Featured Workshops Today: Helpful Tools

Looking for some basic tools you can use to start making life easier today?

Marcia Ramsland, entertaining media guest expert, speaker, and professional organizer, is well known as “The Organizing Pro” for her practical tips and clever solutions in homes and offices. She shows us how to “Simplify Your Home and Housework.”

And then find out even more on “Getting Organized” and “Parenting When Ill” (We thought those went together well!)

For getting organized we are joined by Karen Whiting, a freelance writer and author of 10 Secrets of Success for Women: Time. If you listen to Marcia’s first presentation, you will hear what Lisa (the host) got from the show and then this next one she shares about what she put into place.

For our parenting segment, we have Jill Hart is founder of Christian Work at Home Moms and co-author of So You Want To Be a Work-At-Home Mom. She’s worked from home since 2000, starting a home-based business. Jill lives in Nebraska with her husband and 2 children. Jill lives with a chronic illness. We were to have Christine Miserandino, founder of www.butyoudontlooksick.com, but she was busy being a mom who had to get her daughter to the doctor!

Kelly Young is the mother 5 of children, 2 of whom are severely hearing impaired. She’s homeschooled for 17 years, led parenting classes and Bible studies, and mentored others. Kelly has lived with autoimmune diseases most of her life and has several diagnoses, including rheumatoid arthritis. She founded RA Warrior.

Would you like to make a few simple, inexpensive changes in your eating style and get much more healthy despite your illness? Super Foods for Super-Natural Health with Joanna Faillace is a terrific eye-opener to some of what goes into our mouth and doesn’t that can help us or hurt us. Joanna Faillace is a Certified Biblical Health Coach awarded to her in 2007 by Jordan Rubin’s Biblical Health Institute.

Joanna is also the TV Host for Super-Naturally Healthy Kids with Chef Joanna, a series of health cooking video shorts which is broadcast daily on TBN’s Smile of a Child Network. Joanna is also a keynote speaker for Thelma Wells’ Ready to Win Life Skills National Conferences. In addition, Joanna is the author of Super-Naturally Healthy Families Cookbook Devotional.

Thinking of applying for disability financial assistance? Now more than ever the government is cracking down on approving applications in the USA. Be sure to check out attorney Scott Davis’ workshops from both 2008 and 2009 on “Applying and Winning Disability Assistance.”

Find even more we’ve not shared this week in our archives at Blog Talk Radio Invisible Illness Week Conference Room.

This year instead of having a live virtual conference we are featuring some amazing workshops from past years. You can find them all here on Blog Talk Radio or, if you use itunes, enter “invisible illness” under “podcasts” and then download them to a music player to listen to anytime. >More instructions here

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Featured Workshops Today: Working and Chronic Illness

If you are one of the millions of people who live with a chronic illness and yet you still get up and go to work every morning, you may find there is a lack of resources for your particular situation. Although you may feel as though you do not necessarily fit in with the career-oriented people who are healthy and not suffering from challenges on a daily basis, you may also feel that you do not specifically relate to those who are home a great deal of time and not able to physically work.

We have found some wonderful resources for you and you will discover that having chronic illness does not prevent you from also having an exceptional career. Although the career you have originally chosen may no longer be possible due to your situation and physical limitations, that does not mean that there are not thousands of career options that you may still choose from, a few which are likely to feel passionate about.

In fact, you may find that having a chronic condition may help you narrow in on your passions and what you enjoy the most, and thereby, make your career choice, an intentional one which can serve you in years to come.

Join us for a couple of workshops where we speak about careers and chronic illness and working well when chronically ill.

Are you interested in “Finding the Job You Desire and Can Do? Rosalind Joffe will be you through the process of looking at what your abilities are (and yes, your inabilities now) and how to go about choosing a wise career path that can work well with the and picked ability of your chronic illness, as well as those leadership skills you have mastered due to managing your illness effectively.

You will also hear from some people who have started their own business, such as Jennie Krogulski who is the founder of Hilton Head Nannies and works each day to best accommodate her career path as well as the daily difficulties with her chronic condition. Rosalind Joffe built on her own experience of living with chronic illnesses for 30 years, including multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, when she founded cicoach.com. And Trish Robichaud is a Maximum Life & Healthy Relationship Coach who lives with multiple sclerosis & major depression. See Illness, Work, Career, and Starting Your Own Business

You also have the opportunity to hear from Lisa about starting Rest Ministries, the founder of Invisible Illness Week. She shares how she has Managed Chronic Illness and a Nonprofit Organization.

