Maps & Frameworks
by Michelle Irving
This body of work offers practical maps and frameworks for navigating career, leadership, and ambition when health is uncertain or changeable.
Each framework can stand alone. Together, they form an integrated system you can return to over time, depending on where you are and what you need most right now.
CAREER & CHRONIC MAP™
Confidence and Clarity
The Career & Chronic Map™ outlines five key stages people move through when chronic illness intersects with work.
It helps you understand where you are now, what kinds of decisions and questions belong to this phase, and how confidence is built differently at each stage.
The map offers practical tools that support mental, emotional, and professional clarity, and shows how lived experience with illness naturally shapes leadership, authority, and informed career choice over time.
Emotional Map for Chronic Illness™
Emotional Confidence for life with chronic Illness
The Emotional Map for Chronic Illness™ outlines the four core emotional stages people move through when living with ongoing or unpredictable illness.
It helps you recognise where you are emotionally, understand what is normal in this phase, and find language for experiences that are often difficult to name.
The map provides a steady framework for making sense of emotional patterns, reducing internal pressure, and supporting yourself with clarity as your relationship with health, work, and identity evolves over time.
This map is especially useful when you are off-ramped from work and in The Cocoon phase.
Circle of Wellness™
Sustainable Foundations for Career and Chronic Illness
The Circle of Wellness™ is a self-assessment framework for identifying your physical, mental, emotional, and relational (‘peopling’) capacity on any given workday. It is designed for professional women living with chronic illness, disability, or hidden disability.
It provides a practical way to understand what you can genuinely sustain both at your baseline capacity and at your optimal capacity. It also helps you recognise what drains or restores your energy, and develop clearer boundaries around how you work.
This framework supports clearer communication and ensure career trajectory and credibility without sacrificing your health.
It is especially useful when you are stabilising, navigating boundaries at work, or redesigning how you participate in your role.
Authentic Ambition Framework™
Move forward in a way your body can sustain.
The Authentic Ambition Framework™ sets out five core practical stages for how ambition can be shaped and expressed over time when health, capacity, and life conditions are variable.
It provides a way to clarify professional direction aligned with your values and health. It then shows you how to take sustainable action to reach your career dreams and live the life you want, including the leadership choices you make along the way.
This framework is commonly used when reassessing career direction, leadership identity, or longer-term professional goals.
How the frameworks work together
Each map and framework can be used on its own.
Together, they form a coherent system for navigating work, health, and ambition over time.
You may enter this work through one framework and return to others as your circumstances change.
Where to begin
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Begin with the Emotional Map for Chronic Illness™ if you are currently off-ramped from work or primarily navigating emotional change.
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Begin with the Career & Chronic Map™ if you are making decisions about work, returning to work, or redesigning your role.
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Begin with the Circle of Wellness™ if sustainability, capacity, or boundaries are your main concern.
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Begin with the Authentic Ambition Framework™ if you are shaping what comes next in your career or leadership.
A body of work you can return to.
This work is designed to be returned to over time, as health, work, and ambition shift.
Career Notes
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