to Show Up

I don't believe any business should depend entirely on one marketing channel, but medical challenges can make that dependence particularly vulnerable.

If your entire marketing strategy requires you to be on camera every day, what happens during a week when you cannot comfortably be on camera?

If your entire strategy depends on networking events, what happens when you cannot physically attend them?

If every sale requires a live discovery call, what happens when you have a period when extended conversations are difficult?

A resilient marketing strategy gives you more than one way to remain visible and connected. There may be weeks when I can walk into a room, speak, have conversations and be extraordinarily present. There may be other times when writing is a better way for me to communicate.

Both are still me.

Your marketing can work the same way.

You might have email for the times when writing is easier, intimate events when you want deeper interaction with fewer people, partnerships that allow someone else to introduce your work, and speaking opportunities when your capacity allows you to be in the room.

4. Let Your Lived Experience Inform Your Marketing Without Becoming Your Marketing

This one matters to me personally.

I live with tic disorder. I live with OCD. Those things affect how I experience rooms, how I travel, how I work and sometimes how I market my business.

They also give me a perspective I didn't have before.

I notice things about experiences that I might not have noticed before. I think differently about what people need to know before they enter a room. I think differently about participation, sensory environments, unpredictability and the assumptions we make about what an audience can comfortably tolerate.

That perspective is now part of how I see my work. But I am still a marketer.

I don't have to choose between pretending these experiences don't exist and making every piece of content about them.

There is a middle ground where lived experience becomes a lens.

Your medical experience may have changed the way you think about leadership, time, customer care, communication, accessibility, money, resilience, decision-making or the work you already do. You can allow that perspective into your marketing when it genuinely contributes something without allowing a diagnosis to become the entirety of your professional identity.

You get to decide how much you share.

You get to decide what remains private.

You get to decide when your experience adds something useful to the conversation and when it doesn't belong there at all.

Your humanity does not dilute your expertise.

It can deepen the perspective from which that expertise is delivered.

5. Stop Measuring Your Marketing Against Someone Else's Body

This may be one of the most important adjustments. A marketing strategy is often presented as though every business owner begins with the same physical, emotional and logistical resources.

Post every day. Attend three networking events a week. Send 50 direct messages. Start a YouTube channel. Go live. Travel to conferences. Host events. Take every speaking opportunity. Follow up with everyone. Be consistent.

That advice rarely accounts for what consistency actually costs different people.

Two people can perform the exact same marketing activity and pay completely different prices for it.

A three-hour event may simply be three hours on someone's calendar. For someone else, it may require preparation before the event and significant recovery afterward. A video that takes one person 15 minutes to record may be considerably more demanding for someone managing symptoms that affect speech, movement, concentration or energy.

That doesn't make the strategy impossible. It changes the math.

When I evaluate a marketing opportunity now, return on investment cannot only mean money. I also have to consider the amount of energy, recovery, preparation and uncertainty attached to producing that return.

That is still a business decision.

In fact, I would argue that it is a better business decision because it accounts for the actual resources required to produce the result.

Marketing on Your Own Terms Means Your Terms

I have said for years that marketing is mandatory, but making yourself miserable doing it isn't. Medical challenges have given that statement an entirely different meaning for me. There are things I can do. There are things I can do differently. There are things I may decide are no longer worth what they cost me. And there are things I haven't figured out yet.

None of that means I stop marketing.

It means my marketing has to evolve with me.

The woman I met recently doesn't need to abandon her desire to host events simply because she has medical challenges. She may need to create a different kind of event. She may need more support. She may need a smaller room, a shorter program, a different schedule, a partner, more information from the venue or more recovery time afterward.

The goal doesn't necessarily have to change.

The architecture around the goal can.

That distinction gives us far more possibilities than deciding that we either have to push ourselves through a marketing strategy that doesn't account for our lived experience or stop marketing altogether.

There is a third option.

We can build differently.

We can choose marketing that respects our capacity while still supporting the business we're trying to grow. We can make informed decisions about where we show up, how often we show up and what showing up needs to look like. We can allow our lived experiences to inform our work without requiring them to become our entire professional identity.

And perhaps most importantly, we can stop assuming that doing marketing differently means we're doing less. Sometimes it means hiring help, stopping what used to work, and reconsidering what we think marketing is.