This year instead of having a live virtual conference we are featuring some amazing workshops from past years. You can find them all here on Blog Talk Radio or, if you use itunes, enter “invisible illness” under “podcasts” and then download them to a music player to listen to anytime. >More instructions here

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Featured Workshops Today: Communicating With Others

Communicating is a big deal when it comes to making some practical steps toward living with joy. We recommend the following workshops from past years.
“Helping Others Understand Your Pain” with Karen Lee Richards, a writer and patient advocate who works at HealthCentral and lives with fibromyalgia.

It’s OK to say NO: Building Healthy Boundaries” with Jenni Prokopy is a nice reminder that we are allowed to take care of ourselves. Jenni is the founder of chronicbabe.com and a journalist.

And “How You Can Help Those Who Help You” with author Jo Franz who lives with multiple sclerosis.

Times get tough when you are “Coping with Crises on Top of Chronic.” Join Jenni Saake (founder of Hannah’s Hope: Seeking God’s Heart in the Midst of Infertility, Miscarriage & Adoption Loss ) and Lisa Copen founder Rest Ministries, as we chat about surving crises in the midst of Chronic illness. Between the two of us, Lisa and Jenni have survived 45 years of multiple chronic illnesses including Chronic Fatigue Immunity Dysfunction Syndrome (ME/CFS), rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, diabetes, endometriosis, infertility, chemical sensitivities and more.

These women know that life doesn’t stop just because we are in pain. Hear us share our hearts and experiences through surgeries, infections, IV therapies, broken bones, unemployment, adoption journeys, and grief ranging from miscarriages to the deaths of grandparents. We will share a few survival skills for coping with the stress of everyday life when crisis hits.

This year instead of having a live virtual conference we are featuring some amazing workshops from past years. You can find them all here on Blog Talk Radio or, if you use itunes, enter “invisible illness” under “podcasts” and then download them to a music player to listen to anytime. >More instructions here

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Featured Workshops Today: Searching For Self Understanding

Do you ever feel a bit emotionally stuck? Whether you have the blues or have gone through some major depression, some our favorite marriage and family therapists join us with their seminars, as well as some illness advocates. All of these women Lisa is honored to call friend.

Here are some of their workshops we know you will enjoy and hopefully get something wonderful and helpful out of!

“Living with Chronic Illness: Why It Hurts, How to Cope” Georgia Shaffer, Maureen Pratt, and Mary Yerkes join us in an interview style 1-hour conversation. There are some powerful tools that can start helping you today!

A bit about these women:

Georgia Shaffer is a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania and a certified life coach. For over 15 years, she has enhanced people’s lives by teaching how to identify: “What needs to grow? What needs to go?”

Author and speaker Maureen Pratt lives with multiple illnesses, including organ-involved lupus, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, and chronic back pain. Through her books, including “Peace in the Storm: Meditations on Chronic Pain & Illness,” she encourages others to deepen their faith and Christian walk in spite of and with living with chronic illness.

Mary Yerkes is a professional life coach who specializes in working with the chronically ill. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases in 1997, Mary combines years of practical experience with her professional training to help the chronically ill build meaningful and significant lives.

More programs you will love!

In the program, “Understanding How we Uniquely Deal with Difficulties in Life,” Georgia Shaffer explains how we handle the stress of illness in our lives is very unique to us. Our personality, faith, coping skills and more all come together and one person’s way is not better or worse than anothers.

Leslie Vernick shares with us something we all encounter at one time or another: “Dealing with Hurt Feeling and Mixed Up Relationships.” Leslie Vernick is a Christian counselor who doing most of her work with relationship problems. She focuses on improving relationships with others, God and self, teaching people how to address conflict, speak the truth in love, handle adversity in a God-centered way and negotiate through difficult and destructive relationships with biblical principles.

Regardless of your faith, Leslie will give some practical tools and tips to help you with the people in your life. When things go wrong in relationships, is someone at fault? Do you feel like you would have responded differently if your illness didn’t get in the way? Leslie will explain how to respond when things don’t turn out the way we’d hoped.

If you feel like there are times when you are messing up your own life, you’ll want to listen to Jenny Prokopy’s presentation, “Overcoming Self-Defeating Behaviors” Jenni is the founder of the popular chronicbabe.com

This year instead of having a live virtual conference we are featuring some amazing workshops from past years. You can find them all here on Blog Talk Radio or, if you use itunes, enter “invisible illness” under “podcasts” and then download them to a music player to listen to anytime. >More instructions here

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About This Week’s Workshops

Monday is officially the first day of National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week. In past years we have featured a 5-day virtual conference with special guests who help us learn to live better lives even though we also deal with the day to day struggles of an unpredictable chronic illness.

This year we will be featuring some of these exceptional workshops. Each day we will provide links to 3 or 4 podcasts we think you would enjoy. We hope that you find the information valuable and helpful and please feel fre to share it with a friend,on your favorite social network, or even in your own blog (you can actually get the embed code at blogtalkradio.com)

You can find them all podcasts here on Blog Talk Radio or, if you use itunes, enter “invisible illness” under “podcasts” and then download them to a music player to listen to anytime. >More instructions here

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Why We Won’t Be Having a Virtual Conference This Year and Alternative Ways to Get Involved

It’s that time! We’ve announced our theme for National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness Week 2011: “Deep Breath, Start Fresh.”

Founder Lisa Copen shares how to get involved in this video. If you are unable to view the video in an email or RSS feed see it here: About 2011 Invisible Illness Awareness Week.

After much thought and prayer, Lisa has decided to not have a virtual conference this year. “To be honest, the conference takes a lot of time, my energy and money. It is an exhausting 3 months of preparation, follow through, and recovery for me,” Lisa shares. “At this time, I’d love to focus more on better meeting the needs of those here at Rest Ministries, such as the Summer Study, finishing up some Bible studies, and spending some time with my family.”

Lisa’s son is 8 years old and likely won’t be that interested in hanging out with his mom all summer for many more years. Invisible Illness Week, September 12-18th also falls between her husband’s birthday (9/11) and her own (9/19). “Over the years it’s become a time of sacrifice of my whole family, including my mom who flies down from Oregon to help me with my son and more,” says Lisa. “Right now, I am trying to focus on improving my own health, cutting back the prednisone, losing weight to decrease other health issues, and getting my rheumatoid arthritis under control.”

Lisa began seeing a new rheumatologist in March 2011, after experiencing the most painful 3 months January – March of this year, out of her 18 years with rheumatoid arthritis. “Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it got much worse,” says Lisa. “It’s not about puffy cheeks anymore, it’s about being here for my son in ten years.”

“We will be posting links and information about some of our exceptional workshops we’ve hosted in the past,” says Lisa. “Even if you’ve heard them previously, it’s a great refresher time to see if you’ve put into place what you had learned in past years, and if not, see where to go from here!”

But we are still having Invisible Illness Week! There will be tons of articles and guest bloggers, loads of great informative posts and tweets to share with friends, and ways to help the world understand that invisible illness is a very serious and isolating experience. The Invisible Illness Week web site will also highlight programs from the conferences for the past couple of years.

Watch our site here at http://invisibleillnessweek.com in coming weeks for updates and also sign up to get the updates so you are on top of all the happenings!

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Thursday’s Workshop 2 Parts [1] Invisible Disabilites [2] The Joy of Friendships

Wayne and Sherri Connell shared from their hearts about marriage when chronic illness is a part of life as well as information about their role as invisible disability advocates.

Then Lisa interviewed Jenni Prokopy, Christine Miserandino and Kerri Sparling, who are all well-known in the illness community due to their blogs, and they shared in a lively discussion about the friendship aspects of chronic illness.

All of them still take it one day at a time when it comes to learning their limitations and what they can do. Christine calls her time after an event that takes a lot of energy “preparing for a crash landing.” They discussed how important it is to have friends “in person” and stay connected, as well as friends online and how helpful they can be in our journey of coping with illness.

You can still listen this program any time as it is archived. Either go to www.invisbleillnessconference.com or click in the BlogTalkRadio blue box to the right of this post.

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• Monday’s Workshops Talk About New Normal, Stages of Emotions When Coping with Illness (invisibleillnessweek.com)
• Wednesday’s Workshop Covers Organizing Tips & Parenting When Ill (invisibleillnessweek.com)
• Tuesday’s Workshop Panelists Share About Relationships and Chronic Illness (invisibleillnessweek.com)

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Wednesday’s Workshop Covers Organizing Tips & Parenting When Ill

Wednesday’s program covered 2 topics: “Getting Organized” and “Parenting with Illness.”

Lisa started the show with a bit of a technical glitch but she quickly was able to get her guests through. (And Lisa was dressed today!) Karen Whiting and Marcia Ramsland spoke on organizing and time management. Karen shared one of her best parenting tips, which was to have each child assigned a color and they have everything that is theirs that color, such as a towel, toothbrush, school folders, etc. She said they never passed around the flu in her home, because there was no spread of germs this way. She also shared how helpful it can be to know your “natural energy cycle.” Know what time of day you have more energy of know the seasons that are more difficult for you to get that “spring cleaning” done (it may not be in the Spring at all!)

Marcia Ramsland shared about how the little things can make a huge impact in getting organized, like just doing a “2-minute pickup” when you leave a room or cleaning up a small drawer during the commercials on TV.

Marcia and Karen both have many articles and tips on their web sites, and Marcia also has a free download of a “Time Tracker.”

Next Jill Hart joined Lisa to talk about parenting. Lisa and Jill shared a little about how hard it can be to find the right balance between raising a compassionate kid as well as not wanting them to be the “parent” to an ill parent. Christine Miserandino and Kelly Young joined a few minutes late but Christine shared how the reason was because she’d literally just gotten home from the pediatrician with her daughter who is 3. She spoke about how important it is to have a emergency plan in place for when things like your child becoming ill happens.

Kelly shared about how a child is not like a cake mix (listen to learn more!) and then the women shared a little bit about how they are a mom, someone with an illness, AND a patient advocate online (when do they write and how do they do it all?)

One caller explained how the session had been encouraging as she and her spouse were considering if they should have a child or not. Lisa encouraged her to make the decision from the heart along with her spouse and not to give outside influences too much weight in the choice.

They closed the program with Lisa saying she’d love to have them all back sometime soon for a more in depth time, as they all are an amazing group of women with lots to share.

You can still listen this program any time as it is archived. Either go to www.invisbleillnessconference.com or click in the BlogTalkRadio blue box to the right of this post.

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MONDAY’S 9/13 SEMINAR: Why Illness Hurts, How to Cope

We kick things off at September 13 at 10:30 – 12 Pacific time; 12:30-2 PM Central time; or 1:30 PM – 3 PM Eastern time – USA time at http://invisibleillnessconference.com . Remember, if you miss it… it’s okay! It will be archived for eons!

Have you wondered why the emotional part of coping with a chronic illness can sometimes be more draining than the physical symptoms? Do you not know where to turn to get past hurt feelings or feeling like no one understands? We’e put together a 90-minute time today with three women who we believe can help you find the answers to these questions.

Georgia Shaffer is a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania and a certified life coach. For over 15 years, she has enhanced people’s lives by teaching how to identify: “What needs to grow? What needs to go?” She is also is on the teaching staff of the Christian Leaders, Authors & Speakers Seminar (CLASS) and Personality Plus. She has great insight into why we do what we do, which she has shared in her books and will be sharing with us! Twitter: @GeorgiaShaffer

Author and speaker Maureen Pratt lives with multiple illnesses, including organ-involved lupus, cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, hypothyroidism, and chronic back pain. Through her books, including “Peace in the Storm: Meditations on Chronic Pain & Illness,” articles, and talks, she encourages others to deepen their faith and Christian walk in spite of and with living with chronic illness. Twitter: @MaureenPratt

Mary Yerkes is a professional life coach who specializes in working with the chronically ill. Diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases in 1997, Mary combines years of practical experience with her professional training to help the chronically ill build meaningful and significant lives, of which illness is only a part. She is also an author and speaker. To learn more about Coach Mary and the services she offers, visit www.newlifechristiancoaching.com. Twitter: @newlifeonline

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Invisible Illness Week Online Virtual Conference Registration Now Open

You don’t even have to get out of bed for this virtual conference!

Will you be attending at least one Invisible Illness Awareness Week Workshop?

Here are the details about the seminars of Invisible Illness Week:

• This year, 2010, we will have one seminar each day, 90 minutes long, with guest experts on panels
• M-F, September 13-17
• They will be held online, for free
• 10:30 AM Pacific time, USA
• Go to www.blogtalkradio.com/invisibleillnessconf at the time of the conference and the program will play out of your computer speakers
• If you miss it you can listen to it later, and within a few days they are also imported into itunes if you listen to podcasts on an ipod.

Here is a time zone converter.

Register below. It’s free. We basically just need your name and email, but if you’d like to share anything with us (including a web site address if you blog about your illness), we’d love to get to know you better. Leave any comments in the “bio” section if you’d like.

If the form does not work for some reason, just email us “yes, I am coming/listening in!”

http://invisibleillness.eventbrite.com

Are on Facebook?

If so, be sure to RSVP there too . Why? It helps us spread the word by popping up the little Facebook ad in the right hand column. Plus, we have a better idea of how many listeners to expect.

Remember, you can listen to all of the programs from your computer. They will be broadcast via Blog Talk Radio. If for some reason you can’t get it working, within moments of the program being complete, you can listen to it archived at Blog Talk Radio and later on itunes.

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